"The stern sank below the waves, and the graceful arc of her bow aimed into the dark heavens, as she struggled, almost desperate to keep her proud head above water, and then as the hoarse screams of five hundred men rose, she began a slow watery spin, the water turning faster and faster and faster and faster, until the swirling vortex sucked the men into a suffocating darkness, deeper and deeper, cracking their ears, ripping the life vests from their bodies, tearing from their hands the planks and spars, sucking them deeper and deeper into the darkness, the pressure squeezing the air out of their lungs, salt water filling their noses and mouths and seeping into their eyes, their bodies twisting, the ship exploding all around them in the blackness, the pieces whirling, slamming into them, deeper and deeper and deeper, trapped in the vortex, entangled in the rigging, swallowing the salty water, their lungs filling, the last thoughts racing across their minds before the final darkness set in, descending with the once majestic steamer through the long column of black water, now possessed by her, and dead long before she crashed into the floor of the sea thousands of feet below."

Now that's a description! Read this book for three reasons : the story of the wreck and its tie-in with the California gold rush; the astonishing technical details of finding the wreck (which will disabuse anyone of the romantic notion of treasure hunting for all time), and lastly, to learn about Tommy Thompson, who was at least as driven in his field (and possibly as, well, idiosyncratic, shall we say) as Bezos or Jobs. 

In September 1857, the SS Central America, a steamer carrying nearly six hundred passengers returning from the California Gold Rush, was caught in a hurricane two hundred miles off the Carolina coast. Despite the heroic efforts of the captain and his crew, the ship, over four hundred lives, and twenty-one tons of California gold were lost. It remains the worst peacetime disaster at sea in American history. Combining historical adventure and scientific discovery, Gary Kinder re-creates the ill-fated voyage, and then tells the story of Tommy Thompson, a young engineer from Ohio who, in the 1980s, set out to be the first ever to work on the bottom of the deep ocean. As the target for his impossible quest, Thompson chose the wrecksite and fabled treasure of the Central America. Kinder chronicles Thompson’s epic battles with naysayers, violent weather, experimental technology, the harsh environment of the deep ocean, and unscrupulous rival treasure hunters. The result is an extraordinary narrative of human drama, heroic rescue, scientific ingenuity, and individual courage.