Around the World Submerged

by Edward L. Beach

  Shortly after midnight of this day I turned in; the first leg of our trip was completed and the second one fairly started. We had had our share of ups and downs during these first days, and I wondered what the next leg would bring. Our course was now to the southwest, and in another week we would be at Cape Horn.

  We had calculated that it would take us about seven days to make the long run down the east coast of South America to Cape Horn. It was technically the first leg of our circumnavigation, and I was glad that our first landfall and the horseplay at the equator were behind us. Now we could settle down and organize the ship for the long run. If all went as we hoped, we would see St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks again on the twenty-fifth of April.

  Various projects were already under way. Dr. Ben Wey-brew, a psychologist from the Navy Medical Research Laboratory in New London, had issued a series of questionnaires to various volunteers from the crew. They were to mark them at different times during each day and turn them in daily. The Doctor’s project was to record such prosaic things as sleeping hours; smoking and coffee-drinking habits; general feelings and moods, such as laziness or energy, depression or euphoria; how much food a man consumed and whether his eating habits changed during the cruise; his reading habits; how often he thought of his family; and other related matters. His questions seemed a bit strange to a number of us and when I asked about them, he explained that they were, in fact, derived from diaries kept by the men on Nautilus and Seawolf, who had carried out similar investigations during their long trips. Our data would add to the information thus amassed regarding the psychological effects of long cruises. The basic information would be valuable not only for future submarine operations, but for space travel as well.

  One thing was already very evident: all hands were just beginning to realize how long a trip ours was to be. The crossing-the-line ceremony and the abandon with which hair had been cut brought our isolation home to all of us.

  My off-hand comment that there would be plenty of time for the hair to grow back had apparently reached a large audience. The short bristles standing on stark white skin where there had been a handsome head of hair were a constant reminder that we still had a long way to go.

  For a while, I was worried by the conduct of our high jinks the day before. Three of our pollywogs had refused to participate in the ceremonies. Even our technical and scientific personnel had accepted the full treatment, including Joe Roberts, who had been across the equator four times but never “officially,” as he put it.

  In hopes the three holdouts would change their minds, I had refused to allow them to be dragged into the initiation. Later on, it was evident that I had missed my chance, if there had ever been one, to avert bad feeling—something we could not tolerate with a long cruise still before us.

  For several days the matter preyed upon my mind, for it became apparent that some animosity was growing. Could this be the beginning of a breakdown in the spirit of togetherness, which as a crew we must have for maximum efficiency, if not for an harmonious life aboard ship? Had I acted wisely in permitting our three holdouts to get away with their defiance? Might it not have been wiser to have haled them forth at the first sign of rebellion and have it over with, hopefully as a big joke—or would other things gradually occupy us and the whole affair blow over?

  The matter was discussed privately with Ben Weybrew and Will Adams. There was considerable resentment of the three among the rest of the crew, Shellbacks all. If we were to give the holdouts credit for crossing the line, which they certainly had done even though not officially received by King Neptune and his Court, there would undoubtedly be even more resentment. If we held a special ceremony for them the next time we crossed the line—during the voyage there would be three more crossings—the best I could hope for was to minimize any possible outburst of vindictiveness by instant repression; active rancor was almost a sure bet, and during this sort of situation there is always a measurable loss of control.

  Perhaps I felt the risk of trouble more than was necessary, but at any rate, all moves to give the three a special initiation were vetoed. In the end, we merely placed an official entry, carefully worded, in the records of everyone else, stating that they had crossed the line on such and such a date and had been received by Neptunus, rex, and his Court. Pollywogs were converted officially into Shellbacks, and Shellbacks were reaffirmed as such. No entry of any kind was made for the three holdouts. They would have to find another ship going across the line should they change their minds at a later date. Though we were to cross the equator thrice more, I decreed, there would be no further visits from King Neptune.

  Along with everything else, this was the Triton’s shakedown cruise, and so a daily schedule of drills and exercises was laid out. In addition, a number of extracurricular activities blossomed. The ship’s newspaper had become one of our primary sources of daily interest. Once a week we held our religious services. Courses in Spanish, mathematics, history, and civics were begun, with instructors, textbooks, and scheduled classes. The “ Triton Lecture Association” was formed, created by Lieutenant R. P. (Pat) McDonald with the provident thought that after we returned from our cruise, there might be numerous requests for members of the ship’s company to lecture before various audiences. A little practice in advance, Pat suggested, would be useful.

  There were indeed many separate and diverse activities going on. Some of us brought along books we had been planning to read or correspondence courses which, in many cases, were a prerequisite to advancement in rank, or rating. I found room in my cabin for the entire six-volume Story of Civilization by Will Durant, Samuel Eliot Morison’s biographies of Columbus and John Paul Jones, Admiral Mahan’s The Life of Nelson in two old volumes and Dr. Charles McKew Parr’s carefully researched life of Ferdinand Magellan, So Noble a Captain.

  All in all, there was plenty to occupy everybody as we proceeded on the first leg of our “official” circumnavigation.

