honor of breaking bread with the crew of the _Dunderberg_ and two of the
company's stanchest divers, Atkinson and Timmans, both small, thin men
with wrinkled faces, both the heroes of many adventures. Here was indeed
a chance to find out things!
One of my first questions turned upon the effect of diving on a man's
hearing. Was it true, as I had read, that divers often have one or both
of their ear-drums ruptured by the water-pressure?
Both men thought not; most divers of their acquaintance had good
hearing.
"Diving often kills a man straight out," said Timmans; "but, aside from
that, I don't think it injures his health. Ain't that right, Bill?"
Atkinson nodded. He had observed that divers almost never take cold or
have trouble with their lungs, although they are constantly exposed to
all weathers, and often live and sleep in wet clothes for days and
nights. As a young man, he himself had been a bookkeeper, in delicate
health. People thought he had consumption. So he gave up bookkeeping
and, by accident, became a diver. He had never had a sick day since, and
he had worn the suit now for twenty-nine years.
"About a man's ears," said he; "there's no doubt you get a pressure in
'em when you go down, and the pressure gets harder and harder the deeper
you go, that is, until your ears crack."
"Crack?" said I.
"Well, that's what we call it, but I don't suppose anything really
cracks. After you get down, say, thirty feet, your ears hurt a good
deal, especially if by chance you have a little cold; and you keep
opening your mouth and swallering to make the crack come, and the first
thing you know, you hear a sound inside your head like striking a match;
that's the crack, and then you can go on down as far as you please, and
you won't feel any more pain in your ears until you're coming up again;
then you get a reverse crack. They say it's the air working in and out
of your head. I don't know what it is, but I know some men's ears won't
crack, and those men can't never make divers."
"How deep can a diver go down?" I inquired.
The company smiled at this, and turned to Atkinson, who smiled back, and
then referred modestly to one of the deepest dives on record, one
hundred and fifty feet, made by himself some years before up the Hudson.
He had a pressure of six atmospheres on him at that depth, and could
stay down only twenty minutes. "I'll tell you about that some other
day," said he. "It's pretty near time now for me to be sweeping up this
coal."
Then, answering my look of surprise at the word "sweeping," he explained
how they lessen the weight of a sunken barge by first pumping out the
water in her, and then pumping out the coal. The same suction-pipe does
both, and will discharge thirty-five or forty tons of coal an hour, on a
chute which holds the coal while the water streams through. During this
operation the diver is down in the barge, moving the suction-end back
and forth, up and down--the "sweeping" in question--until no more coal
is left for its hungry mouth.
"We pump grain out of wrecks in the same way," said Atkinson, "tons and
tons of it! and they dry it in ovens and sell it. A man must look sharp,
though, and not get himself caught. We had a diver--he was new at the
business--who got his knee against the suction-pipe one day while he was
pumping coal, and it held him as if he was nailed there. He was so
scared he tore himself loose; but he had to rip a piece out of his suit
to do it. He stayed down, though, just the same."
[Illustration: DIVER STANDING ON SUNKEN COAL BARGE.]
"What!--with a hole in his suit?"
"That doesn't matter, as long as it's only in the leg. You see, the air
in the helmet presses down hard enough to keep the water below a man's
neck. But he mustn't bend over so as to let his helmet get lower than
the hole."
"I 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.
[Illustration: THE MEN AT WORK WITH THE AIR-PUMP.]
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 nodded.
"I told him I thought I could do the job myself, so why shouldn't he?
but that was partly to encourage him.
"Anyhow, Hansen went down, and I got a signal 'All right' from him when
he struck the bottom. Then the line kept very still, and pretty soon I
jerked it again. No answer. So I knew something was wrong, and began to
haul him up quick, telling the boys to turn faster. He was unconscious
when we got him on deck, but he soon came round, and said he felt like
he'd been dreaming. He'll tell you if that ain't right."
"It's right," said Hansen.
"We couldn't work any more that day, on account of the tide, but Captain
Timmans said the thing had to be done the next morning, and wanted
Hansen to try it again; but Hansen wouldn't."
"Wasn't no use of trying again," put in Hansen.
"That's it; he'd passed his limit. But it seems I had a longer one.
Anyhow, when the captain called on me, I got into the suit and went
down, and I stayed down until that chain was under the shaft. It took me
twenty minutes, and I don't believe I could have stood it much longer.
The pressure was terrible, and those twenty minutes took more out of me
than four hours would, say, at fifty feet. But we got the tug-boat up,
and she's running yet."
