Thirty Fathoms Deep

by Ellsberg, Edward

  “It’s all so,” added Clark. “Just to show how the air acts, you can’t whistle no matter how hard you try. The air’s too thick.”

  “The telephone’s a help, but it takes teamwork to get a message through,” continued Joe. “A diver usually don’t waste his time talking. Unless a message is absolutely necessary he keeps quiet, and so does his tender, ’cause it’s nearly as much of a job for the diver listening to a message as it is talking.

  “Anyway, there’s the transmitter soldered to the helmet. You wear a pair of earphones strapped over your head like a radio headset; that plugs in here beside the transmitter.

  “The rest of the rig’s simpler. Here it is,” and he pulled the diving-suit up on the table. It was a watertight union suit, made of rubber, covered inside and out with white duck, and fairly flexible. The feet were made as part of the suit, with extra canvas for reinforcing; a heavy, flat rubber collar, nearly half an inch thick, with small holes punched in it, finished off the top. Hawkins explained that the diver slipped into the suit through this collar, entered his feet in the legs, and then worked his hands down the canvas arms. The most difficult task in putting on the suit lay in getting the hands through the tight rubber cuffs which made a watertight seal round the diver’s wrists.

  “They’re such a tight fit that you always have to soap your hands, or they’ll never slip through,” said Joe, as he exhibited the cuffs. “Then the tenders slip on a tight rubber band over the cuffs to make sure they don’t leak. And that don’t make the work any easier, for it shuts off the circulation of blood in your hands, and they get numb pretty quick. In cold water, your hands’ll freeze in a hurry; so you wear watertight gloves cemented to your sleeves instead of cuffs, but it’s mighty unhandy working with watertight gloves. Either way you take it, cuffs or gloves, the poor old diver’s up against a tough proposition, but I guess the gloves are the worst.”

  Hawkins showed Bob how the copper breastplate was slipped over the diver’s head and bolted tightly to the rubber collar; how the helmet was next slipped on and locked to the breastplate by a quarter turn on an interrupted screw-joint, just like the breech-plug of a naval gun. Next he described the rigging of the diver’s weights and why they were required — the lead-soled shoes weighing twenty pounds apiece and the sixty-pound leaden belt.

  “The helmet’s always full of air, and it’s buoyant in the water; it’d float right up over your head as soon as you submerged. To hold it down on your shoulders where it belongs, you have this leather harness, like the Sam Browne belt they wear in the army; it goes over the breastplate and hooks to your lead belt, which is heavy enough to hold it down, but to make sure, this leather strap from in back of the belt goes down between your legs and is buckled up tight to the belt in front. Then when the lead shoes are buckled on you, you’re loaded with about two hundred pounds of ballast and you can hardly stand up until you’re in the water. There’s two reasons for the belt and the shoes. The main one is that you’ve got to have air in your helmet and in your suit over your chest if you want to breathe, but that much air makes you so light when you go over the side that you float; you’ve got to put on weight to make you heavy so’s you’ll sink. Now you could do it just by putting all the weight in the belt, but it’d be dangerous. If, for any reason, you lost your balance and fell down, the air in your suit would go to your legs and you’d turn upside down with your heavy helmet acting as ballast on your head, and no way of getting your buoyant feet down again. And that’d be your finish!

  “So to prevent that, a diver always wears lead-soled shoes to keep his feet heavy, and in addition, we lace the legs of his suit up tight so they can’t balloon out on him when he lies down to work.”

  Hawkins next explained how the air-hose connection from behind the helmet is brought under the diver’s left arm and the hose lashed to his breastplate there to take the strain off the helmet. He pointed out the working of the control-valve inserted in the hose just above the right breast, by which the diver can regulate the amount of air admitted to his suit, or shut it off altogether if he wished to talk.

