Recovery of ships, their gear and cargo, is no longer wholly an application of practised seamanship. The task is burdened and complicated by powers and conditions that call for auxiliary arts. It is true that the salvage officer's ground, his main asset, is the knowledge and ability to do a seamanlike 'job o' work' when the time and tide are opportune; he must have a seaman's training in the ways of the wind and the sea and be able properly to assess the weather conditions under which alone his precarious work is possible. A scientist of a liberal and versatile type (not perhaps exhaustive in his scope and range), he is able to draw the quantum of his needs from a wide and varied summary. Together with his medical exemplar, he has developed a technique from crude remedies and imperfect diagnoses to application of fine science. He must have a sure knowledge of the anatomy of his great steel patients, be versed in the infinite variety and intricacy of ship construction, and the valves and arteries of their power; be able to pen and plan his formulæ for weight-lifting—the stress and strain of it, down to the calibre of the weakest link. A super-tidesman, he must know to an inch the run of bottom, the swirl and eddy, the value of flood and ebb and springs, for the tide—Canute's immutable recalcitrant—is his greatest assistant, a familiar Genius maris whom he conjures from the deeps of ocean to do his bidding. Shrewd! He is a keen student of the psychology of the distressed mariner; again, like the medical man, he must set himself to extract truth from the tale that is told. His treatment must be prescribed, not to meet a case as presented, but as his skilled knowledge of the probabilities warrants. Tactful, if he is to meet with assistance in his difficult work, he must assume the sympathy of one seaman to another in distress. What, after all, does it matter if he agree heartily that "the touch was very light, we were going dead slow," when, from his divers' reports, he knows that the whole bottom is 'up'?
In the handling of his own men there must be a combination of rigour and reason. Salvage crews are a hardy, tempestuous race who have no ordinary regard for the niceties of law and order; their work is no scheduled and defined occupation with states and margins; they are servants to tide and weather alone; they are embarked on a venture, on a hazard, a lottery. To such men, administering, under his direction, the heroic but destructive remedies of high explosive and compressed air, there cannot be a normal allowance for the economic use of gear and material. He must know the right and judicial discount to be made that will meet the conflicting demands of the expenses department and the results committee. Above all, he must be of an infinite patience, of the mettle that is not readily discouraged. In the great game of seafaring his hand holds the king of disappointment and the knaves of frustration and discouragement. But he has other cards; he holds an ace in stability and determination.
Calm days and smooth seas may lure him to surpassing effort, to work through the tides in feverish energy, making the most of favoured opportunity. The scattered and interrupted work of months has perhaps been geared and bound, the tackle rigged and set for a final dead lift. Buoyancy is figured out and assured; the pumps are in place, throbbing and droning out, throwing steady streams from the weight of water that so long has held the foundered wreck in depth. The work has been long and trying, but an end to difficulty is in sight. Given a day or two of continued fine weather, the sea and the rocks will have to surrender their prisoner.
Comes a darkling to windward and the sea stirs uneasily; jets and spurts of broken water appear over the teeth and spit of rocky ledges. The salvors look around with calculating eyes and note the signs of a weather break. Still, there is no slackening of effort; there may be time to complete the work before the sea rises to interfere; if anything, the omens only call for another spur to the flank, a new sting to the lash.
Beaten to the knees, the gear and tackle swaying perilously in breaking seas, the lifting-barges thundering at their curbs, the pumps groaning and protesting their inability to overcome the lap of blue water, there is no alternative but to abandon the work and return to harbour. From the beach the salvage officer may watch his labour of weeks—or months—savagely undone in an hour or two of storm and fury of the sea!
It is a great catalogue, that schedule of virtues and accomplishments. To it must be added, as a supplement, that he must be a 'made' man—made in a long hard pupilage in a stern school that appraises strictly on results. It is of little use to show that, in theory, a certain course was right and proper, when the broad but damning fact remains that the property is still in Davy Jones his locker, and likely—there to remain. Many are called, but few are chosen. The salvage service has no room for the merely mediocre officer: the right man goes inevitably to his proper place, the wrong one goes back to a junior, and less responsible, post at sea.
It is doubtful if the Naval Service could produce the type required. Their candidate would be, to a degree, inelastic. He would be an excellent theorist, a sound executant, a strict disciplinarian; but his training and ideas would fit ill to the wide range of conflicting interests, and the shutting out of all manœuvre, however skilled and stimulating—but that of securing a maximum of result by a minimum of effort. Perhaps it was for these reasons our salvage services before the war were almost wholly mercantile and commercial. Certainly, most Admiralty efforts in this direction were confined to ports and harbours where method could be ordered and controlled by routine; their more arduous and unmanageable cases on the littoral were frequently handed over to the merchantmen—not seldom after naval efforts had been unavailing. Among the protestations of our good faith to the world in time of peace, it may be cited that we made no serious provision for a succession of maritime casualties; there was no specially organized and equipped Naval Salvage Service. True, there were the harbour gear, divers, a pump or two, and appliances and craft for attending submarine accidents, but their energies were bent largely to humane purposes—to marine first aid. Of major gear and a trained personnel to control equipment and operation there was not even a nucleus. Salvage was valued at a modest section of the "Manual on Seamanship" (written by a mercantile expert), and a very occasional lecture at the Naval College. At war, and the toll of maritime disaster rising, the need grew quickly for expert and special service. There was no longer a relative and profitable balance to be struck between value of sea-property and cost of salvage operations. A ship had become beyond mere money valuation; as well assess the air we breathe in terms of finance. No cost was high if a keel could be added to our mercantile fleets in one minute less than the time the builders would take to construct a new vessel. The call was for competent ship-surgeons who could front-rank our maritime C Threes. By whatever skill and daring and exercise of seamanship, the wrecks must be returned to service. Happily, there was no necessity to go far afield; the merchants' salvage enterprise, like the merchants' ships and the merchants' men, was ready at hand for adoption.
IN A SALVAGE VESSEL: OVERHAULING THE INSULATION OF THE POWER LEADS