CSS "Texas" is featured prominently in the 2005 film "Sahara", based on the best-selling book of the same name by Clive Cussler. In both movie and novel, a team of treasure hunters search for what was by the late 20th century presumed a mythical Confederate Civil War ironclad ship, carrying an equally mythical hoard of gold bullion – therefore constituting another take on the so-called "Confederate gold" myth. In the fictionalized movie version of historical events and unlike its historical counterpart, CSS "Texas", close to completion and under the command of Captain Mason Tombs, made it out of Richmond just before the fall of the city, battling itself through the Union blockade of the James River before disappearing altogether, and carrying what remained of the Confederate war treasury in gold bullion, the hoard the treasure hunters are after. The ship, its contents and the mortal remains of its crew, they having succumbed to a tropical disease, are a century later discovered buried in an old, dried up riverbed of the Niger River, deep in western Africa (thereby making the implausible assumption that the ironclad had somehow managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean on its own accord). The adventurers manage to reactivate the armament of "Texas" in order to battle off an African warlord and his troops, succeeding in killing him, even though the armor of "Texas" is riddled as it is no match for the modern armor piercing ordnance. Ship and contents are at the end of the movie remanded in the custody of the Smithsonian Institution, but not before the treasure hunters have absconded with the hoard.