Thirty Fathoms Deep

by Ellsberg, Edward

  The Lapwing’s stern swung slightly into the wind as the rudder went over; in the little lee created to port, the surf-boat ran alongside. The deck force threw over lifelines; the surf-boat plunged up and down as the seas swept by, while her crew, one by one, leapt for the lines and clambered on board. Clark covered the engine, unshipped his tiller, and last of all, leapt for the rail; in a moment, the surf-boat, trailing on a long painter, was riding astern. The quartermaster eased the Lapwing’s rudder and once more pointed into the sea.

  Carroll rang up, “One-third speed,” and forged slowly ahead while he heaved in with the forecastle winch on the sole remaining hawser. At last it came up and down over the starboard bow; he heaved a little more and hauled the spar-buoy up over the rail. The Lapwing steamed against the sea to relieve the strain on the hawser; Bill Clark cautiously pulled the pin free with a boat-hook and then, with all hands clear, tripped the pelican. The hook flew open, dropped to the deck with a bang while the released spar-buoy shot over the side into the sea. They were unmoored.

  The Lapwing turned slowly to port, rolling violently as the waves caught her abeam, and then steamed westward towards El Morro.

  The crashing of the surf as the waves broke in foaming walls and rushed up the beach reverberated through the whistling of the wind as they approached the island; at the foot of El Morro, the solid water hitting the rock rose in clouds of spray a hundred feet high.

  Bob watched the spectacle in breathless admiration as the Lapwing scudded before the gale and swept to the northward of the sentinel rock. To leeward of the island, Carroll dropped anchor in ten fathoms of water, and paying out his cable to the bitter end, rode to the storm.

  In the cabin, as their little vessel yawed and pitched, the captain and his friend compared notes.

  “Lucky for Joe, and incidentally for all of us,” said Carroll, “that Tom got him clear before this storm broke. We might have lost them both inside; I couldn’t have hung on much longer, for our mooring-anchors would have dragged and shot us down the wind. The boys all right?”

  “Yes,” replied Bob. “I was talking with ’em again over the telephone in the recompression tank. They’re both seasick from trying to ride that bucking stage just before we hauled them in and they say they’ve got a terrible earache. Joe’s broken leg doesn’t feel any too good; outside of that they think they’re O.K. But I don’t quite see how Tom dared to cut open Joe’s suit to give him air again. Did you ever hear of anything like that?”

  “No, Bob, I haven’t. Divers have had their air-lines cut before, but that was their finish. They never came up alive. Tom’s a genius for thinking out the trick that he used to save Joe’s life. It’s never been done before. And yet it’s safe enough. Even with a hole in his suit, as long as Joe had his helmet uppermost and air going into it, the water that ran in through the cut could never rise into his helmet; it would fill up his suit all right, but Joe could still keep on breathing. He was like a diving-bell; it’s open at the bottom but it’s watertight on top and the air trapped in the bell stays there.

  “Well, I guess Joe owes his life all right to Tom’s quick thinking. Probably an ordinary diver would have lost his head altogether and let Joe die while he struggled trying to get him clear of that beam; even an excellent diver would have thought it necessary to try to get a new air-hose and a wrench and couple up the new hose to the joint on Joe’s helmet. If Tom had tried that, I guess by the time we got the hose and wrench down the descending-line, and he had dragged them inside that passage in the hold, Joe would have passed the point where he ever needed air any more.

  “Yes, Tom’s ripping open Joe’s suit and shoving his broken air-hose up into his helmet was a positive stroke of genius. When you think of the conditions down in that hold, with poor Joe fouled and suffocating, and Tom himself in a pretty tight place, it’s a real miracle he could think at all, let alone pull off the stunt he did. I tell you, Bob, it certainly pays to keep your head in a tough situation and think!”

  Chapter 18

  The storm blew for two days, while the Lapwing pitched erratically at the end of her cable and her crew lived on the scanty meals that the cook managed to prepare amid his flying pots and pans.

