right, Bill?"
Atkinson nodded. He had observed that divers almost never take cold or have trouble with their lungs, although they are constantly exposed to all weathers, and often live and sleep in wet clothes for days and nights. As a young man, he himself had been a bookkeeper, in delicate health. People thought he had consumption. So he gave up bookkeeping and, by accident, became a diver. He had never had a sick day since, and he had worn the suit now for twenty-nine years.
"About a man's ears," said he; "there's no doubt you get a pressure in 'em when you go down, and the pressure gets harder and harder the deeper you go, that is, until your ears crack."
"Crack?" said I.
"Well, that's what we call it, but I don't suppose anything really cracks. After you get down, say, thirty feet, your ears hurt a good deal, especially if by chance you have a little cold; and you keep opening your mouth and swallering to make the crack come, and the first thing you know, you hear a sound inside your head like striking a match; that's the crack, and then you can go on down as far as you please, and you won't feel any more pain in your ears until you're coming up again; then you get a reverse crack. They say it's the air working in and out of your head. I don't know what it is, but I know some men's ears won't crack, and those men can't never make divers."
"How deep can a diver go down?" I inquired.
The company smiled at this, and turned to Atkinson, who smiled back, and then referred modestly to one of the deepest dives on record, one hundred and fifty feet, made by himself some years before up the Hudson. He had a pressure of six atmospheres on him at that depth, and could stay down only twenty minutes. "I'll tell you about that some other day," said he. "It's pretty near time now for me to be sweeping up this coal."
Then, answering my look of surprise at the word "sweeping," he explained how they lessen the weight of a sunken barge by first pumping out the water in her, and then pumping out the coal. The same suction-pipe does both, and will discharge thirty-five or forty tons of coal an hour, on a chute which holds the coal while the water streams through. During this operation the diver is down in the barge, moving the suction-end back and forth, up and down—the "sweeping" in question—until no more coal is left for its hungry mouth.
"We pump grain out of wrecks in the same way," said Atkinson, "tons and tons of it! and they dry it in ovens and sell it. A man must look sharp, though, and not get himself caught. We had a diver—he was new at the business—who got his knee against the suction-pipe one day while he was pumping coal, and it held him as if he was nailed there. He was so scared he tore himself loose; but he had to rip a piece out of his suit to do it. He stayed down, though, just the same."
DIVER STANDING ON SUNKEN COAL BARGE.
"What!—with a hole in his suit?"
"That doesn't matter, as long as it's only in the leg. You see, the air in the helmet presses down hard enough to keep the water below a man's neck. But he mustn't bend over so as to let his helmet get lower than the hole."
"I should say not!" put in Timmans.
"Why, what would happen if he did?"
"He'd be killed quicker than you can wink. The air from the helmet would rush out at the hole, and he'd be crushed by the weight of the water."
I don't know whether Mr. Atkinson realized the full truth of his words, but I found, on consulting the authorities, that a diver's body at thirty-two feet is subjected to a pressure of water amounting to forty tons, at sixty-four feet to eighty tons, at ninety-six feet to one hundred and twenty tons, etc. And it is only the great counter-pressure in the helmet of air from the air-pump that enables the diver to endure this otherwise deadly weight. It follows that the deeper a diver goes, the harder work it is for the air-pump men to drive air down to him; and at great depths as many as four men are sometimes needed at the pump to conquer the water resistance and keep open the escape-valve (for air breathed out) at the helmet-top.
Here ended this day's talk, for the coal would wait no longer; Atkinson must go down again to his "sweeping". But there were other days for me aboard the Dunderberg—other glimpses into these brave, simple lives. Think what these fellows do! Here is a huge, helpless vessel at the bottom of a bay, with the tide tearing her to pieces, and down into the depths comes a queer little man, as big as one of her anchor-points, and stands beside her in the mud, and feels her over, and decides how he will save her; and then does it—does it all alone. And what he does is never the same as anything he has done before; for each wreck is a new problem, each job of submarine patching has its own difficulties and dangers. Oh, bored folk, idle folk, go to the wreckers, say I, if you want a new sensation; watch the big pontoons put forth their strength, watch the divers, and (if you can) set the crew of the Dunderberg to telling stories.
II.
A Visit to the Burying-Ground of Wrecks
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.
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