Careers of Danger and Daring

"I suppose you don't usually see much under water?" said I.

"Depends on what water it is," answered Timmans.

"All rivers around New York are black as ink twenty feet down," remarked Atkinson.

"I know they are," said Timmans, "but I've seen different rivers. When I was diving off the Kennebec's mouth, five miles southeast of the Seguin light (we were getting up the wreck of the Mary Lee), then, gentlemen, I looked through as beautiful clear water as you could find in a drug-store filter. Why, it reminded me of the West Indies. I could see plainly for, well, certainly seventy-five feet over swaying kelp-weed, eight feet high, with blood-red leaves as big as a barrel, all dotted over with black spots. There were acres and acres of it, swarming with rock-crabs and lobsters and all kinds of fish."

"Any sharks?" said I.

Hansen and Atkinson smiled, for this is a question always put to divers, who usually have to admit that they never even saw a shark. Not so Timmans.

"I had an experience with a shark," he answered gravely, "but it wasn't up in Maine. It was while we were trying to save a three-thousand-ton steamer of the Hamburg-American Packet Company, wrecked on a bar in the Magdalena River, United States of Colombia. I'd been working for days patching her keel, hung on a swinging shelf we'd lowered along her side, and every time I went down I saw swarms of red snappers and butterfish under my shelf, darting after the refuse I'd scrape off her plates; and there were big jewfish, too, and I used to harpoon 'em for the men to eat. In-fact, I about kept our crew supplied with fresh fish that way. Well, on one particular day I noticed a sudden shadow against the light, and there was a shark sure enough; not such an enormous one, but twelve feet long anyhow – big enough to make me uneasy. He swam slowly around me, and then kept perfectly still, looking straight at me with his little wicked eyes. I didn't know what minute he might make a rush, so I caught up a hammer I was working with – it was my only weapon – and struck it against the steamer's iron side as hard as I could. You know a blow like that sounds louder under water than it does in the air, and it frightened the shark so he went off like a flash."

"Perhaps he wasn't hungry," laughed one of the crew.

"Not hungry? I'll tell you how hungry those sharks were. They'd swallow big chunks of pork, sir, nailed and wired to barrel heads, as fast as we could chuck 'em overboard; swallow nails, wire, barrel heads, and all, and then we'd haul 'em in by ropes, that did for fish-lines, only it took twenty or thirty men to do the hauling. And there were plenty of sharks 'round, only they never seemed to tackle a man in the suit."

"Some say it's the fire-light of the valve bubbles that scares sharks off," commented Atkinson. "I don't know what it is, but I know the bubbles shine something wonderful as you watch 'em boiling up out of your helmet."

"Phosphorescence," I suggested, and then went back into the talk for some broken threads.

"How about that steamer you were telling about," I asked; "the one that was wrecked on the bar? Did you save her?"

"I should say we did," replied Timmans, "and I guess the company wished we hadn't; it cost them more money than the job was worth. Why, if I should start telling how we saved that steamer I don't know when I'd get through. It took us eight solid months. Yes, sir, and that meant sixty men to feed and pay wages to – forty in the wrecking-crew and twenty on the tug. Oh, but we did have trouble – trouble all the time, but we had fun, too, especially when some o' these gay Bowery lads we'd picked up got loose on the mainland. Talk about scraps!"

Timmans paused as if for invitations to spin the whole yarn, and these he immediately received.

"Tell about painting the alligator," urged Hansen.

"Oh, that was a bit of foolishness me an' another fellow done. He was a Dutchman, and got me to help him catch an alligator one day. He said he could bring him up North and get a big price for him. Well, we noosed one after a whole lot of chasing in a lagoon, and kept him four or five weeks, but he wouldn't eat, and the boys all gave us the laugh. So the Dutchman got up a scheme to paint him white and put him back in the lagoon. His idea was that this white alligator would scare out all the other alligators, and then we'd capture mebbe twenty or thirty on the banks, and make our fortune."

He paused a moment with a twinkling eye, and Hansen snickered.

