THE DEEP-SEA DIVER
There is something about the occupation of the diver that strongly
appeals to the imagination, and with reason, for working fathoms below
the surface of the water, in semi-darkness, dependent upon a rickety
pump for the breath of life, his trade is at best a perilous and
precarious one. Perhaps, that is why divers as a class are opposed to
taking apprentices, and that a majority of the men who drift into the
calling do so by accident. Most divers, if you question them, will tell
you that the best, if not the only way to acquire their art is to put on
a diving suit, go down into the depths, and learn the business for
yourself.
That was what a diver who was preparing for work in the East River said
to me, and, fitting the action to the word, I asked him to loan me his
suit, and permit me to try my 'prentice hand at the business. He
protested goodnaturedly, but finally yielding, brought out his suit, and
helped me to put it on. The outfit in which I speedily found myself
accoutred, consists of two suits, one within the other, and both of
india-rubber. The stockings, trousers and shirt are all made together as
one garment, which the wearer enters at the neck, feet first. The hands
are left bare, the wristbands of the rubber shirtsleeves tightly
compressing the wrists. There is a copper breastplate, bearing upon its
outer convex surface small screws adjusted to holes in the neck of the
shirt, which by means of nuts fastened upon the screws, is held so
securely in place as to render the entire dress from the neck downward
absolutely air and water-tight. Fitting with equal closeness to the
breastplate is a helmet, completely inclosing the head and supplied with
three glasses, one in front and one on each side, to enable the diver
to look in any direction. Finally, for his feet there is a pair of very
thick leather shoes, made to lace up the front, and supplied with heavy
leaden soles to prevent him from turning feet uppermost in the water.
When, with my friend's aid, I had donned this curious-looking dress, he
placed across my shoulders ropes sustaining two leaden weights, one
hanging at my breast and the other at my back. Sometimes in very strong
currents it is necessary to make the weights which the diver carries
extraordinarily heavy. Such was the case with those hanging over my
shoulders on the occasion of my first dive. While the diving dress I
wore weighed of itself nearly two hundred pounds, yet, much to my
surprise, when once below the surface, I did not find the burden I
sustained in wearing it any more than I did that of my ordinary clothing
when out of the water. It also seemed marvelous to me, after daylight
had swiftly merged into the twilight of the depths, that though I was
several fathoms under water my breathing was free and unconstrained,
for an air-pump worked by two men supplies the diver with air, which
passes into his helmet through a hose at the back. Near the place of its
entrance is a spring valve for its escape. This can be controlled by the
diver, but he usually sets it before going into the water and seldom
disturbs it afterward, since the pressure of the air being greater than
that of the water a surplus of the former readily escapes.
When the valve proves insufficient to permit the escape of all the dead
air the diver can open in his breast-plate a similar spring valve
intended only for such an emergency. He can also regulate the amount of
air pumped to him by signals on the air-hose to the men engaged in
pumping, one pull meaning more and two pulls less air. These signals by
means of the air-hose are generally used by all divers, but each diver
has also his own private code of signals upon the life-line, which is
always fastened to his waist, and by which he is drawn up out of the
water. These signals each diver writes down very carefully and gives to
the man in charge of the life-line. By means of these he can, without
coming to the surface, send for tools, material or anything needed for
the work he has in hand. When a lengthy communication is to be made the
diver often sends up for a slate and writes what he wishes to say. Old
divers declare that it is just as easy to read and write under the water
as it is out of it, all objects being greatly magnified.
The only unpleasant sensation of my stay below was a slight drumming in
the ears--walking under the water I found an easy matter--and when
hauled to the surface I declared my first attempt at diving a wholly
successful one. However, the man whose suit I had borrowed, smiled at my
enthusiasm, and declared with something akin to contempt that there was
a good deal of difference between deep-sea diving and grubbing about the
East River for a lost anchor. I learned before we parted that he was a
deep-sea diver forced for the moment to accept whatever task came to
hand, but there was truth in what he said; and I am also convinced,
after talks with a dozen members of his fraternity, that neither a
single descent nor even many descents into the depths, can give one an
adequate idea of the weird strangeness of a diver's life. That can come
only from the cumulative experience of a lifetime.