  As it happened, the run down the coast of South America started out smoothly enough, but it didn’t end that way. On the first of March, 1960, Jim Stark, a Commander in the Medical Corps, USN, and our ship’s doctor, sought me out.

  “Captain,” he said rather abruptly, looking serious, “I’m afraid we have a pretty sick man aboard.”

  This, of all things, was what I had been dreading most. “Who is it?” I asked. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “It’s Poole,” said Jim, “Chief Radarman. I’m afraid he might have a kidney stone.”

  My tone of voice must have indicated relief that it wasn’t something highly contagious like smallpox or meningitis. “Oh,” I said. “He’s not really sick then, is he?”

  Stark grinned wryly. “It’s not infectious, Captain, if that’s what you mean, but he’s a pretty sick boy, all right. The trouble is there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You mean you can’t treat him on board?” I asked, feeling the glimmerings of worry again.

  Jim nodded. “He’s not sick in the sense of having a germ or a bug of some kind, but if you take a look at him, you’ll agree that if he doesn’t improve, we do have a problem. You need special tools for this, and we don’t have any of them. This is a job for a hospital.”

  Stark produced a thick medical book with photographs and drawings to illustrate Poole’s problem. A stone had formed in one of Poole’s kidneys, had been dislodged, and was now in a ureter tube where it was damming the normal flow. The specified treatment was rather similar to what one might do with a clogged drain line on board ship, but as Jim patiently explained the techniques of doing it and described the delicate equipment which we did not have—which included an X-ray outfit—I began to understand his concern.

  “Suppose the kidney stone remains stuck in the tube,” I said. “What happens then?”

  “Well,” replied Jim, “in the first place, it’s terribly painful—and that’s what’s happening to Poole now. That’s why I’ve had to give him sedation. If there’s no relief—in ext
reme cases—there can be mild or serious damage of the kidney, which could result in a permanent injury. In an extreme case,” he said soberly, “if unrelieved, a person could die.”

  “You mean he’s in danger?”

  Jim hastened to assure me that this was not so. The treatment Poole was receiving at his hands was the standard treatment in the early stages of a kidney stone ailment. In most cases, the trouble cleared up more or less spontaneously, with the stone passing the rest of the way down the tube and out of the body in the urine. Poole was already using a specimen bottle, he explained, and his urine would be carefully examined.

  “I’m giving him morphine to ease the pain,” Jim said, as he rose to leave. “All we can do is wait.”

  I sat pondering. Prior to leaving New London, I had been briefed on the general locations of all US naval units in the areas near which we might be passing, and I knew that the Macon, a cruiser built at the end of the war, was somewhere in these waters. Maybe we could effect a rendezvous with her. But even if we were to do so, how could we transfer Poole without surfacing—and if we were to surface, would this not ruin our submerged record? Suppose we were to surface, transfer Poole to the Macon, and keep it a secret. Would our submerged record still be valid? Suppose the press discovered it; suppose—after the cruise was announced publicly—the newspapers of the Soviet bloc were to get hold of the item? Would it not be terribly embarrassing to our country? What about the special purpose of our mission? Would this not, in fact, utterly destroy it?

  To this last question, at least, I knew the answer as soon as I formulated it. As for the rest, going around the world submerged was naturally tremendously important to us as a morale factor. No doubt it held real value for our Navy and our country, particularly in view of the Russian successes with their Sputniks. But so far as the fundamental purposes of our voyage were concerned—the research to be made, the data to be collected—surfacing for an hour or so would make no difference at all. But we could not under any circumstances pretend to an accomplishment we had not done.

  And I knew, or sensed, another thing, which was simply that either Poole passed the kidney stone and recovered, or we would have to get help for him somehow, somewhere. Were this war, were our mission one of life or death, were the ship to be endangered with the possibility of more lives lost if we exposed ourselves in order to help Poole, then there might conceivably be some excuse for gritting our teeth and making him grit his. But not under the circumstances that existed.

  Jim Stark, however, had made it clear that the situation was not yet desperate. We could hang on a while longer and await developments.

  I had just about reached this point in my reasoning when there came a rap on my door, and Dick Harris pulled aside the curtain. He, like Stark, wore a troubled look.

  “What’s on your mind, Dick?” I asked. “Have you a kidney stone in your sonar?”

  Dick’s face twisted. “Something like that perhaps, Captain,” he said. “It’s the fathometer.”

  Constitutionally, I needed much less background information to become excited about a sick fathometer than about a sick kidney, and I was intensely concerned. “What’s the trouble, Dick?” I asked.

  As he answered, Dick characteristically chose his words carefully. “We’ve been slowly losing sensitivity with the fathometer,” he said, “and I’ve started checking into it. The strength of the echo is becoming noticeably weaker. I worked on it for a couple of hours last night, but it is still weaker than it should be, even though we seemed to have been able to make some improvement in it. We’re getting only a faint echo, and it could go completely out of commission at any time.”

  “Where do you think the trouble is?” I asked. “Is it in the transmitter head, do you think, or the transmitting or receiving section of the set itself?”

  “Dunno yet, Captain,” he said. “As far as we can tell, the outgoing signal is about the same strength as ever, but the return signal seems to be weaker. Maybe we’ll find something wrong with the receiver section, and if we can get the right parts, we should have it back in commission soon.”

