Careers of Danger and Daring

"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!

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."

"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.

"I suppose that settled the question of stopping a hose with your thumb?" I remarked.

"That's what it did!" said Atkinson.

After this there were more stories. I can't begin to say how many more. Every time a diver goes down, one would say, something new happens to him, something worth telling about. Hansen related an experience of his with a conger eel. Atkinson told how a Dock Department diver named Fairchild was blown to death under forty feet of water when twenty-eight pounds of dynamite he was putting in for blasting went off too soon. Timmans told how he fainted away once, one hundred and five feet down, and another time let the water into his suit by pulling out a helmet lug on a foolish wager. And that reminded Atkinson of the time his gasket (the rubber joint under the collar) was cut through by the slam of an iron ladder, and the air went out "Hooo," and a quick jerk on the life-line was all that saved him. Last of all they told the story of old Captain Conkling and the Holyoke Dam, a story known to every diver. It seems there was a leak in this dam, and the water was rushing through with so strong a suction that it seemed certain death for a diver to go near enough to stop the leak. Yet it was extremely important that the leak be stopped – in fact, the saving of the dam depended on it. So Captain Conkling, who was in charge of the job, induced one of his divers to go down, and reluctantly the man put on his suit, but insisted on having an extra rope, and a very strong one, tied around his waist.

"What's that for?" asked Conkling.

"That's to help get my body out, if the life-line breaks," said the diver.

"Go on and do your work," replied Conkling, who had little use for sentiment.

It happened exactly as the diver feared. He was drawn into the suction of the hole, and when they tried to pull him up both hose and life-line parted, and the man was drowned, but they managed to rescue his body with the heavy line, just as he had planned.

Then Conkling called for another diver, but not a man responded. They said they weren't that kind of fools.

"All right," said the captain, in his businesslike way; "then I'll go down myself and stop that hole." And he called the men to dress him.

At this time Captain Conkling was seventy-five years old, and had retired long since from active diving. But he was as strong as a horse still, and no man had ever questioned his courage.

In vain they tried to dissuade him. "I'll stop that hole," said he, "and I don't want any extra rope, either."

He kept his word. He went down, and he stopped the hole, but it was with his dead body, and to-day somewhere in the Holyoke Dam lie the bones of brave old Captain Conkling, incased in full diving-dress, helmet and hose and life-line, buried in that mass of masonry. No man ever dared go down after his body.

IV

WHEREIN WE MEET SHARKS, ALLIGATORS, AND A VERY TOUGH PROBLEM IN WRECKING

TIMMANS, whom I used to call the student diver, because of his keen observation and capacity for wonder, leaned against the step-ladder that reached down from hatch to cabin on the Dunderberg, and remarked, while the others listened: "I did a queer job of diving once down into the hold of a steamship, a National liner, that lay in her dock, blazing with electric lights, and dry as a bone. Just the same, I needed my suit when I got down into her – in fact, I wouldn't have lasted there very long without air from the pump."

"Some queer cargo?" suggested Atkinson.

"That's it. She was loaded with caustic soda, or whatever they make bleaching-powder of – barrels and barrels of it, with the heads broke in after a storm, and it wasn't good stuff to breathe, I can tell you. First they set men shoveling it out, with sponges in their mouths, against the dust and gases, but one man coughed so hard he tore something in his lungs or head and died. Then they sent for a diver – that was me – and I worked hours down there hoisting and shoveling, like I was at the bottom of the bay, only there was no water to carry the weight. Say, but wasn't that suit heavy, and when I looked out through my helmet-glasses it seemed as if I was digging through a snow-field, with such a terrible dazzle it made my eyes ache to look at it."

"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.