Almost all the submarine work on the Atlantic coast is done by divers
living in New York or Boston. There are about as many skilled divers in
Boston as New York--perhaps twenty in each city. The pay of a skilled
diver is five dollars a day of four hours or less. In that time a man
may descend half a dozen times, or he may descend once and stay four
hours, but be his period of labor long or short, it counts as a day. If
at the end of four hours he descends again that descent counts as
another day's labor. The diver's assistant receives three dollars. He is
a skilled man, whose business it is to manage the life-line and the
hose, and who sometimes becomes a diver. The pumpers, who run the pump
that keeps the diver supplied with air, are each paid two dollars a day.
They are not skilled workmen and seldom develop into divers.
Probably a third of the New York divers do not work for wages. These are
men who own their outfits and prefer to work by the job. Some of the
self-employing divers enjoy good incomes from their labors. As a rule, a
diver of this class goes down, looks at a sunken vessel, and then states
what he will charge to raise her. Diver Victor Hinston was paid $150 a
day for locating the sunken steamship City of Chester, and Captain
Anthony Williams, having raised the schooner Dauntless in two days,
received $750 for his time and trouble. The same diver, having repaired
with iron plates and raised in four days the steamer Meredith, ashore
near Jeremie, in Hayti, demanded and was paid $7,500 for his work. The
divers of New York live much as other citizens of the metropolis. A
majority of them are native Americans, with homes, wives and children.
They are, of course, absent from home a great deal and on short notice,
for divers from New York are not only sent all over the eastern coast of
the continent, but even to the Great Lakes and the interior rivers, most
of their work lying beyond the city.
Abram Onderdonk, when he died not long ago, was the oldest deep-sea
diver in this country. During forty of the nearly seventy years of his
life he was continuously engaged in the pursuit of his calling, and it
carried him to nearly every part of the globe. Captain Abe, as his
friends called him, counted the swordfish as the gravest danger members
of his craft have to fear. This fish, which has a short bony sword
almost as strong as steel, protruding from its head, speeds along
through the water, charging dead ahead and never veering from its course
for anything save a rocky ledge or the iron hull of a steamship. If it
strikes a wooden craft, its sword seldom fails to cut clean through the
vessel's side. Should a man be attacked by it certain death awaits him.
Diver Onderdonk himself never encountered but one of these creatures,
and that was a young one whose sword had not yet hardened. He was at
work on the deck of a sunken vessel, when he saw the fish coming from a
distance, and heading straight toward him. He took a tighter grip upon
the ax which he held in his hand, and made ready for attack, but, to his
surprise and relief, the fish, never swerving from its course, glided
past him out of his guard's range, and a moment later disappeared.
Captain Abe often encountered sharks under water, but declared that, as
a rule, there is little to be feared from them. A former mate of his
named March, however, once had an ugly experience with these creatures.
The diver in question was at work in a wreck which had been loaded with
live cattle. When she had been at the bottom for a month or so the
cattle became light and began rising to the surface. The locality was
infested with sharks, which quickly gathered round the hatchway, seizing
the carcasses as they came out and following them to the surface. Some
of the cattle had been tied, and these floating out to their ropes' end,
were torn to pieces by the sharks, which soon began to fight among
themselves, with the diver an unwilling witness to their struggles.
March, hesitating to ascend for fear he might be attacked, and afraid to
remain below lest the snap of a shark's mouth should sever his air hose,
in the end gave the signal to be hauled up, and the next instant was
jerked into and through the school of sharks. He came out of the water
maimed for life, as in his upward passage a shark snapped at him and
took off his right hand, thus rendering him incapable of further service
as a diver.