"Well, we done it. We painted that alligator white, and put him back in the lagoon, and you can shoot me if those other alligators didn't eat him. Yes, sir; they chewed him clean up before we'd hardly got the ropes off him."

"What did the Dutchman say?" asked Hansen, shaking with mirth.

"He stuck to it his idea was all right, but it was the blamed alligator's fault for being too weak with fasting to fight the ones as weren't painted, and he wanted somebody to help him catch another, but nobody would."

Then Timmans came back to the saving of the wreck, and it really was an amazing story of patience and ingenuity against endless obstacles. I doubt if men from anywhere but America would have carried such a hopeless undertaking through to success. First they rigged up a wire railway from wreck to shore, and slid off a valuable cargo of alpaca, silks, and beer bit by bit along the wire to land (where they conscientiously drank the beer). Then they hitched a hawser to the steamer, and by clever engineering managed to drag her off the bar against the river current; but presently this current, sweeping down from the mountains, grew too swift for the wrecking-tug, and she in turn was dragged down stream against all the strength of her engines, and saw herself threatened with destruction on the bar. Then the captain of the tug, in his peril, ordered the hawser cut, and thirty-nine men of the wrecking-crew were left to their fate on the abandoned wreck. Their adventures alone would make a thrilling chapter, but they were rescued finally from the half-sinking steamer, after she had somehow crossed the bar and wrecked herself anew in the breakers some miles down the coast.

Then weeks passed while the wrecking-crew worked at patching the steamer's holes so that she would float, and every day Timmans went down in his suit and did blacksmith work and carpenter work on her torn plates and beams, in constant danger of being crushed in the deep sand trough she rocked and slid in. Sometimes the whole iron hull, beaten against by the ocean, would go grinding along, breaking down a wall of sand ten feet high, almost as fast as Timmans could walk. And to be caught between her side and that wall would have ended his days forthwith. Diving-suit and man would have been crushed like an egg-shell.

Finally, when she was ready they made fast a sixteen-inch hawser, and put on full steam to pull her off into deep water. Off she came, and all was going well with the towing when a fierce tropical storm came upon them, and the steamer turned broadside to its fury, and the great hawser snapped like a kite-string, and back she went on a coral-reef.

Once more they began at the beginning, and in time had another hawser ready, and tried again. This time the hawser parted by grinding on the beach as they dragged her.

Then, after long delay, they got a sixteen-inch hawser, wound with wire, that would resist the friction of rocks and sand, and all would have happened as they hoped had not a sawfish, sent by the evil power that thwarted them, thrust its jagged weapon through the hawser strands, piercing the wire and severing the big tow-line. The wrecking company still shows the saw of that mischievous fish among its curiosities.

So Timmans's narrative ran on endlessly, with details of how they stopped some fresh leaks with sixty-five barrels of cement, and how they quelled a mutiny and how they finally got the steamer off, and rigged up a patent rudder that steered her over twenty-five hundred miles, until they landed her home, two hundred and fifty-odd days after the expedition started. All going to show the kind of stuff American wreckers are made of.

V

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR PUTS ON A DIVING-SUIT AND GOES DOWN TO A WRECK

ONE day I asked Atkinson, as master diver of the wrecking company, if he would let me go down in his diving-suit; and he said yes very promptly, with an odd little smile, and immediately began telling of people who, on various occasions, had teased to go down, and then had backed out at the critical moment, sometimes at the very last, just as the face-glass was being screwed on. It was a bit disconcerting to me, for Atkinson seemed to imply that I, of course, would be different from such people, and go down like a veteran, whereas I was as yet only thinking of going down!

"There's a wreck on the Hackensack," said he; "it's a coal-barge sunk in twenty feet of water. We'll be pumping her out to-morrow. Come down about noon, and I'll put the suit on you."

Then he told me how to find the place, and spoke as if the thing were settled.