  “That control-valve’s mighty important, Bob. Depending on how much air you let into your suit and the back pressure you keep on the exhaust-valve, you can make yourself so light in the water that you can jump ten feet high if you want; or you can make yourself so heavy that the tenders can hardly haul you up. There’s danger both ways. If you get too light, you start to float up, your suit balloons out as the water-pressure decreases, you get still more buoyant, and go shooting for the surface like a rocket, without any decompression. If you’ve been down long enough to soak up any air, your blood will be full of bubbles when you hit the surface, and ‘blowing up’ from deep water’s nearly the worst thing that can happen to a diver.

  “Now, if you’re keeping yourself too heavy and you happen to fall off the boat or step into a hold in the wreck or something like that, you’ll sink like a shot and the increase in pressure will give you a ‘squeeze’ that will kill you. So it’s bad both ways, and you’ve got to keep your air adjusted right or you won’t be a diver for long.”

  Hawkins paused in his explanations to turn the fan temporarily away from Williams to cool his own perspiring face.

  Frank Martin sat up in his bunk and turned the other fan on Bob. “Diving’s a tough game, boy. Workin’ in the mud most o’ the time all by yourself. Usually you see mighty little while you’re down, and if you make a mistake, it’s most likely your last one. Joe ain’t told you half o’ what can happen while you’re down. But I’ll tell you this — a cool head’s the best friend a diver’s got. If he loses his bean when he’s in trouble, he’ll kill himself in a few minutes strugglin’ under all that pressure. You wanta go along with it?”

  Bob nodded. “If I didn’t, Frank, I would have stayed in Boston. I’m going through the Santa Cruz with you. Come on, let me try on that rig.” He pulled off his shoes; Martin rolled out of his bunk to help Hawkins. Soon Bob found himself completely dressed except for the helmet; then that was put on him with the face-plate open so that he could breathe. He tried adjusting the exhaust-valve with his right hand, turned the air-control valve with his left, then started to rise from his stool. He staggered under the load of his helmet and belt; Frank hurriedly steadied him by grasping the belt and taking part of the weight.

  “That’s enough!” cried Joe through the face-plate, “sit down!” And he shoved the stool in behind him again. Bob seated himself heavily, and his two tenders hastily undressed him. With his helmet off, Bob turned, grinning, to Williams.

  “It feels like trying to take the ball over the goal with a couple of Yale tackles round your neck, another one round your waist, and a linesman’s hanging on to each foot. But I guess the rig hasn’t thrown me for a loss yet; I can carry it.”

  Chapter 9

  Bob worked in the cabin for several nights, making an accurate copy in Spanish of the two chapters of Un Caballero en Peru which dealt with Don Jaime’s voyage in the Santa Cruz. Then the original was locked in the captain’s safe and the copy locked in his desk.

  “They’re safer up here,” declared Carroll. “My cabin’s just abaft the bridge and there’s always someone on watch there. It’s not so likely anybody can go exploring in my room without getting nailed at it.”

  Bob heartily agreed with him, and it was with considerable relief that he turned over the precious book to his friend for safe-keeping.

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have been any good to anybody unless he could get ashore with it,” said Bob, “but it would have cooked our goose if he’d thrown it overboard to avoid being caught with it when we searched the ship. We hadn’t got another copy then.”

  Carroll laughed. “Don’t fool yourself, Bob. I’ve been in the game long enough to know that it’s always wise to have an anchor out to windward. The first time I ever saw that book, I made a little chart showing the Santa Cruz positions from the day she left port, her dead-reckoning position until Drake sighted her, her co
urse towards the beach, the soundings, and the bearing of the sun over that headland when she blew up. The chart was in my safe all the time, and that’ll take us to her without the book.”

  Bob gazed with added respect at the skipper. Evidently it was no accident that he had previously been so successful.

  “When I was a midshipman back at Crab town, we had as an instructor in seamanship a grizzled old boatswain’s mate who must have sailed with John Paul Jones. And he kept drumming into us whenever we rigged lines for lifting or hauling anything, ‘Young gentlemen, a good seaman always puts on a preventer.’ It’s a wonderful habit, Bob — whenever you’re working a line that anything depends on, always put on another line as a preventer to take the strain in case the first hawser carries away. I’m one of that old sailor’s ‘young gentlemen’ who wouldn’t be talking to you now if it hadn’t been for unconsciously following his advice on several occasions.”