Another of Captain Abe's old mates, McGavern by name, while at work in
New Zealand waters, had an equally harrowing, although fortunately less
harmful, encounter with that most formidable of all marine monsters, the
devil fish. The diver was laying some wharf-blocks when suddenly
surprised by his uncanny foe. Despite his struggles--and he was a giant
in stature and strength--the monster quickly and completely overpowered
him. He was locked in the tremendous claws of the devil fish, and
fastened helpless against a submerged spile. McGavern realized his
peril, and kept quiet until his assailant, whose arms measured nearly
nine feet, loosened his hold. Then he signalled to be drawn up, and came
to the surface with the writhing creature still clinging to his back.
Captain Abe served before the mast in his youth, and I find that, other
things being equal, sailors make the best divers of all. Their former
experience is apt to render them cool and quick-witted in the presence
of danger, and their knowledge of a ship's rigging and construction
proves of untold value to them in their work. To his training as a
sailor Captain Charles Smith, a well-known Boston diver, probably owed
his truly marvelous escape from death when overtaken by accident while
at work on the sunken hull of the Clara Post, in the harbor of
Bridgeport, Conn., a few years ago. The wreck lay sixteen fathoms deep,
and when Captain Smith descended to examine it, he found that the masts
had gone by the board, and that the deck had been torn off by the waves,
while the cross timbers strewed with the wreckage, hung over the decks
and into the hold. Captain Smith began to cut them away, when suddenly
the tangled mass shifted and fell part way in the hold, catching him
with it and prisoning him as in a vise. The diver could not see far in
the deep water in which he was at work, and finding himself pinned in,
how he could not tell, he pulled the life-line three times--the signal
that his life was in peril. He felt himself rising a few feet; then all
the wreckage fell in upon him, pinning him more securely than before.
Worse still, when he tried to free himself, he found that the air-pipe
had encountered some unseen obstruction, and that to attempt to move
about would shut off his supply of air. The peril was one that made each
moment seem like eternity.
[Illustration: A DIVER READY TO DESCEND]
Meanwhile the diver's assistants were trying to discover what had
happened to him. It seemed to them that the signal to haul up had been
instantly followed by one to lower, and then by one to stop. The men at
the life-line, confused at these apparently contradictory commands,
ordered the derrick to haul on the blocks. Nothing yielded to the
strain, and the men at the pumps labored until they were exhausted, and
had to give way to others, but still no signs of release. A new danger
now threatened the imprisoned man. In catching hold of some iron bolts
he had cut a small hole in the valve of one of his rubber gloves, and
water, filling the glove, was slowly oozing past the clamps at the
wrist, and creeping up the arm. It seemed to the helpless diver, held
fast in the tide-swept mass, that he would soon be strangled or crushed
to death. Confused by the great air pressure in his helmet, he had about
concluded that his end had come, when--unlooked for relief--the wreckage
gave a lurch, and he found that he could climb up to one of the deck
timbers. He grasped his ax, and was hewing desperately for freedom,
when suddenly the whole mass broke away, and began to rise rapidly,
carrying the diver, now head downward, with it. His queer ascent did not
consume more than ten seconds, but it was long enough for him to live
over in memory all the events of a lifetime of two-score years. At first
his comrades failed to discover him in the mass of tangled material, and
their surprise can be imagined when he shot up through the wreckage,
feet first. Captain Smith described this as his closest call to death's
door, "and" he added, "I have peeped through the keyhole pretty often."
Captain Smith's adventure reminded a brother diver, in whose presence it
was told, of a narrow escape of his own. It occurred while he was
putting some copper on the bottom of a steamer in dock. "I took some
plate down with me," he said, "and worked for a while on one side of the
hull, after which I started in to put some plates on the other side. The
vessel was about three feet off the bottom, and I crawled underneath,
dragging the plates behind me. After I had been at work for an hour or
so I noticed that my air was getting short, but when I tried to get
under the keel again to be hauled up, I found the steamer on the bottom
and squeezing my air-hose between its keel and the ground. The tide was
ebbing and the hull had gradually sunk until it was almost aground. I
had forgotten all about the tide, and when I pulled the hose it refused
to move an inch. If the bottom had been soft it would not have mattered
so much, but it was rock, and the hose was gripped like a vise. There
was nothing to do but wait; if she fell any lower the air would be
entirely shut off and I would have to die. Not till my last hour shall I
forget the torture of those few minutes while I waited to see whether it
rose or fell. My head felt as though it was bursting, and my nose and
ears were bleeding. I took heart, however, when the air began to
freshen, for I knew then that the tide had turned, and that the hull was
rising. There was plenty of time for me to recover my nerve before it
was high enough off the bottom for me to crawl under, but I did not get
it back. Instead, I stood there shaking like one stricken with palsy
until I could squeeze under the bottom and give the signal to be hauled
up. I reached the surface in a half-fainting condition, and was sick for
weeks afterward. When I did recover it was with hearing permanently
impaired."