  In his bunk, Bob Porter braced himself against the leeboard and tried to read, but the motion was too violent and he was unable to follow the lines. He tossed the book to his desk and looked out of the porthole — on a world of flying spray and tumbling waves. The anchor-cable groaned as it surged back and forth in the hawse-pipe; the wind whistled through the bridge overhead, and the seas pounded loudly as they hammered the Lapwing’s bow.

  Bob left his bunk and slipped on an oilskin coat and a sou’wester. He went through the lee mess room door to the deck; the wind struck him and swept him back a few feet until, leaning forward, he was able to make headway against it and work his way up the forecastle to the eyes of the ship.

  He thrilled to the power of the sea as he watched the huge storm waves rush up, crash against the bow, and sweep in a mass of foam and broken water down the sides of the ship.

  As the deck rose and fell beneath his feet and the salt of the biting wind stung his face, his heart swelled with the realisation that he was at last a seasoned sailor; he could ride out a storm with the best of them.

  After two days, the weather moderated, but another day went by before the long swells which followed in the wake of the gale had calmed enough to allow the Lapwing to moor again.

  The three days’ break in the work had its compensations, however. The tired divers welcomed the opportunity to recuperate. In particular Tom Williams, whose back was so stiff from heaving against the crowbar that for several days he did not leave his bunk, was able to manoeuvre round the deck when the motion of the ship eased down.

  But in spite of the respite, the strain of working under pressure was showing up. All the divers had lost weight; every ounce of fat had been burned out of them by breathing highly compressed air at the bottom of the sea. Quietly they moved about the deck or lay silently in their bunks. Their spirit of banter was gone; the constant strain of watchfulness against unseen death waiting to seize them if they made a slip, had left its mark. Williams, Clark, and Hawkins in turn had suddenly found themselves fighting in the solitude of the depths for their lives; they had escaped, but memories of their peril brooded over them and kept alive the fear of dangers yet to come. Only Martin had been spared, but even he had firmly burned into his memory that terrible hour of struggle, when Tom Williams dangled limply from the mooring-hawser on the end of a fouled lifeline and flew helplessly through the water each time the cable surged, while Martin strove frantically to save him.

  The weather calmed, the Lapwing moored. Once more the side was rigged for diving. Tom Williams and Bill Clark went overboard armed with a submarine light, a crowbar, and a sledgehammer. They eased themselves into the tunnel, squeezed into the passage, and crawled aft to the strong-room. They scrambled over the loose beam which had trapped Joe; just beyond it they found a point where several planks had butted in the wake of the stanchion. The broken tree-nails protruded up into the passage, threatening to tear open their suits. Clark swung his sledgehammer and broke off the jagged ends. Tom jammed his crowbar into an open joint, worked it down until it struck the iron plating underneath. Together the divers swung their weight down on the plank, ripped out a splinter, widened the gap until they could push their bar well underneath and then heaved down until the plank rose out of the bulkhead and they broke it off against the stanchion aft.

  They attacked the next plank. With sledgehammer and bar they broke it out; the crash of wood and the ring of the sledgehammer echoed through the silent hulk of the Santa Cruz as the grotesque figures of the divers toiled over the bulkhead. In silence they signalled each other to bear down on the bar, to batter with the sledgehammer, to shine the light this way and that as they tore out the water — logged planks and exposed the iron room beneath.

  On deck, Bob on one phone, Carroll on
the other, listened to the sharp ring of the hammer, the ripping of the timbers. No word came up; no messages were sent down to annoy the workers. The minutes sped swiftly by; at last Tom Carley, who was keeping time, announced: “Fifty minutes on the bottom!”

  Carroll turned to the tenders fishing the diving-lines over the rail and ordered: “Stand by to come up!”

  Each tender jerked his line four times; through the sea, down the tunnel, into the passage inside the wreck, the lifelines carried the signal to the divers. They paused in their work, gripped the lines trailing from their breastplates, and signalled back.

  Tom picked up the light, shone it over the spot they had been working on. Five planks were gone. The opening was large enough. He seized his crowbar, Bill picked up his sledge. Leaving behind a trail of bubbles as they went, they crawled out the passage on to the ocean floor.

