“Slack away the wreck rope!”
“Aye, aye!” cried the man. And it was done. Then the two men waited, expecting to see the diver’s helmet appear above the surface, and ready to haul him aboard.
But there was no sign of Pearce; only something was happening down there, for the man with the lifeline could tell by the pull.
“What’s he up to?” the diver asked, for he knew that it was unusual for a diver to give the signal to come up and then to remain below.
“I don’t know,” was the reply, “but he seems to have gone back into the hold again.”
“Reckon you’re wrong,” said the diver. “The line’s too deep for him to be in the hold. Something’s gone wrong.”
They signalled down to Pearce again and again, but getting no answer began to haul away at the hoisting tackle.
After an anxious time of straining at the ropes, they succeeded in bringing the diver to the surface, hauled him into the cutter, unscrewed his helmet and—thought him dead. Applying artificial respiration immediately in the hope of his being alive, and forcing brandy between the clenched teeth, they were fortunate enough to bring Pearce round; and then the mystery was explained. The signal man had made a mistake; he had called “Slack away!” when he should not have done, with the result that the diver had slipped from the deck of the sunken Mindora, to fall heavily on the floor of the ocean, cutting his air supply and knocking himself unconscious. A few moments more down there, with the air supply cut off, and he would inevitably have died of suffocation.
This was by no means the only adventure that befel Pearce in the course of his work in the depths, and although the following incident took place in a river, and not at sea, it may be included in this record. He was at work on the s.s. London, which had sunk in the Tay, and his task was to attach the bales of cotton with which she was laden to the large drag hooks which men in the vessel above were letting down to him. What made the job a ticklish one was the fact that the water was thick, and, as he himself said, “I had to do all my work by feeling!”
It is easy to imagine that Pearce found it very hard to manipulate the drag hook which, after hauling a bale up, would descend to him again, perhaps narrowly missing knocking him on the helmet, to the danger of the glass front, which, breaking, would mean death. However, this did not happen; instead, after he had fixed the four-pronged hook in a bale it slipped, and in doing so, and before Pearce could jump aside, caught him in the palm of his hand. The winches above, of course, were hauling away at the chain which, going up, carried Pearce with it, and soon he found himself in intense agony on the upper deck of the London. By good luck he managed to wrench the hook out of his palm just then, and the chain went upwards without a load, and the men above believed that the bale had slipped as it was being hoisted. They little knew what kind of a load it had had on it—a human load! Once free of the hook Pearce, suffering severely, and feeling faint from loss of blood, gave the signal to be hauled up, and in a short time was on the surface. The men in the lighter quickly attended to him, and they found that his palm had been torn completely open, and that the hook had penetrated the third finger. That accident cost Pearce three months’ work, and for a long time he despaired of ever being able to use the hand again.