Diving in the Great Lakes is attended with even greater perils than
those I have just been describing. In Lake Huron, opposite the entrance
of Thunder Bay, a large buoy marks the spot where, nearly twenty-five
fathoms deep, lies the wreck of a once famous lake vessel, which sank
while sixty of its passengers were still in their berths, not one of
whom evermore made sign. The steamer took down with it when it sank not
only that precious human freight, but $300,000 in gold coin and five
hundred tons of copper. The sunken steamer was the Pewabic. Bound down
the lakes from Copper Island, then the richest known deposit of pure
copper in the world, it collided with the steamer Meteor, bound up the
lakes, and sank almost instantly.
Diving apparatus was at that time somewhat crude upon the lakes, and the
great depth of water in which the Pewabic went down made it out of the
question to attempt to raise it or to recover any of its valuable cargo.
Twenty-five years after the wreck the sunken vessel was located by means
of grappling irons, and a Toledo diver ventured to go down and inspect
it. He was hauled up dead. In spite of his fate, two other divers,
tempted by the price offered, went down at different times. Neither
survived the venture, and until 1892 nothing further was done toward
recovering the wealth lying in the wrecked Pewabic. Then a noted diver,
Oliver Peliky by name, who had with apparatus of his own devising done
safer work in deeper water than any other diver on the lakes had ever
been able to withstand, announced his willingness to go down to the
wreck. He was taken to the spot, the wreck was located by grapples and
Peliky went down. He was below twenty minutes and then signalled to be
drawn up. When he reached the surface he said he had experienced no
great inconvenience, had gone into the wreck, and was enthusiastic in
his belief that he could do the work that was necessary to recover the
cargo. He went down again, and for a quarter of an hour answered every
signal. Then he failed to respond. The men on the tender pulled on the
life-line. It had plainly caught on some obstruction. The crew,
believing that Peliky was dead, backed the steamer. The jerk loosened
the life-line. They hauled the diver to the surface. His armor was
opened, as if burst by some great force. The diver, of course, was dead.
Since then, though handsome inducements have been held out to various
divers, no further attempt has been made to recover the treasure that
has lain for more than a generation in the Pewabic's hold.
One of the divers with whom I have talked told me that somehow diving
took the life out of a man, and that he had never known a diver who did
much smiling. "I have an impression myself," he added, "that I shall go
down one of these days without coming up again." In truth, before my
wanderings among them were ended, I came to the conclusion that divers,
as a class, are taciturn, grave, sober-faced men, but I also found that
the calling they follow has its humorous as well as its serious side,
although too often the humor has a dash of the grewsome to it, as was
the case with a diver who went down to work on the steamship Viscaya,
sunk in a collision off Barnegat Light. It was a difficult job, so two
divers were sent down--one of them to remain on deck in sixty feet of
water, to act as second tender to the other diver who went below. The
latter had been at work but a few minutes when three jerks came over the
life-line. He was so unnerved when hauled up to the deck that he forgot
that he was still in sixty feet of water, and signalled to have his
helmet removed. When both divers had been hauled to the surface, he said
that while he was working through a gangway, he had seen two huge
objects coming toward him; and nothing could dissuade him from the
belief that he had encountered two submarine ghosts--until the other
diver went down and discovered that there was a mirror at the end of the
gangway, and that the diver had seen the reflection of his own legs,
vastly enlarged, coming toward him.
