Cleveland Moffett - Careers of Danger and Daring

"This will show you," said the expert, "what a diver has to contend with at the bottom of a river. He often sinks four or five feet in the mud, just as those bags sink, and sometimes the mud suction holds him down so hard that three men pulling on the life-line can scarcely budge him. And when the mud lets go the diver comes out of it like a cork from a bottle. You can feel him flop over, clean tuckered out with kicking and working his arms. They let him lie there a minute or two to rest, and then pull him up. Why, vessels will sink ten or twelve feet in the mud, so that the diver has to take a hose down, and wash a tunnel out below the keel, to get a lifting-chain under."

"Wash a tunnel out?" I inquired.

"That's what they do. You know how you can bore a hole in a sand-bank, don't you, with a stream of water? Well, it's just the same with a mud-bank down below, only you need more pressure. Sometimes we use a stream of compressed air. The diver steers the hose just as a fireman steers the fire-hose, and once in a while gets knocked over by the force of it, just as a fireman does."

Tunneling mud-banks under water, with streams of water or streams of compressed air, struck me as decidedly a novelty. I was to hear of stranger things ere long.

My guide presently pointed out a splendidly built young man who was shoveling mud off the deck, not far from us.

"There," said he, "is a case that illustrates the worst of this business. That fellow is made to be a diver; he's intelligent, he's not afraid, and he can stand having the suit on; he's been down two or three times and done easy jobs of patching. If he'd keep straight for a year or two, he could earn his ten dollars a day with the best of them. But he won't keep straight. The poor fellow drinks. We can't depend on him. And here he is, shoveling mud for a dollar and a quarter a day, and no steady work at that."

Ten dollars a day seemed a handsome wage, and I asked if divers generally earn so much.

"Good ones do, and a diver's day is only four hours' long, or less when they go to great depths. And they draw a salary besides, and often receive handsome presents. You ought to see our chief diver, Bill Atkinson; he lives in a brownstone house." He paused a moment, and then added: "But I guess they earn all they get."

A few days later I made Mr. Atkinson's acquaintance on board the steam-pump Dunderberg , then busy raising a coal-barge sunk off Fourteenth Street in the East River.

Atkinson was down doing carpenter-work on holes stove in her, and I stood on deck beside the man "tending" him, and watched the bubbles boil up from the diver's breathing, and the signals on a rubber hose and a rope. It was less air or more air, by jerks on the hose. It was rags for a leak, or a heavier hammer, or a piece of batten so-and-so long, with nails ready driven at the corners – all were indicated by pulls on the life-line or the startling appearance of hands or fingers (Atkinson's), that would now and then reach above water and move impatiently. The wreck was only five or six feet under, and the diver's helmet showed like the back of a big turtle whenever he stood up straight on the sunken deck.

Suddenly there is a scurry of barefoot youths along the pier timbers. The diver is coming up. Now he lifts himself slowly under the crushing weight, one short step at a time up the ladder. No man at all is this, but a dripping three-eyed monster of rubber and brass, infinitely fascinating to wharf loungers. The "tender" twists off the face-glass, and Atkinson says something with a snap in it, and explains what he is trying to do at the forward hatch. Then he leans over the rail on his stomach and rests. Then he goes down again.

"He's the best-natured man I know, Bill is," remarked Captain Taylor, commander of the Dunderberg; "but all men get irritable under water. Why, I've had men who wouldn't swear for the world up in the air tell me they rip out cuss words something terrible down on the bottom. Just seems like they can't help it."

I noticed that the tender did not join in our talk, but stood with hands on his lines and eyes on the water, absorbed in his responsibility; he looked like an angler about to land a big fish. Neither did the men at the air-pump talk. This feeding breath to a diver is serious business.

"How long would he live, do you think," I asked, "if the pump should stop?"

"Mebbe a minute, mebbe two," said Captain Taylor. "I knew a Norwegian who was down in fifty feet of water when the hose busted. It busted on deck, where the tender heard it, and he started to lift, right away. It couldn't have been over a minute before they had him up, but he was so near dead the doctors worked three hours on him before he came around. That'll give you an idea of how far gone he was."

The captain told of other desperate chances faced by divers in his experience: of a hose and life-line fouled in a wreck; of an escape-valve frozen shut, in winter-time, by the diver's congealed breath; of a helmet smashed through by a load of pig-iron falling from its sling; of a diver dragged off a wreck by a drifting pontoon – such a record of thrilling escapes and tragedies as any wrecking-master could run over. One realized why insurance companies refuse to take risks on divers' lives, and why the diver's pay is large.

Before long Atkinson came up again, and announced that everything was ready, holes stopped and suction length in place. Two men helped undress him, while the others set the big eight-inch pipe to pumping out the wreck, and soon it was spurting a thick stream over her side like a fire-tower.

Presently the dinner-bell rang from a tiny cabin below, and I had the honor of breaking bread with the crew of the Dunderberg and two of the company's stanchest divers, Atkinson and Timmans, both small, thin men with wrinkled faces, both the heroes of many adventures. Here was indeed a chance to find out things!

One of my first questions turned upon the effect of diving on a man's hearing. Was it true, as I had read, that divers often have one or both of their ear-drums ruptured by the water-pressure?

Both men thought not; most divers of their acquaintance had good hearing.

"Diving often kills a man straight out," said Timmans; "but, aside from that, I don't think it injures his health. Ain't that 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."