Siddhartha Summary

The waves lapped against the Siddhartha with a rhythm that Gilbert Morgan heard even when he was ashore. He had tried to get away from the family business, but honestly, once he had treasure hunting in his blood, it was there to stay. And now, since his father had left it to him years back, the Siddhartha was all his.

Gilbert and his crew had enough success to keep up with expenses and make comfortable livings. At fifty-six years old, Gilbert didn’t know what he would do when he became too old to hunt. He pushed those thoughts out of his mind whenever they tried to creep in.

This hunt was for the Spanish commercial trade ship, the Guillermo Soto, which in 1856 had sailed northwest from Acapulco heading toward the Orient. The ship met with a

Gilbert’s researcher, Arthur Santos, was one of the best in the business and had the highest probability of determining where the ship had sunk. Once Arthur had discounted the locations where others had looked, he estimated variables such as calculating the rate of speed of a heavy ship made out of wood given the technology of the era when it was built and identifying the weather records and ocean currents of the time. When he was done, he meshed it all together to create a probable picture of where it might be now. Much of his data was difficult to acquire; records dating back that far are generally not available on the Internet, requiring that Arthur travel to locations to find information. Often, the smaller newspapers would provide more information than the larger ones, because a ship in port would be more notable in a small town than in a big one, thus making it more likely that it’s docking would make the local news. Few researchers would delve into the details as Arthur did. He created intricate timelines of events with mathematical estimates that many times put the Siddhartha crew in the right location. People thought Gilbert Morgan and his crew were lucky. But there was much time and methodical effort that went into their

The Siddhartha crew, consisting of Gilbert, Maury, Thomas, Mike, and Arthur, had made an undersea grid of the area and numbered each section into quadrants in order to keep track of where they had searched. Arthur estimated that the ship had sunk within the ten-nautical-mile span of the quadrant. Once they had laid the area out on a grid, they methodically searched each section one dive at a time.

Treasure hunting is somewhat like fishing. Both treasure hunters and fishermen estimate where they need to be in order to find success and then wait, which requires patience. People who love speed or instant gratification find this process to be unpleasant, at best. Gilbert was exceptionally patient. Being born and raised in his treasure-hunting family had taught him that. The reason he continued this line of work was for the surge of adrenaline he felt when they found something of significance.

As he dove in quadrant seventeen, he felt the familiar embrace of the ocean, holding his body in a cold grip that he’d grown to cherish— down, down, down to the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean. Maury, Thomas, and Arthur were all around him. Their equipment was there, ready for the day, just as they’d left it the day