The veteran from whom I had this story told me also of the amusing
mistake made by a diver, who, much against his will, had been sent down
to recover a body from a wreck. Some divers have an ineradicable dread
of the dead, and never handle them when they can possible avoid it. He
was one of this kind, and the water being very thick, he went groping
gingerly about in the cabin. After a lengthy search he found a body, and
fastening a line around it, gave the signal to haul it up. When he
followed and took off his helmet a large hog lay on the deck. He had
tied the line around it, thinking it was the body he was looking for.
After that he was always called the "pork" diver. His former comrades
have likewise many amusing stories to relate of a diver of other days,
Tom Brintley by name, who, though a competent man and a good fellow, was
a little too fond of stimulants. On one occasion he went down while in
his cups, and the men above not knowing his condition, became seriously
alarmed when several hours passed by without their receiving any signals
from him or any response to those they made to him. Another diver, sent
down to look for him, found him lying on his back at the bottom of the
ocean, sixty feet below the surface, fast asleep!
The bed of the ocean would seem to most people an exceedingly strange
place in which to take a nap, but divers live in a world of their own--a
world of which their fellows know little or nothing, yet abounding at
every turn with curious, beautiful, and indeed, almost incredible
sights. Sometimes, especially in tropical waters, the bottom of the sea
is a lovely spectacle, and divers grow enthusiastic when they describe
its forests of kelp and seaweed gently waving in the tide, which look
like fairyland, in dim light, and the bright-colored fish making them
all the more beautiful. Along the coast of the Island of Margueretta,
and in many parts of the Caribbean Sea, there are submarine scenes of
surpassing beauty. Often the bed of the ocean is as smooth and firm as a
house floor, and the water as transparent as crystal, while the white
sandy bottom acts as a reflector to the bright sunshine above the
surface. In some places there are widespreading pastures of stumpy,
scrubby marine vegetation, a growth not unlike seaweed, and of a bluish
gray tinge. There are also clumps of fan-shaped fungi, of a spongy
consistency, which when dried in the sun are exceedingly beautiful. But
the most wonderful growths in these gardens of Neptune are the long kelp
tubas, resembling our fresh-water pond-lilies, only of much larger size.
Their stems are tough and hollow, and put forth pretty blossoms on the
surface, although their roots are in the bed of the ocean, many fathoms
below.
In the West Indies and the Spanish Main the water is so clear and
transparent that the bottom is visible at a depth of from sixty to a
hundred feet below the surface, and the scope of the diver's vision is
seldom less than an eighth of a mile. In Northern seas, however,
especially in the harbors of towns and cities, the water is so
discolored and murky that nothing can be seen at about twenty feet from
the surface, a disadvantage which calls for the exercise of the gift of
which all divers are most boastful--their delicacy of touch. Indeed,
most frequently the diver must do his work under water by means of touch
only, and when one considers the varied tasks he is called upon to
perform, pipe laying, building, drilling holes in rocks and charging
them with dynamite in darkness, looking for treasure, recovering dead
bodies and sunken cargoes, or inspecting all parts of a wrecked vessel,
buried in water a hundred feet deep, it is not to be wondered at that he
should be proud of any special skill in this direction with which nature
and practice have favored him. With some, this delicacy of touch
becomes in time almost a sixth sense. Diver C. P. Everett, of New York,
is one of these. Four or five years ago, he laid a submarine timber
foundation of twenty-eight feet long 12 x 12 yellow pine, handling it
alone. First, the pieces were weighted to sink; and then Everett went
down and weighted them for handling, for without weights they would, of
course, have immediately risen to the surface.
