Careers of Danger and Daring. Moffett Cleveland

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СКАЧАТЬ should say not!" put in Timmans.

      "Why, what would happen if he did?"

      "He'd be killed quicker than you can wink. The air from the helmet would rush out at the hole, and he'd be crushed by the weight of the water."

      I don't know whether Mr. Atkinson realized the full truth of his words, but I found, on consulting the authorities, that a diver's body at thirty-two feet is subjected to a pressure of water amounting to forty tons, at sixty-four feet to eighty tons, at ninety-six feet to one hundred and twenty tons, etc. And it is only the great counter-pressure in the helmet of air from the air-pump that enables the diver to endure this otherwise deadly weight. It follows that the deeper a diver goes, the harder work it is for the air-pump men to drive air down to him; and at great depths as many as four men are sometimes needed at the pump to conquer the water resistance and keep open the escape-valve (for air breathed out) at the helmet-top.

      Here ended this day's talk, for the coal would wait no longer; Atkinson must go down again to his "sweeping". But there were other days for me aboard the Dunderberg– other glimpses into these brave, simple lives. Think what these fellows do! Here is a huge, helpless vessel at the bottom of a bay, with the tide tearing her to pieces, and down into the depths comes a queer little man, as big as one of her anchor-points, and stands beside her in the mud, and feels her over, and decides how he will save her; and then does it – does it all alone. And what he does is never the same as anything he has done before; for each wreck is a new problem, each job of submarine patching has its own difficulties and dangers. Oh, bored folk, idle folk, go to the wreckers, say I, if you want a new sensation; watch the big pontoons put forth their strength, watch the divers, and (if you can) set the crew of the Dunderberg to telling stories.

      II

      A VISIT TO THE BURYING-GROUND OF WRECKS

      LITTLE by little, one picks up lore of the divers – small things, yet edifying. In summer a diver wears underneath his suit, to keep him cool, the same flannel shirt and thick woolen socks that he wears in winter to keep him warm. But he wears mittens in winter on his hands, which are bare in summer. On the bitterest day in January he finds comparative warmth in deep water, as he finds a chill there in torrid August. Summer and winter he perspires very freely, and a little work brings him to the limit of his strength, the strain being chiefly on the lungs. The deeper he goes the more exhausting becomes every effort.

      A diver often endures real suffering (like the foot-tickling torture) because he cannot scratch his nose or face, and they tell of one man who worked in great distress because, when he got down, he found a June-bug in his helmet, and had to bear the insect's lively promenading over his features, powerless to stop it. And there was a diver who, in bravado, used to smoke a cigarette inside his helmet.

      Divers, as a class, are not superstitious. Seldom do their thoughts down below stray into realms of fantasy, nor have they time to dream, but only to hammer, and saw, and ply the crowbar, and drive iron spikes twenty inches long into huge timbers – in short, to attend strictly to their work.

      It is amusing to note the scorn of practical divers for the nice electric-lighting and telephone contrivances of divers who never dive, but sell their inventions to the Government for its Newport diving school, which same inventions remain, for the most part, in their spick-span boxes. It seems simple enough to have submarine lights; yet divers who dive prefer to grope in the almost darkness of our ordinary waters. It seems a distinct advantage that diver and tender be able to talk over a wire; yet divers who dive keep jealously to the clumsy system of jerks on the lines, and will not even be bothered with the Morse alphabet. The fact is, a diver has quite as much as he can attend to with the burden of his suit (about a hundred and seventy-five pounds), and his two lines to watch and keep from kinks and entanglements. Touch one of these lines, and you touch his life. Fasten a new line to him, or two new lines, and you enormously increase his peril. Imagine yourself stumbling about in a dark forest, with a man strapped on your back, and several ropes dragging behind you among trees and rocks, each separate rope being to you as breath and blood! That is precisely the diver's case. So he goes; so he works. And when they offer him pretty apparatus to increase his load, he will have none of it. Nor will he tug any extra ropes. "I have ways enough of dying as it is," says he.

      Working thus in gloom or darkness, the diver develops his senses of feeling and locality. He gains certain qualities of blind men, and finds guidance in unlooked-for ways. The ascending bubbles from his helmet, for instance, shine silver white and may be seen for a couple of fathoms. These bubbles have a trick of lodging in a vessel's seams, and so give the diver a rough pattern of her. Again, in searching for leaks, the sense of hearing helps him, for he can distinguish (after long habit) the sucking sound of water rushing through the holes.

      One is sorry to learn that divers go to pieces early; few of them last beyond fifty. As they grow old their keenness wanes; they lose their bearings easily down below, and show bad judgment. And fear of the business grows upon them. Often they seek false courage in strong drink, which hurries on the end. Too many of them, after searching all their lives for wrecks, wind up as wrecks themselves. But it is good to know that there are exceptions – divers like Bill Atkinson, sturdy and true at fifty, and good in the suit for years to come, unless their wives persuade them to retire. The diver's wife, I am told – poor woman! – starts with terror every time she hears a door-bell ring.

      I must speak now of the burying-ground for wrecks, one of the strangest, saddest, most interesting burying-grounds I can think of. It was a disaster to the tug-boat America that brought me there, this ill-fated craft having been cut half through in the North River and sunk by a great liner she was helping into dock. The America went down forthwith in sixty feet of water – sank so suddenly that all aboard her had to cast themselves into the water and fight for it. The fireman and the cook, not knowing how to swim, fought in vain, and ended their lives there. It is astonishing how many men who follow the sea as a business cannot swim. Well, in due course the wreckers came up to lift the tug-boat, and Atkinson (who cannot swim either) directed the job. They swung chains under her, fore and aft, they "jacked her up" nearly to the surface, and then, while four pontoons held her, the Pinafore, the Catamaran, and two others (only the working crews know the names of these pontoons), they all splashed slowly up the river under tow of the wrecking-tug Fly, and finally came to the burying-ground of wrecks. Here they "jacked her up" some more (it was "We've got her!" "Slack away now!" and "R'heh-eh-eh!" as the men strained at the blocks), and then they grounded her on the mud, where wrecks have been grounded for years, and left her, with all the others, to rust and ruin and rot.

      But before they grounded her there was a long time to wait for high tide – time for a good meal on the Catamaran, and a talk about hazards of the sea as divers know them. It was then that Atkinson told me the promised story of his deepest dive. I wish all men who do big things would speak of them as simply as he did.

      "It's like this," said he: "in diving, the same as in other things, every man has his limit; but he can't tell what it is until the trial comes. At this time I'm talking about (some ten years ago) I thought a hundred feet about as deep as I wanted to go. If there are two hundred divers in the country, you can bet on it not ten of them can go down over a hundred feet. Well, along comes this job in the middle of winter – a head-on collision up the Hudson off Fort Montgomery, and a fine tug-boat gone to the bottom. We came up with pontoons to raise her, and Captain Timmans (he's the father of Timmans the diver) ordered Hansen down to fix a chain under her shaft – there's the man now."

      A big Scandinavian in the listening circle looked pleased at this mention. He was Hansen.

      "We knew by the sounding that she lay in a hundred and fifty feet of water on a shelf of bottom over a deeper place, and Hansen was a little anxious. He got me to tend him, and I remember he asked me, when I was putting the suit on him, if I thought he could do it. Remember that, Hansen?"

      Hansen СКАЧАТЬ