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Careers of Danger and Daring

<hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>II</h2> <h3>A VISIT TO THE BURYING-GROUND OF WRECKS</h3> <div class='cap'>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.</div> 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. <div class="figright"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus13.jpg" width-obs="295" height-obs="300" alt="THE MEN AT WORK WITH THE AIR-PUMP." title="" /> THE MEN AT WORK WITH THE AIR-PUMP.</div> 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." <div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus14.jpg" width-obs="223" height-obs="600" alt=""I STAYED DOWN UNTIL THAT CHAIN WAS UNDER THE SHAFT."" title="" /> "I STAYED DOWN UNTIL THAT CHAIN WAS UNDER THE SHAFT."</div> 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! <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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