Careers of Danger and Daring. Moffett Cleveland

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СКАЧАТЬ keep your head, but I wasn't taking any chances."

      After this came thanks and warm hand-grips all around, and then I left these daring men to their duties, and went down the lower ladders. I am sure I never appreciated the simple privilege of standing on a sidewalk as I did, a few minutes later, when I left the Church of the Pilgrims and came out into the pleasant autumn sunshine.

      THE DEEP-SEA DIVER

      I

      SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MEN WHO GO DOWN UNDER THE SEA

      IN old South Street, far down on the New York river-front, is a gloomy brick building with black fire-escapes zigzagging across its face, and a life-size diver painted over its door, in red helmet and yellow goggle-eyes, to the awe and admiration of the young – to the awe and admiration of anybody who comes through this wicked-looking street by night, and smells the sea, and stares along miles of ships' noses that reach right over the car-tracks, and finally stops at the black-lettered announcement that wrecks are looked after here day or night, and mysteries of the deep penetrated by gentlemen of the diving profession in just such gigantic suits as this painted one.

      None of this had I noticed, late one night (being occupied with the silent, hungry ships, and the fire-cars trailing over the dim bridge), until a brisk banjo-strumming caught my ear, and I paused at the house of wrecks, whence the sounds came. Somebody back in these moldering shadows was playing the "Turkish Patrol," and playing it remarkably well.

      I followed the light down a narrow passage, and presently came upon the modern wrecker, in the person of Benjamin F. Bean, a large man smoking contentedly at a table whereon rested a telephone and phonograph. The phonograph was playing the "Turkish Patrol," and a single incandescent lamp, swinging overhead, illumined the scene. There were coils of rope about, and photographs of vessels in distress, and a bunk with tumbled sheets at one side, where Mr. Bean slept, often with his clothes on, while awaiting the ring of sundry danger-bells.

      Divers fully expect to be objects of curiosity, for never do they work except before wondering audiences; so this one found my visit natural enough – was glad, I think, to talk a little and let the phonograph rest. It must be rather lonely, after all, watching for wrecks hour after hour, night after night, listening always for footsteps (the officer's tramp or the thug's stealthy tread), listening always to the hoot of passing vessels, listening always for bad news.

      He explained to me what happens when the bad news comes, say a collision up the Hudson, a ferry-boat on fire down the bay, a line of barges sunk in the Sound, any one of a dozen ordinary disasters. In olden times such tidings must have traveled from mouth to mouth, and the wreckers of those days flashed their calls and warnings with beacon-fires. Now electricity does all this much better with the click of a key; and presently somebody, somewhere, has the office at the end of a wire telling what the trouble is, and forthwith the man in charge puts machinery in motion that will change this trouble into cash. Br-r-r-r calls the telephone; up spring messenger-boys in distant all-night stations, and in half an hour door-bells are ringing in Harlem or Jersey City, and the men who ought to know things know them, and whistles are sounding on big pontoons that can lift two hundred tons, and sleepy men are tumbling out of their bunks, and great chains are clanking, and tug-boats are sputtering forth for the towing of sundry hoisting- and pumping-craft that go splashing along to the danger-spot with all appliances aboard, pneumatic, hydraulic, not to mention savory hot coffee served to the divers and the crew.

      Most divers are poor story-tellers (perhaps because the marvelous grows commonplace to them from over-indulgence in it), but the stories are there in their lives, if only you can dig them out. I asked Bean if he often went down himself, and found that he was still in active service, after twenty-odd years of it, which certainly had agreed with him. He was just back from a sad errand in Pennsylvania. A boy had gone swimming in a slate-quarry, and been drowned; they had dragged for him, and fired cannon over the water, but nothing had availed, and so, finally, a diver was sent for from the city, the diver being Bean. The quarry was a great chasm four or five hundred feet deep, with eighty feet of water filling various galleries and rock shelves, in one of which the poor lad had been caught and held. The question was in which one.

      "Well," said Bean, coming abruptly to the end, "I went down and got him."

      That was his way of telling the story: he "went down and got him." There was nothing more to say; nothing about the two days' perilous search through every tunnel and recess of those rocky walls; nothing about the three thousand excited people who crowded around the quarry's mouth, awaiting the issue, nor the scene when that pitiful burden was hauled up from the depths.

      I asked Bean if he had ever been in great danger while under the water.

      "Nothing special," he said, and then added, after thinking: "Once I had my helmet twisted off."

      "What, below?"

      He nodded.

      "How can a diver live with his helmet off?"

      "He can't, usually. 'T was just luck they got me up in time. They say my face was black as a coal." And he had no more to tell of this adventure.

      With few exceptions, divers take their career in exactly this phlegmatic, matter-of-fact way. I fancy a man of vivid imagination would break under the strain of such a life. Yet often divers will go into great details about some little incident, as when Bean described the hoisting of a certain boiler sunk outside of Sandy Hook. It had been on a tug-boat of such a name, it was so many feet long and wide, and other things about the tide and the steam-derrick, and what the captain said, the point being that this boiler had acted as an enormous trap for the blackfish, of which they had found some hundreds of big ones splashing about inside, unable to escape.

      So our talk ran on, and all the time I was thinking how I would like to see these things for myself. And it came to pass, as the subject kept its hold on me, that I did see them. Indeed, I spent a whole summer month – and found zest in it beyond ordinary summer pleasurings – in observing the practical operations of diving and wrecking as they go on in the waters about New York. I discovered other wrecking companies, notably one on West Street, and from the head man here learned many things. He took me out on a pier one day, where one of his crews was rescuing thirty thousand dollars' worth of copper buried under the North River. Every few minutes, with a chunk-chunk of the engine and a rattle of chains, the dredge would bring up a fistful of mud (an iron fist, holding a ton or so) and slap it down on the deck, where a strong hose-stream would wash out little canvas bags of copper ore, each worth a ten-dollar bill in the market.

      "This will show you," said the expert, "what a diver has to contend with at the bottom of a river. He often sinks four or five feet in the mud, just as those bags sink, and sometimes the mud suction holds him down so hard that three men pulling on the life-line can scarcely budge him. And when the mud lets go the diver comes out of it like a cork from a bottle. You can feel him flop over, clean tuckered out with kicking and working his arms. They let him lie there a minute or two to rest, and then pull him up. Why, vessels will sink ten or twelve feet in the mud, so that the diver has to take a hose down, and wash a tunnel out below the keel, to get a lifting-chain under."

      "Wash a tunnel out?" I inquired.

      "That's what they do. You know how you can bore a hole in a sand-bank, don't you, with a stream of water? Well, it's just the same with a mud-bank down below, only you need more pressure. Sometimes we use a stream of compressed air. The diver steers the hose just as a fireman steers the fire-hose, and once in a while gets knocked over by the force of it, just as a fireman does."

      Tunneling mud-banks under water, with streams of water or streams of compressed air, struck me as decidedly a novelty. I was to hear of stranger things ere long.

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