I was pondering the question of how we were going to avoid the danger of being betrayed by the fishermen without endangering their lives, which I did not want to do. I thought this over for a moment. Suddenly I struck my forehead with my hand and laughed.
“So stupidly foolish! One is never able to think of the simplest way!” I said. “We’ll simply shift the entire crowd to one of the sailing-ships. With this light breeze, it will take them at least three days to reach the coast and, after that, it does not matter. It will be a little crowded for so many people, but that can’t be helped.”
“And the provisions?” Gröning asked. “What are they going to live on?”
“That’s simple,” I answered. “First of all they can take off all the provisions from the steamer and, besides that, they have all the fish in the sailing-ship.”
I sank the smaller of the two sailboats and then approached the steamer which had taken aboard the crews from the other boats.
The captain of the steamer was bitterly disappointed, of course, when I brought him word that all hands would have to go to the sailboat. He had been so delighted to be the one chosen to keep his steamer. On the other hand, to the captain of the sailing-ship, the message that he could go back to his old, faithful smack came as a gift from heaven.
Yes, indeed, joy and sorrow lie close together and go hand in hand.
After a short half hour the shift was made, and the steamer also went down into the deep—the fifteenth ship within two hours. First the skipper carefully hauled up his nets and then with flapping sails slowly swung around and laid his course toward the west.
During the night we dropped down to the bottom of the ocean at X——. We wanted to get some rest for one night and gather strength for the next day. It is comfortable to lie in the soft sands of the North Sea. It is as if the whole boat went to bed. One thing necessary for this comfort was a calm surface, because a heavy sea is felt at a great depth and throws and bangs the boat back and forth on the bottom.
Slowly the boat slipped deeper and deeper. We had taken soundings before submerging. The nearer we came to the bottom the slower the dynamo motors worked, and I at last stopped them entirely when we were a few meters from the bottom. As soon as we had stopped sinking, which could be told by the fact the diving rudder was no longer working, a few liters of water were pumped into a ballast tank made for just this purpose. The boat became heavier and slowly sunk further.