Careers of Danger and Daring

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.

My guide presently pointed out a splendidly built young man who was shoveling mud off the deck, not far from us.

"There," said he, "is a case that illustrates the worst of this business. That fellow is made to be a diver; he's intelligent, he's not afraid, and he can stand having the suit on; he's been down two or three times and done easy jobs of patching. If he'd keep straight for a year or two, he could earn his ten dollars a day with the best of them. But he won't keep straight. The poor fellow drinks. We can't depend on him. And here he is, shoveling mud for a dollar and a quarter a day, and no steady work at that."

Ten dollars a day seemed a handsome wage, and I asked if divers generally earn so much.

"Good ones do, and a diver's day is only four hours' long, or less when they go to great depths. And they draw a salary besides, and often receive handsome presents. You ought to see our chief diver, Bill Atkinson; he lives in a brownstone house." He paused a moment, and then added: "But I guess they earn all they get."

A few days later I made Mr. Atkinson's acquaintance on board the steam-pump Dunderberg, then busy raising a coal-barge sunk off Fourteenth Street in the East River.

Atkinson was down doing carpenter-work on holes stove in her, and I stood on deck beside the man "tending" him, and watched the bubbles boil up from the diver's breathing, and the signals on a rubber hose and a rope. It was less air or more air, by jerks on the hose. It was rags for a leak, or a heavier hammer, or a piece of batten so-and-so long, with nails ready driven at the corners – all were indicated by pulls on the life-line or the startling appearance of hands or fingers (Atkinson's), that would now and then reach above water and move impatiently. The wreck was only five or six feet under, and the diver's helmet showed like the back of a big turtle whenever he stood up straight on the sunken deck.

Suddenly there is a scurry of barefoot youths along the pier timbers. The diver is coming up. Now he lifts himself slowly under the crushing weight, one short step at a time up the ladder. No man at all is this, but a dripping three-eyed monster of rubber and brass, infinitely fascinating to wharf loungers. The "tender" twists off the face-glass, and Atkinson says something with a snap in it, and explains what he is trying to do at the forward hatch. Then he leans over the rail on his stomach and rests. Then he goes down again.

"He's the best-natured man I know, Bill is," remarked Captain Taylor, commander of the Dunderberg; "but all men get irritable under water. Why, I've had men who wouldn't swear for the world up in the air tell me they rip out cuss words something terrible down on the bottom. Just seems like they can't help it."

I noticed that the tender did not join in our talk, but stood with hands on his lines and eyes on the water, absorbed in his responsibility; he looked like an angler about to land a big fish. Neither did the men at the air-pump talk. This feeding breath to a diver is serious business.

"How long would he live, do you think," I asked, "if the pump should stop?"

"Mebbe a minute, mebbe two," said Captain Taylor. "I knew a Norwegian who was down in fifty feet of water when the hose busted. It busted on deck, where the tender heard it, and he started to lift, right away. It couldn't have been over a minute before they had him up, but he was so near dead the doctors worked three hours on him before he came around. That'll give you an idea of how far gone he was."

The captain told of other desperate chances faced by divers in his experience: of a hose and life-line fouled in a wreck; of an escape-valve frozen shut, in winter-time, by the diver's congealed breath; of a helmet smashed through by a load of pig-iron falling from its sling; of a diver dragged off a wreck by a drifting pontoon – such a record of thrilling escapes and tragedies as any wrecking-master could run over. One realized why insurance companies refuse to take risks on divers' lives, and why the diver's pay is large.

Before long Atkinson came up again, and announced that everything was ready, holes stopped and suction length in place. Two men helped undress him, while the others set the big eight-inch pipe to pumping out the wreck, and soon it was spurting a thick stream over her side like a fire-tower.

Presently the dinner-bell rang from a tiny cabin below, and I had the 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."

"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.

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.

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!