Hours after Captain William Lewis Herndon had resigned himself to his fate — that he would go down with his ship, hundreds of passengers and crew and a precious cargo of California gold — he continued firing rockets from the steamer’s hurricane deck in the hope more of them could be saved.
In the darkness of that September night in 1857, a witness watched Herndon’s final rocket shoot horizontally over the waves as the 2,180-tonne sidewheel steamship Central America plunged towards the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, about 200 miles off the North Carolina coast.
As
