In the meantime, we want to share this story of fire, shipwreck and near-miraculous rescue with anyone who loves the subject as much as we do." It was only much later, once he had built up a trading business of his own, that he decided he wanted to conquer a completely different industry with a venture called Endurance Exploration Group. The Endurance Exploration Group is not engaged in marine archaeology; rather, their mission is "to seek out and recover long-lost riches from ships vanished in the ocean's depths." All seemed lost, but a small merchant ship sailed to intercept the burning ship. And out of those, the SS Connaught was their number one. This analysis was largely the work of Taylor Zajonc, lead researcher for Endurance. We'll use robotics systems to rescue the gold cargo and document any historically important artifacts. On 6 October, the ship was just over a hundred miles from Boston, her next port of call after a stop in St John’s, Newfoundland. "We'll return to the site as soon as possible," said Zajonc. Smoke and flames forced passengers and crew to the top deck. She was lost on only her second voyage. Incredibly, nearly 600 people had been transferred from one of the largest ocean liners of the time to a tiny ship without incurring a single loss of life. Once everyone was off the Connaught, the captain joined them. *** 
 
 In summer 2015, the customs officer at Gloucester got an unexpected radio call. “When he seen the paddle wheel he was jumpin’. "She was one of the largest steam liners of her time, a true Titanic of her era. It was brought under control, but by that point a fire had started below deck.
– Last summer, a team from Endurance Exploration Group used a remotely operated vehicle—or ROV—to recover a glass bottle, a chamber pot fragment, and a piece of china that had been sitting on the seabed some 1,000 feet below the Atlantic Ocean's surface for more than 150 years. It was confirmation that they had discovered the resting place of the SS Connaught, a 370-foot-long steamer that sank April 21, 1860, about 100 miles from Boston. Now, Endurance is formulating a plan to retrieve the Connaught's suspected bounty: millions of dollars in gold coins. In a lengthy BBC piece, Chris Baraniuk tells the story of Endurance CEO Micah Eldred's mission to create a profitable shipwreck salvage business, why he chose the Connaught, and the challenges Endurance faces as it undertakes "a subsea engineering job that we're trying to make respectable." Four years ago, Endurance began researching shipwrecks that both contained valuables worth salvaging and for which salvage was technically feasible. Starting with 1,500 wrecks, they whittled the number to 20. Of those, Connaught was their best bet. Using sonar to scan more than 700 square miles of ocean bottom, the team discovered the Connaught in 2013, as iO9 reported. The next year, an ROV confirmed the find. In 2015, they recovered artifacts, and they also became aware of an unanticipated problem: Thick fishing nets snagged on the wreckage rose hundreds of feet off the Connaught. As the team figures out a solution—perhaps in the form of a giant log-gripping claw adapted for maritime use— Eldred tells Baraniuk that he's not motivated by the gold involved. "The excitement, he says, "comes from building a business that’s really complicated.” (These repo men of the high seas face challenges of their own.)