Only a strong man can become or, at least, long remain a successful
diver. No one is fit for the calling who suffers from headache,
neuralgia, deafness, palpitation of the heart, intemperance, or a
languid circulation. The pressure of the atmosphere increases the lower
one descends, until a point is reached where life could not be
maintained. The greatest depth, perhaps, ever reached, was 201 feet,
with an atmosphere pressure of 87 pounds to the square inch. A diver
named Green worked in 145 feet in Lake Ontario, but he was paralyzed,
and never did a day's work afterward. Most divers do not care to work
much deeper than 120 feet, and even for 30 or 40 feet, a moderate
depth, considerable nerve and practice are requisite. The lower the
depth, the more acute the pains felt in the ears and about the eyes, and
symptoms of paralysis become more pronounced. An asthmatic man, on the
other hand, may be cured by diving, the constant supply of fresh air,
and the pressure which drives the blood so rapidly opening up the lungs.
Divers as a rule cannot stand close rooms, being so accustomed to a
copious supply of fresh air that they must have plenty of it, even when
they are above water. In diving, the supply of air is increased
according to the depth. At thirty feet below the surface fifteen pounds
of air to the square inch is used, at sixty feet thirty pounds, and so
on. Still, much depends on the man, and some divers work in eighty feet
of water with only forty-five pounds.
In the laying of masonry under the water and other work of the kind, the
diving dress is usually replaced by the diving bell. This is a large
vessel full of air, but open at the bottom, fresh air being pumped into
it by air pumps. It is furnished with seats, and a chain passes through
the center, by which weights can be raised or lowered. The diving bell
has this advantage over the dress, that several men can work in company;
on the other hand, should an accident happen, more lives are involved.
Some years ago the chain of a diving bell in use at a pier in Dover,
England, got fouled in some way and its occupants found themselves in a
most alarming predicament. However, a diver named William Wharlow,
donning his suit, descended, crowbar in hand, and after several hours of
hard work, succeeded in freeing the chain, when the diving bell was
hauled up in safety.
It was stated a little while ago that some divers have an ineradicable
dread of the dead; many will not have anything to do with them, when
they come upon them by accident they will be unnerved and useless for
the rest of the day, and those who make a virtue of necessity, when on a
wreck generally insist upon getting the bodies out first. The
temperature of the water always tells the diver where to look for bodies
in a wreck; if it is cold they will be on the floor or lying in the
berths; if warm they rise to the ceiling or against the bottom of the
berth above.
The diver who raised the tugboat Bronx from the East River found the
fireman sitting in a chair in the fire-room, staring into a
wave-quenched furnace, with the weird, lifelike expression often seen in
the wide-open eyes of the drowned, and which those who have encountered
it declare never fails to strain the nerves of the strongest man. Other
divers relate even more grewsome experiences. When the diver, employed
to locate and examine the steamship City of Chester, entered the
steerage, the first object that met his gaze was the figure of a man
standing upright, entangled in a pile of ropes. The face was terribly
distorted and the tongue, protruding, hung from the mouth, while the
body was swollen to twice its natural size. Going a little further aft
he found another victim of the wreck, who had fallen on his knees and
grasped a third man around the waist. The spectacle so affected him that
he signaled to be hauled to the surface, where he reported what he had
seen, and refused to again go below until accompanied by another diver.
Captain Abram Onderdonk, already referred to, once brought up a dozen
bodies from the wreck of the steamer Albatross, sunk in the Caribbean
Sea. Some of these were in their staterooms, and the last corpse was
that of a young woman. He found her in the bed lying on her side, her
eyes wide open and staring straight ahead. One of her arms was thrust
through the bed slats, with the hand clutching the berth frame. As he
loosened her grasp the body turned, then floated to an almost erect
position, and leaned over toward him with a repelling look. The
expression of the face and eyes, as well as the attitude, almost
unmanned him, but in a moment he regained his nerve, clasped her about
the waist and brought her to the surface. The same diver was employed
to bring the dead from the wrecked Sound steamer Stonington. Groping
about one of the staterooms, for he had to feel his way in the darkness,
his hand came in contact with a corpse, which he took and carried to the
surface. It proved to be a woman, and clasped to her bosom so firmly
that no effort could separate them, was a beautiful babe. Perfect peace
and rest were on their faces, and they had evidently died in sleep.
Mother and child were buried as they were found--together.