  Next morning they approached the Canal. Before entering the harbour, the captain called the four divers into his cabin, instructing them to see that no one left the ship and that no casual visitors came aboard. Then he posted them, two on each side, as a special watch for the transit.

  They steamed into port and the Lapwing dropped anchor for a brief period until, in company with a large tank steamer, they were ordered to get underway. Then they entered the locks and passed quickly through, rising step by step until they emerged at the Canal level. They passed through the cut, tropical jungles lining their route. At Balboa they were locked down and without a pause steamed out into the ocean — to the evident surprise of most of the crew, who wasted no words in expressing their disappointment to one another as they watched Panama, a fine port for a liberty, sink below the horizon astern.

  But it was with marked relief that Lieutenant Carroll found himself finally in the Pacific, headed south again on the last lap of their voyage, and Bob found him considerably more light-hearted as they lost sight of land and were once more alone in the midst of the rolling sea.

  “We’re safe now, Bob,” he confided, as together they leaned over the starboard bridge-rail and watched the burning path of flame leading across the waves to the setting sun. “Nothing happened in the Zone. Nobody came on board but the pilot, and not a man had a chance even to talk to anybody in a boat. We won’t have to worry anymore — we’re out of the steamer routes near El Morro. It’s uninhabited, and a ship never passes there from one year’s end to another. Now I can turn to on locating the wreck.”

  “But you know just where she is, don’t you, Lieutenant?”

  “Within a couple of miles maybe, but we can’t rest on that. Don Jaime says they were a league off shore, with the sun just setting over a headland on the north end of the island. Do you know what that means to us, Bob?”

  Bob, looking at the sunset, shook his head. “I suppose it’ll give us the time of the day that she blew up, but as that was a few hundred years ago, I imagine a few hours more or less don’t mean much now.”

  “You’re right on that, but wrong on what it means. That line about the setting sun is the most valuable direction Don Jaime left us; it’s going to give us the exact bearing of the wreck from the island. We know the approximate distance and that’ll show us where to sweep.”

  “I see,” said Bob, “the sun sets in the west, so if we go east three miles from El Morro, we’ll be there.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not so simple. The sun sets in the west all right, but not exactly, and it varies every day of the year and from year to year. We’ve got to have an exact bearing if we don’t want to spend months sweeping all over the ocean for that wreck. Getting that bearing exact is a complicated problem in spherical trigonometry, and I can’t solve it until I see El Morro Island, though I’ve got most of the other data. Do you know what working out that bearing required?”

  His listener admitted ignorance.

  “Well, the sun’s got what they call ‘declination’, which is one of the factors we use in navigating. If I wanted to check my compass against the bearing of the sun this afternoon, I’d take the sun’s altitude with my sextant and note the time; then pick the sun’s declination for today, at the minute I took my sight, out of the Nautical Almanac, get my latitude from our dead-reckoning, and then work out a spherical triangle that’d give me the azimuth, or bearing, of the sun at that time.

  “Now I’ve got to work out the same problem for the evening the Santa Cruz blew up. Unfortunately there wasn’t any Nautical Almanac published for navigators in those days, but I got a classmate of mine at the Naval Observatory in Washington to work out for me what the declination of the sun was on the night of March 18, 1579, when the Santa Cruz sank. That was some problem in itself, but they finally worked it out, and I’ve got the angle in my desk.

  “I computed the latitude myself by the dead-reckoning run of the Santa Cruz, and I can check that when we get there. The one thing I can’t find out at all yet is what the altitude of the sun was when Don Jaime last saw it over that hill, but as soon as we arrive, I can measure the height of that point above the sea and then figure out what altitude the sun would have had when seen from a ship’s deck about twenty feet above the water and three miles away.

  “Then, when I’ve worked out a lot of cosines, secants, and square roots of all those angles, I’ll have the azimuth or the true bearing of the sun, and that’ll give us the correct line to sweep out from the island to find our ship.”