  Leaving the lamp at the tunnel mouth, they crunched across the hard sand bottom to the descending-line, and soon were on the stage, their decompression started.

  Tom made his first report.

  “On deck! All ready for the torch!” He started to exercise vigorously to accelerate his decompression, and soon both Tom and Bill were deeply engrossed in submarine callisthenics.

  Frank Martin slid down past them, the torch dangling from a lanyard on his wrist. He reached the bottom, reported, and looked upward through the water to see that the torch hoses were free of the descending-line and not tangled in his own lines. Everything was clear; in an easy sweep the hoses led up through the quiet water and faded into the sea above.

  The diver moved into the shadow of the poop, picked up the lamp at the black pool which marked the tunnel and vanished through the ocean floor. Impeded a little by the many lines trailing behind, he dragged the lamp and the torch down the passage and over the torn planks and came at last to the spot where the wooden bulkhead lay torn apart.

  Martin swung his lamp over the debris. Blackened iron plates met his gaze. He rapped them with his shoe. A solid ring came back. The plating was at least an inch thick; the strong-room of the Santa Cruz was strong indeed.

  Martin unscrewed his knife and dug its point into the iron. A thin coat of rust broke away; underneath the bright metal gleamed in the ray of his searchlight. Not much rusting. Just like those submarines. There was no air at the bottom of the sea to oxidise the iron; corrosion had hardly started.

  Martin placed his light to one side so that it shone over the exposed iron, and cleared away the broken lumber that littered the opening. He set his exhaust-valve so that he could lie down, stretched himself out flat on his stomach, and pulled the torch up in front of him.

  He was at full depth; the bottom one hundred and eighty feet from the surface, and he some twenty feet below the bottom, two hundred feet down altogether. He had never tried the torch at such a depth before.

  He turned on his gases — the air, the oxygen, the hydrogen — one at a time, and adjusted each one carefully. The stream of gases shot out under high pressure from his torch, rising in a mass of fine bubbles into the water.

  Martin reached for the rubber cable to the igniter, dragged it up, and swung the contacts over the torch. He shouted out: “Turn on the igniter!”

  On deck, the electrician threw in his switch. Carroll answered: “The igniter is on!”

  Martin released the contacts. A spark flashed, the torch lit up with a terrific bang, a brilliant ball of flame flashed in the darkness. Against the high pressure of the water the torch burned with a roar like an un-muffled aeroplane motor.

  On the Lapwing, Carroll heard the familiar rumble over Martin’s telephone. He called to the electrician: “Turn off the igniter!”

  Martin dropped the igniter, swung the torch through the water, and, guiding the tip with his left hand, brought down the flame against the metal. A few sparks flew as the rust dried under the flame and cracked off, then a dull red spot started to form under the tip and in a few seconds glowed brightly. Frank squeezed the trigger on his torch; the flame lengthened out, a jet of pure oxygen shot through the centre of the flame and hit the glowing iron. It caught fire. Brilliant white streamers flew through the water in all directions, more gorgeous than a firework-display. Another second and the flame had punched through the heavy iron. The sparks blew through inside the room below and the brightness faded out; only the glow of the torch itself remained. Slowly Martin guided the flame along; in the wake of the spurting oxygen, the iron vanished, leaving a cut in the metal an eighth of an inch wide. Carefully the diver drew his orange flame along, watching it closely through his face-plate in order to keep his torch-tip the right distance from the metal.

  The cut lengthened, and a black streak showed in the wake of the torch. Under the jet the iron flamed pure white; a quarter of an inch away the water quenched the burned plate. A cloud of bubbles and steam rose from the fierce heat, but, protected by the water, the diver’s fingers, within an inch of the tip, held it steadily to its path.

  Four feet of iron were severed in as many minutes, then Martin swung his torch round the corner and started to cut at right angles. Steadily the flame cut through; in the blackness below, Martin could see the sparks flashing as they shot downward and the torch moved on.