After this Hansen told a story showing what power the suction-pipes
exert in pumping out a vessel. He was working on a wreck off City
Island, at the entrance to the Sound. He had signaled for rags to stuff
up a long crack, and the tender had tied a bundle of them to the
life-line, and lowered it to him by slacking out the line. All this time
the pump was working at full pressure, throwing out streams from the
wreck through four big pipes. Suddenly the life-line came near the
crack, and was instantly drawn into it and jammed fast, so that Hansen
would have been held prisoner by the very rope intended to save him, had
it not been for the slack paid out, which was fortunately long enough
to bring him up. Had it been his hand or foot that was seized in that
sucking clutch, the incident would have had a sadder ending.
[Illustration: "I STAYED DOWN UNTIL THAT CHAIN WAS UNDER THE SHAFT."]
Then came other stories, until the day was fading and the tide was
right, and Atkinson was ready for the grounding of this soaked and
battered tug-boat. Presently he calls "Look out for that rope. Get yer
jacks ready. Now slack away!" And forthwith pulleys are creaking and
great chains are grinding down link by link as the men pump at the
little "jacks" and the forty-foot timbers that stretch across pontoons
and hold the wreck-chains groan on their blocks, and at last the
_America_ comes to rest safely, ingloriously on the mud. Poor
_America_! so proud and saucily tooting only the other day, now a
bedraggled wreck on these Weehawken flats, destined to what fate who
knows? To be lifted from the mud, patched up, rebuilt, quarreled over by
owners and insurance people, or perhaps simply left here, with the
others, for wharf-rats to swarm in and boys to go crabbing on!
The burying-ground of wrecks! What a sight from the rugged height back
of the water! Here are blackened, shapeless hulks from the great river
fire of 1900, when red-hot liners drifted blazing to these very flats.
Here is the ferry-boat _River Bell_, decked with flags in her day, and
danced on by gay excursionists, now thick with mud and slime, her
deck-beams spongy under foot, her wheel-frames twisted like a broken
spider's-web. Here are the half-sunken halves of some ice-barge, cut
clean in two by a liner. Here, heaving with the tide, is an aged
car-float with a watchman's shanty on it, heaped with its rusted
boilers, its anchors, cranes, gear-wheels, cables, pumps, a tangle of
iron things that were once important. Here is a scuttled tug-boat that
has been in a law-suit (and the mud) for years. Here is a coal-barge,
wedged open and sunk by her owner to steal the insurance money. Wrecks
spread all about us, and above them rise the masts and cranes of
pontoons and pumping-craft, that seem, in the shadows and desolation,
like things of evil omen guarding their prey.
Night is coming on. Lights show in the great city across the river.
Ferry-boats pass. Lines of barges pass. Whistles sound. The waves
splash, splash against the wrecks, touching them gently, one would say.
But nobody else cares. Nobody comes near. Nobody looks. The divers go
home. The wrecking-crews eat and turn in to sleep. A rat squeals
somewhere. These helpless, crippled hulks are alone in the night, and
they grind, grind against decaying stumps. They are wrecks, they are
dead, they are buried--and yet they can move a little in the mud!
III
AN AFTERNOON OF STORY-TELLING ON THE STEAM-PUMP "DUNDERBERG"
WHEN there is difficult diving to be done in the East River, or in any
river where the tide runs strong, you will see the wrecking-boats swing
idly at anchor for hours waiting for slack water, the only time when
divers dare go down. And often there is half a day's waiting for half an
hour's work, and often a week goes by on a two hours' job, say, in full
midstream, where not even the most venturesome beginner will stay down
more than twenty minutes at the turn, lest he be swept away, ponderous
suit and all, by the rush of the river. It's start your patch and leave
it to be ripped open by the beating sea; it's get your chain fast nine
weary times, and have it nine times torn away over night by some
foolish, bumping tug-boat; in fact, it's worry and aggravation until the
thing is over.
Also, this is the time of times, if you can get aboard, to make
acquaintance with the wreckers, to pick up lore of the diving-suit and
tales of the divers.
It was bad weather when we, on the sturdy old _Dunderberg_, were busy at
a wreck off the Brooklyn shore, not far from Grand Street ferry (I had
as much to do with lifting this wreck as the pewter spoons stuck around
the little cabin). It wasn't much of a wreck anyhow--only a
grain-boat--but it had my gratitude for stubbornly refusing to come up.
And so we had hours to spend down in the cabin aforesaid, which could
barely hold cook-stove and dining-table, but managed to be parlor and
bedroom besides; also laundry on occasions. The _Dunderberg_, I should
explain, was originally a mud-scow, but for good conduct and an injury
to her nose had been changed into a steam-pump. She could suck her forty
tons of coal an hour out of a wreck with the best of them. And she
traveled with four pontoons, no one of which could touch her in table
fare, especially coffee.
Late one afternoon, when the rain was drizzling and the swinging brass
lamps lit, we sat about on wooden stools (and some were curled up in
bunks along the walls) and listened to the talk of Atkinson and Timmans
and Hansen, who had seen and done strange things in their time.