  “I guess poor old Don Jaime never guessed there was so much maths in that glimpse of the setting sun he got when he was blown overboard,” mused Bob. “I’ve had some ‘trig’ in school myself, but I’m afraid I’d be lost chasing ‘Old Sol’ through the sky, trying to find out just how he bore when he set over a hill on a Pacific island a couple of centuries ago.”

  The sun had set, the brief twilight vanished. The Lapwing, alone in the darkness, moved steadily on. The two on deck fell silent. Only a faint gleam in the binnacle over the compass-card shone in the charthouse as the helmsman slowly manoeuvred his wheel to hold the ship to her course. Below, clearly visible from the wings of the bridge in which they stood, the sea foamed and sparkled with a phosphorescent glow as the waves parted under their bows. Points of light seemed to flash up suddenly as the billows curved away, gleaming brightly for an instant and vanishing in the deep blue of the water. A luminous streak ran past each side, disappearing in the brilliant wake astern.

  Bob watched fascinated as the ship heaved easily to the long swells rolling in from the westward — undulating waves which seemed to burst into a sea of blue-white fire as they met the Lapwing.

  Overhead the tropic stars burned against the background of a moonless night; low in the sky the Great Bear was still visible above the North Star which shone dimly astern, barely above the horizon, soon to disappear altogether as they neared the Equator.

  Bob felt his blood tingle as he drank in the scene; the magic of the tropic sea intoxicated him with its strange beauty; his thoughts raced on ahead of the Lapwing to the south — where wealth, adventure, and the Santa Cruz lay waiting for them at the bottom of the sea.

  Chapter 10

  The morning of the third day after leaving Balboa found Porter and Lieutenant Carroll anxiously scanning the horizon ahead. For two days they had steered South by West, heading for Long. 83 W., Lat. 3 S., which was the position Carroll had estimated as the location of the wreck. The charts bore no island of the name Don Jaime gave; an unnamed island well off the coast appeared as the only possible spot. Would its appearance coincide with the narrative they had and prove the truth of their story? They strained their eyes sweeping the sea ahead with their glasses. The clear rim of the distant horizon remained unbroken.

  Carroll put down his binoculars and rubbed his eyes. He walked over to the chart-board, took off with his dividers the distance between their own position and the location of their destination, and scaled it off.

  “Only twenty miles now. If there are any hills on that island we ough
t to pick ’em up. If we don’t soon, the chances are the island’s flat and if that’s so, I guess the Don Jaime’ll turn out to be some Spanish relative of Baron Munchausen.”

  Both Bob and Carroll looked again but without result. The ship steamed on.

  Carroll shouted to the helmsman: “Are we on our course?”

  “Steady on South by West, sir!”

  Bob looked glumly ahead. A fine time he’d have back in Boston if their first glimpse of El Morro proved the story to be false. He searched again. Still nothing ahead.

  Carroll noticed the look of disappointment gathering on Bob’s face and endeavoured to cheer him a bit: “It’d be a great joke on the gob who tried to steal that book, wouldn’t it, Bob? We could give him the book for a souvenir and tell him we really came south on a fishing trip.” But in spite of his raillery, he inwardly began to feel as down-hearted as his companion. Again he measured the distance on the chart. Eighteen miles. He picked up his binoculars and walked towards the rail.

  “Land ho!”

  Bob jumped, staring up at the crow’s nest where Hawkins was leaning far out.

  “Thank God!” murmured Carroll under his breath, then, looking up, shouted, “Where away?”

  “Dead ahead!”

  Bob raced excitedly up the mast, clung to the cross-trees just below the crow’s nest with one hand, and levelled his glasses ahead with the other. There, looming up on the horizon, clear cut like a solitary spar-buoy, a pinnacle projected above the sea. As he watched a vague line, like a distant cloud, seemed to form below it, then grew darker. Their island, just as it should be!

  He came down, feeling after his recent gloom as if he were treading on air. “It’s right, Captain, there’s a high point, exactly as it was described!” Gleefully Carroll shook his hand.