For the first few days, while the K-16 crept out of the English Channel and into the broad Atlantic, the messages from it were for the main part but routine reports of progress. The submarine was following a northwestern course toward the upper boundary of the Nelsen Deeps, and would, Clinton reported, begin its surveys at once upon reaching that objective. For several days thereafter the K-16's messages to the university station at London gave only its position and progress, and it was not until May 5th that a brief report from the submarine stated that it had reached the desired latitude and was now forging slowly southward on the surface, the expedition's members already busy with their trawls and deck-winches.
For the next three days the messages from the K-16 were reports of the work accomplished with the trawls. In those days, so Clinton reported, no less than a dozen new forms had already been brought up and classified. An entirely new species of the Modiola vulgaris was, he stated, probably the most important of their finds so far, but besides this a half-dozen variations of common malacopterygii and acanthopterygii forms had been obtained and examined. The submarine, Clinton added, was still forging south, working all her trawls, and as yet no descents had been attempted.
On the next day, the 9th, there came a further message in which Clinton reported the bringing up of several other notable variations from classified forms, this time of the dibranchiate and tetrabranchiate cephalopods. He stressed, in this report, the difficulty experienced in using the trawls at the great depths over which the submarine was forging, and added that they had been further hampered by the loss, on the preceding day, of one of their trawls, which, as he said, "was lost in a rather puzzling manner which none of us is able to explain." With this rather ambiguous phrase the message of the 9th concluded, and on the next day no word whatever from the K-16 was received by the university station. Then, late on the morning of the 11th, there came that short and enigmatic message which was to make Clinton and his expedition the center of a sudden storm of speculation and discussion.
The message itself, received just before noon on the 11th, was a quite coherent one, yet seemed at the same time a quite crazy one. It read:
Either we are all mad, or we have made the greatest discovery ever made. One of our trawls has brought up a thing so incredible, so unbelievable, that our minds refuse to credit it though it lies before our eyes. I will not expose this expedition to the derision of the world by telling what we have found until we learn more, and for that reason we are making a descent within the next half-hour which will tell us all. When you hear from us again we shall either have made the greatest discovery ever made by men, or shall know ourselves the victims of some incomprehensible delusion.
Clinton.
Considering that message, it is hardly surprizing that the world found it interesting, and that within the next few hours the newspaper-reading public developed a sudden interest in the scientific expedition of whose existence it had hardly been aware until then. Through the afternoon of the 11th, in a hundred radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic, press-writers and scientists alike crowded into the little receiving-rooms to wait for the first news from Clinton and his expedition. And in the university station at London, Stevens and Clinton's other friends and associates waited tensely for that news.
Through the long afternoon of that long spring day they waited, and the world waited, but still there came no word. Night fell, but a veil of silence had dropped upon the submarine, and when morning came it found Stevens and his friends still waiting in vain by the silent impersonal instruments. Through all that night the calls of a score of stations to the submarine had gone unheeded, and when the morning newspapers gave to the public the first news of the K-16's long silence, they stated openly that some mishap or disaster must have overtaken the submarine. Only young Stevens and his friends remained steadfast in their optimism, and even they began to doubt as the 12th passed and still no message came. By night it was universally believed that the submarine had met disaster, and out on the Atlantic a half-dozen steamers were heading toward the spot where it had last reported its position.
By the morning of the 13th the public was informed through the early editions that the ships rushing to the submarine's aid had been unable to find any trace of it whatever, though they had circled repeatedly over the spot. By that time, too, it was pointed out that the submarine's air-supply would be getting very low, even if it still remained intact beneath the surface. The general opinion, though, by then, was that Clinton in over-confidence had ventured to too great a depth in the submarine, and that it had been crushed by the terrific pressure. Even at the university it was tacitly conceded that this must be the case.