They were discussing the escape-valve in a diver's helmet, and arguing
whether it pays to stiffen the spring for very deep diving. Atkinson,
who had worked eight fathoms deeper than either of them, said he left
his spring alone; he used the same suit and the same valve action for
any depth.
"But I look out for sand-banks," said he, "ever since that fellow--you
know who I mean--had one cave in on him in the North River. He was
tunneling under a vessel with a wall of sand beside him higher than his
head, and the first thing he knew he was flat on his back, with sand
jammed in his valve so it couldn't open. It wasn't a minute before he
was shot up to the surface like a balloon. The reason of that," he
explained for my benefit, "is because a diving-suit with its valve shut
gets lighter and lighter as they drive down air from the air-pump, until
all of a sudden it comes up, man and all, just as a plank would if you
held it on the bottom and then let it go."
[Illustration: THE MAN WHO ATTENDS TO THE DIVER'S SIGNALS.]
"Talking about planks coming up," said Timmans, who was seated under the
picture of a prize-fighter, "I was down on the North German Lloyd
steamer _Main_, the one that was burned and sunk, fixing a suction-pipe
to pump grain out of her, when a big wooden hatch got loose and came up
under me. I was working between decks, and the hatch swung me right up
against the overhead beams and held me there, squeezing the life-line
and hose so tight I couldn't signal. It's lucky the hose was wire wound,
or that would have been the last of me. But I got my air all right, and
after a while I worked free."
"Wire wound and all," observed Atkinson, "I've had my hose squeezed so
the air was shut off. I was on a wreck off one of the Hoboken docks
once, when an eight-inch suction-pipe caught the hose coming down
through a hatch, and the next second I felt my air stop, though I could
hear the pump beating. I jerked 'slack away' on the life-line, and that
loosed the hose and saved me, but I got a blast of compressed air as the
jam eased that jumped me up a yard."
"Suppose your life-line had been jammed, too," I asked, "so that you
couldn't jerk 'slack away'?"
Atkinson paused to think. "There's a difference of opinion about how
long a man can live on the air that's in his helmet. Some say three or
four minutes. I don't believe it. I think two minutes would do the
business."
"There was George Seaman--" began Timmans.
"Yes," said Atkinson, taking up the story, as was a senior's right,
"there was George Seaman, who put trust in the argument of Tom Scott and
Low and some of those old-timers, that a man can cut his hose and press
his thumb quick against the hole and live long enough on what air's in
the helmet to reach the top. Years ago they used to give that talk to us
youngsters, but I notice none of 'em ever tried it. Well, Seaman, he
_did_ try it; he was down on a wreck somewhere along Sixtieth Street,
and his hose got caught in the timbers. The life-line was all right, and
he was getting air enough, only when they tried to haul him up he stuck
on account of the hose. They tried three times to lift him, and each
time he'd come up a few feet and stick, and then they'd have to let him
fall back. You can see that's awful discouraging for a man, especially
when he's tired and cold. If Seaman had kept his nerve and waited they'd
prob'bly have sent another diver down to get him untangled, but he
didn't keep his nerve. All he saw was that the hose was caught and he
couldn't free it, and they couldn't get him up. It's a lot easier to get
rattled at the bottom of a river than up in the air, and Seaman called
to mind what he'd heard about stopping the hole with your thumb, and he
got out his knife. All divers carry a knife fast to the suit. See, like
this." He drew a two-edged knife, a wicked-looking weapon, out of its
leathern sheath, and moved his thumb along the edge.
"Then Seaman he felt for the hose, and made ready to cut. His idea was,
you see, to slash the hose at one stroke, then jerk on the life-line to
be hauled up quick, and keep the hole shut with his thumb while he came
up. I can picture him now with his knife on the hose, sort of praying a
minute, like a man might with a knife at his throat. That's what it
amounted to. Well, he wrote the story of what he did right there on the
hose, and wrote it plain. They've got the piece at the office, and
they'll show it to you if you ask 'em. Seaman made his cut with about
two men's strength; I'll bet not one of you boys could do near as well
as he did at cutting a hose through with one stroke. His slash came
clear through all but a shaving of rubber, and he tried to cut that with
a second stroke; but the knife struck a new place about an inch away,
and he slashed her half through there. Then he tried nine times more,
and made nine separate cuts at the hose; and there they are to-day,
about half an inch apart, each one a little shallower than the one
before, and the last two or three only scratches on the outside. That
was just as he died, and you can figure out how long it prob'bly took
him to make those eleven knife strokes. I suppose there ought to be
thirteen, but eleven's what there is. You'll count 'em."
Not only did I count them, these eleven tragic cuts, but I have the
piece of hose to this day. The office people gave it to me, and never do
I look but with a shiver at this dumb record in diminuendo of agony and
sacrifice.