I thought it over that evening, and decided not to go down. It was not worth while to take such a risk; it was a foolish idea. Then I changed my mind: I would go down. I must not miss such a chance; it would give me a better understanding of this strange business; and there was no particular danger in it, only a little discomfort. Then I wavered again, and thought of accidents to divers, and tragedies of diving. What if something went wrong! What if the hose burst or the air-valve stuck! Or suppose I should injure my hearing, in spite of Atkinson's assurance? I looked up a book on diving, and found that certain persons are warned not to try it – full-blooded men, very pale men, men who suffer much from headache, men subject to rheumatism, men with poor hearts or lungs, and others. The list seemed to include everybody, and certainly included me on at least two counts. Nevertheless I kept to my purpose; I would go down.

It was rising tide the next afternoon, an hour before slack water (slack water is the diver's harvest-time), when the crew of the steam-pump Dunderberg gathered on deck to witness my descent and assist in dressing me; for no diver can dress himself. The putting on a diving-suit is like squeezing into an enormous pair of rubber boots reaching up to the chin, and provided with sleeves that clutch the wrists tightly with clinging bands, to keep out the water. Thus incased, you feel as helpless and oppressed as a tightly stuffed sawdust doll, and you stand anxiously while the men put the gasket (a rubber joint) over your shoulders and make it fast with thumb-screws, under a heavy copper collar. Next you step into a pair of thirty-pound iron shoes that are strapped over your rubber feet. And now they lead you to an iron ladder that reaches down from rail to water. You lift your feet somehow over the side, right foot, left foot, and feel around for the ladder-rungs. Then you bend forward on the deck, face down, as a man would lay his neck on the block. This is to let the helpers make fast around your waist the belt that is to sink you presently with its hundred pounds of lead. Under this belt you feel the life-line noose hugging below your arms, a stout rope trailing along the deck, that will follow you to the bottom, and haul you back again safely, let us hope. Beside it trails the precious black hose that brings you air.

Now Atkinson himself lifts the copper helmet with its three goggle-eyes, and prepares to screw it on. The men watch your face sharply; they have seen novices weaken here.

"Want to leave any address?" says Captain Taylor, cheerfully.

I admit, in my own case, that at this moment I felt a very real emotion. I watched two lads at the air-pump wheels as if they were executioners, though both had kind faces, and one was sucking placidly at a clay pipe. I thought how good it was to stay in the sunshine, and not go down under a muddy river in a diving-suit.

"Wait a minute," I cried out, and went over the signals again – three slow jerks on the life-line to come up, and so on.

Now the helmet settles down over my head and jars against the collar. I see a man's hands through the round glasses crisscrossed over with protecting wires; he is screwing the helmet down tight. Now he holds the face-glass before my last little open window. "Go ahead wid de pump," calls a queer voice, and forthwith a sweetish, warmish breath enters the helmet, and I hear the wheeze and groan of the cylinders.

"If you get too much air, pull once on the hose," somebody calls; "if you don't get enough, pull twice." I wonder how I am to know whether I am getting too much or not enough, but there is no time to find out. I have just a moment for one deep breath from the outside, when there is no more "outside" for me; the face-glass has shut it off, and now grimy fingers are turning this glass in its threads, turning it hard, and hands are fussing with hose and life-line, making them fast to lugs on the helmet-face, one on each side, so that the hose drops away under my left arm, and the life-line under my right. Then I feel a sharp tap on my big copper crown, which means I must start down. That is the signal.

I pause a moment to see if I can breathe, and find I can. One step downward, and I feel a tug at my trousers as the air-feed plumps them out. Step by step I enter the water; foot by foot the river rises to my waist, to my shoulders – to my head. With a roar in my ears, and a flash of silver bubbles, I sink beneath the surface; I reach the ladder's end, loose my hold on it, and sink, sink through an amber-colored region, slowly, easily, and land safely (thanks to Atkinson's careful handling) on the barge's deck just outside her combings, and can reach one heavy foot over the depth of her hold, where tons of coal await rescue. A jerk comes on the life-line, and I answer that all is well; indeed, I am pleasantly disappointed, thus far, in my sensations. It is true there is a pressure in my ears, but nothing of consequence (no doubt deeper it would have been different), and I feel rather a sense of exhilaration from my air-supply than any inconvenience. At every breath the whole suit heaves and settles with the lift and fall of my lungs. I carry my armor easily. It seems as if I have no weight at all, yet the scales would give me close to four hundred pounds.