  The job was half finished. Martin’s outstretched arms could no longer guide the flame and the cut became jagged. He let go his trigger and lifted the torch. He dragged his bulky frame up closer, slewed himself parallel to his last cut, and, picking up the spot where he had left off, brought the flame once more down on the plates, and quickly preheated the iron. Again he pressed the trigger; the metal in wake of the oxygen flared white and burned away. No need for his submarine light now. The glow of the iron in the water lit up the passage, and cast a huge shadow from his helmet against the woodwork overhead.

  Three sides of the cut were done. Martin crawled round so that he lay facing the fourth side and resumed his work. The torch bit into the plating and as the cut neared its end, the large square of iron sheathing started to sag down into the water-filled room below. Only a foot of metal remained unburned; as inch by inch this vanished, the plate sagged more and more, leaving a gradually increasing black hole in the bulkhead. Martin glimpsed it through the top of his faceplate but kept his gaze riveted to the flame which he was guiding until there remained only half an inch of iron; then the plate suddenly dropped, tore away the remaining metal, and fell with a metallic ring into the dark room below.

  Martin shut off his valves. The flame went out, leaving only the diffused light from his lamp several feet away. He crawled carefully round the hole he had cut, to the lamp, picked it up and started to train it into the opening.

  In the sudden quiet which followed the banging of the torch, he heard a faraway call in the earphones strapped over his head.

  “Hello, Frank!” He shut off his air.

  “Hello!” he shouted.

  “Your time’s up! Are you done?” asked Carroll.

  “Yes!” answered Martin. “Lemme stay down a few minutes more, Captain, I’m just going into the strong-room!”

  “Nothing doing. Stand by to come up!” ordered the skipper, and to make sure that Martin understood he said to the tender:

  “Give him ‘four’!”

  The tender jerked the signal on the air-hose; Martin, stretched out inside the Santa Cruz, gripped his line and answered it. Regretfully he cast one look into the black water in the gap he had cut, then gripped his torch and the lamp, and, as his tender above slowly hauled in the slack on his lines, he crawled out to the descending-line and was hauled up to the stage.

  Work ceased for the day when Martin finally was swung in over the side and undressed. Three men had been down.

  The ship quivered with excitement. The way to the treasure room was clear at last, the weather was calm, the day only half gone, and yet they lay idly on the surface.

  Leaning over the rail, gazing at the placid ocean broken only by the gently heaving mooring-buoys round them, Bob pleaded earnestly
with the captain for a chance to go down.

  “I’ve practised with the rig, Captain, until I can find every part of it in my sleep; and you know I’ve been over the side on the stage when the other boys weren’t down and I’m accustomed now to being under water. Come on, skipper, be a sport!”

  Carroll shook his head. “The pressure’d get you, Bob; and even if it didn’t I couldn’t let you go roaming round in all that wreckage. It isn’t necessary; we’ll get in tomorrow. I know you’re all right in a diving-rig; if the water weren’t too deep, I’d let you take a walk on the bottom, but a wreck’s different and deep water is another thing. We’ve been here two months now. Hang on another day. You want to see Boston again, don’t you?”

  “I’d trade my chance of ever seeing Boston again for one look at the Santa Cruz!” said Bob ruefully. “Just think, I’m only thirty fathoms from it.” He leaned restlessly over the rail and stared into the sea as if trying to penetrate the depths.

  “Cheer up, old man.” Carroll placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “I’m a qualified diver myself, and I’d give a year’s pay to get down on the poop of that old galleon, but I’m never going to see her. I’ve got to stay on the top side for the safety of the ship; I’ve got to keep you here for your uncle’s sake. You’ve done a lot on deck, Bob, to help out. You’ll have to be content with that.”

  The day dragged slowly on. A few miles to the westward, El Morro Island, wreathed with a fine white line of surf, broke the horizon. Everywhere else, nothing marred the sharp line where sky met sea. Eight weeks had passed since they arrived; no sail had ever come in view. The Lapwing, the mooring-buoys, the little island to the westward were all they ever saw to break the endless monotony of the ocean. Now the end was in sight, and all hands waited eagerly.

  Morning came. Clark was dressed, armed with a lamp, a heavy canvas sack, and a manila line. He swung overboard, sank in a swirl of bubbles while his lifelines and the extra line he carried ran swiftly out over the side.