With few exceptions, divers take their career in exactly this phlegmatic, matter-of-fact way. I fancy a man of vivid imagination would break under the strain of such a life. Yet often divers will go into great details about some little incident, as when Bean described the hoisting of a certain boiler sunk outside of Sandy Hook. It had been on a tug-boat of such a name, it was so many feet long and wide, and other things about the tide and the steam-derrick, and what the captain said, the point being that this boiler had acted as an enormous trap for the blackfish, of which they had found some hundreds of big ones splashing about inside, unable to escape.
So our talk ran on, and all the time I was thinking how I would like to see these things for myself. And it came to pass, as the subject kept its hold on me, that I did see them. Indeed, I spent a whole summer month—and found zest in it beyond ordinary summer pleasurings—in observing the practical operations of diving and wrecking as they go on in the waters about New York. I discovered other wrecking companies, notably one on West Street, and from the head man here learned many things. He took me out on a pier one day, where one of his crews was rescuing thirty thousand dollars' worth of copper buried under the North River. Every few minutes, with a chunk-chunk of the engine and a rattle of chains, the dredge would bring up a fistful of mud (an iron fist, holding a ton or so) and slap it down on the deck, where a strong hose-stream would wash out little canvas bags of copper ore, each worth a ten-dollar bill in the market.
"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."
"THE DIVER'S HELMET SHOWED LIKE THE BACK OF A BIG TURTLE."