The fact is, though I did not know it, my friends up in the daylight were pumping me down too much air (this in their eager desire to give enough), and I was in danger of becoming more buoyant than is good for a diver; in fact, if the clay-pipe gentleman had turned his wheel just a shade faster I should have traveled up in a rush – four hundred pounds and all. I learned afterward that Atkinson had an experience like this, one day, when a green tender mixed the signals and kept sending down more air every time he got a jerk for less. Atkinson was under a vessel's keel, patching a hole, and he hung on there as long as he could, saying things to himself, while the suit swelled and swelled. Then he let go, and came to the surface so fast that he shot three feet out of the water, and startled the poor tender into dropping his line and taking to his heels.

Needless to say, that sort of thing is quite the reverse of amusing to a diver, who must be raised and lowered slowly (say at the speed of a lazy freight elevator) to escape bad head-pains from changing air-pressure.

I sat down on the deck and took note of things. The golden color of the water was due to the sunshine through it and the mud in it – a fine effect from a mean cause. For two or three feet I could see distinctly enough. I noticed how red my hands were from the squeeze of rubber wrist-bands. I felt the diving-suit over, and found the legs pressed hard against my body with the weight of water. I searched for the hammer and nail they had tied to me, and proceeded to drive the latter into the deck. I knew that divers use tools under water – the hammer, the saw, the crowbar, etc. – almost entirely by sense of feeling, and I wanted to see if I could do so. The thing proved easier than I had expected. I hit the nail on the head nearly every time. Nor did the water resistance matter much; my nail went home, and I was duly pleased. I breathed quicker, after this slight exertion, and recalled Atkinson's words about the great fatigue of work under water.

I stood up again and shuffled to the edge of the wreck. Strange to think that if I stepped off I should fall to the bottom (unless the life-line held me) just as surely as a man might fall to the ground from a housetop. I would not rise as a swimmer does. And then I felt the diver's utter helplessness: he cannot lift himself; he cannot speak; he cannot save himself, except as those lines save him. Let them part, let one of them choke, and he dies instantly.

And now the steady braying of the air-pump beat sounded like cries of distress, and the noise in my ears grew like the roar of a train. All divers below hear this roaring, and it keeps them from any talking one with another: when two are down together, they communicate by taps and jerks, as they do with the tenders above. I bent my head back, and could see a stream of bubbles, large ones, rising, rising from the escape-valve like a ladder of glistening pearls. And clinging to my little windows were myriad tiny bubbles that rose slowly. The old Hackensack was boiling all about me, and I saw how there may well be reason in the belief of some that this ceaseless ebullition from the helmet (often accompanied by a phosphorescent light in the bubbles) is the diver's safeguard against creatures of the deep.

Well, I had had my experience, and all had gone well – a delightful experience, a thing distinctly worth the doing. It was time to feel for the life-line and give the three slow pulls. Where was the ladder now? I was a little uncertain, and understood how easily a diver (even old-timers have this trouble) may lose his bearings. There! one, two, three. And the answer comes straightway down the line – one, two, three. That means I must stand ready; they are about to lift me. Now the rope tightens under my arms, and easily, slowly, I rise, rise, and the golden water pales to silver, the bubbles boil faster, and I come to the surface by the ladder's side and grope again for its rungs. How heavy I have suddenly become without the river to buoy me! This climbing the ladder is the hardest task of all; it is like carrying two men on one's back. Again I bend over the deck, and see hands moving at my windows. A twist, a tug, and off comes the face-glass, with a suck of air. The test is over.

"You done well," is the greeting I receive; and the divers welcome me almost as one of their craft. Henceforth I have friends among these quiet men whose business it is to look danger in the eye (and look they do without flinching) as they fare over river and sea, and under river and sea, in search of wrecks.

THE BALLOONIST

I

HERE WE VISIT A BALLOON FARM AND TALK, WITH THE MAN WHO RUNS IT