  “Keep me advised, Dick,” I said. “The fathometer is a mighty important instrument for this cruise, especially since we are passing over waters that are basically uncharted.”

  Dick tried another twisted half-grin. “I know that, sir,” he said. “‘Whitey’ Rubb is in there helping us with his electronic technicians. Maybe that will speed up the process of figuring out what’s wrong with it.”

  After Dick left, I sat for a long moment. Now there were two problems to ponder. Shallow water areas near most of the big land masses of the world are well charted these days, and a surface ship has generally little difficulty picking its way along an unfamiliar coast as long as it has the right chart. But nobody had ever gone to much trouble to make accurate charts of deep waters, the so-called “off-soundings” areas, which comprise ninety-nine percent of the oceans. Our unsuspected discovery of a new and previously uncharted mountain peak as we neared St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks a few days ago was a case in point. The chart of the South American coast showed a number of very shallow spots—just dots on the charts—where evidently some submerged mountain peaks had been discovered more or less by accident as ships passed overhead. Surface vessels had been passing over these peaks in perfect safety for centuries, their existence entirely unsuspected. But our situation in Triton was very much different, for we were traveling many hundreds of feet deeper than a surface ship. At the speed we had to go, our ship would be heavily damaged by even a glancing contact with the bottom, and I didn’t even want to think of the result of striking the vertical face of a cliff like the one we had found a week ago. Traveling in uncharted waters, the fathometer was absolutely vital to us.

  Fortunately, an immediate decision on this, too, could be postponed for a little while. At the moment, Triton was proceeding over a particularly deep section of the South Atlantic, and for some hours the fathometer had been showing a relatively flat, level bottom. There would be small chance of sudden peaks, since the topography of the bottom indicated that the granite substructure required for such peaks was most likely not present. In a couple of days, however, we would pass into more shallow areas. There, the structure of the earth could very likely be composed of stone outcroppings of one sort or another, and we would need that fathometer desperately.

  In the control room, Chief Sonarman George McDaniel, assisted by Sonarmen First Class Beckhaus and Kenneth (“Shorty”) Remillard, had already removed the cover from the fathometer console, and they were taking electrical measurements of the electronic equipment inside. The space where they had to work also happened to be the Diving Officer’s watch station. And Lieutenant George Sawyer, whose watch this was, appeared to be having a little difficulty staying out of their way.

  One deck below and one compartment aft, in the air-control center, where the data supplied by Triton’s radars is plotted and evaluated, Electronics Technicians Gordon Simpson and Martin Docker were huddled with their division officer, Lieutenant Milton R. (“Whitey”) Rubb, over the manufacturer’s instruction book for the fathometer.

  It was apparent that all these men, at least, fully shared my appreciation that our fathometer needed to be put back in commission quickly.

  In the crew’s berthing compartment, just forward of the control room, I came upon Poole. In spite of Jim Stark’s warning, I was unprepared for what I saw, and was instantly shocked into concern.

  Eyes half-closed, face swollen, Poole had risen to his forearms and knees and was quivering with obviously excruciating pains.

  It so happened that he had one of the higher bunks in the ship, normally reached by a portable aluminum ladder. The ladder had been placed against the side of his bunk, and First Class Hospitalman Richard Fickel stood upon it in such a manner that if Poole, in one of his uncontrolled movements, were to fall out of his bunk, Fickel would be in a position to catch him or at least restrain him and break his fall.

&nb
sp; One or two off-watch personnel, who occupied the same bunking area as Poole, looked uncomfortably at me. The message in their eyes was unmistakable, though they knew that everything possible was being done for him. “Can’t we do something to make it easier for him?” they appeared to ask. One thing I did know—though this did not seem the appropriate time to mention it—Jim Stark had explained that despite his painful writhings and muffled groans, Poole was in fact not fully conscious. Later on, he would remember nothing at all about his sufferings. The morphine would take care of that.

  Abruptly, I turned about and went back to the wardroom. There, ignoring the troubled gaze of two or three of the ship’s officers, I silently drew a cup of black coffee and retired to my stateroom. There were a number of things I needed to think out.

  Taking the easier one first—casualties to fathometers were rare. I had never heard of one going out of commission before. Fathometers are, after all, not extremely complicated pieces of equipment, and the Navy has been using them for many years. By this time, surely, they should have been perfected, made proof against all the ordinary hazards of shipboard service. Perhaps there was something about ours that was improperly hooked up, perhaps some part in this particular fathometer was a little extra fragile—just enough to cause the trouble. In that case, we’d find it. But the worrisome thing was Dick’s report that the fathometer head was slowly losing sensitivity. Was anything actually happening in the fathometer head? If this were so, there would be nothing we could do about it.

  The fathometer lay up in the bows of the ship, adjacent to the keel; the only way it could be reached was by dry-docking the entire ship. In earlier submarines, perhaps with this very casualty in mind, the fathometer had been located in the forward trim tank, where it was accessible. Would that this were true in Triton! Without a fathometer, the hazards of our trip would be infinitely increased. What to do if it proved impossible to repair?