Almost all the submarine work on the Atlantic coast is done by divers living in New York or Boston. There are about as many skilled divers in Boston as New York—perhaps twenty in each city. The pay of a skilled diver is five dollars a day of four hours or less. In that time a man may descend half a dozen times, or he may descend once and stay four hours, but be his period of labor long or short, it counts as a day. If at the end of four hours he descends again that descent counts as another day's labor. The diver's assistant receives three dollars. He is a skilled man, whose business it is to manage the life-line and the hose, and who sometimes becomes a diver. The pumpers, who run the pump that keeps the diver supplied with air, are each paid two dollars a day. They are not skilled workmen and seldom develop into divers.
Probably a third of the New York divers do not work for wages. These are men who own their outfits and prefer to work by the job. Some of the self-employing divers enjoy good incomes from their labors. As a rule, a diver of this class goes down, looks at a sunken vessel, and then states what he will charge to raise her. Diver Victor Hinston was paid $150 a day for locating the sunken steamship City of Chester, and Captain Anthony Williams, having raised the schooner Dauntless in two days, received $750 for his time and trouble. The same diver, having repaired with iron plates and raised in four days the steamer Meredith, ashore near Jeremie, in Hayti, demanded and was paid $7,500 for his work. The divers of New York live much as other citizens of the metropolis. A majority of them are native Americans, with homes, wives and children. They are, of course, absent from home a great deal and on short notice, for divers from New York are not only sent all over the eastern coast of the continent, but even to the Great Lakes and the interior rivers, most of their work lying beyond the city.
Abram Onderdonk, when he died not long ago, was the oldest deep-sea diver in this country. During forty of the nearly seventy years of his life he was continuously engaged in the pursuit of his calling, and it carried him to nearly every part of the globe. Captain Abe, as his friends called him, counted the swordfish as the gravest danger members of his craft have to fear. This fish, which has a short bony sword almost as strong as steel, protruding from its head, speeds along through the water, charging dead ahead and never veering from its course for anything save a rocky ledge or the iron hull of a steamship. If it strikes a wooden craft, its sword seldom fails to cut clean through the vessel's side. Should a man be attacked by it certain death awaits him. Diver Onderdonk himself never encountered but one of these creatures, and that was a young one whose sword had not yet hardened. He was at work on the deck of a sunken vessel, when he saw the fish coming from a distance, and heading straight toward him. He took a tighter grip upon the ax which he held in his hand, and made ready for attack, but, to his surprise and relief, the fish, never swerving from its course, glided past him out of his guard's range, and a moment later disappeared.
Captain Abe often encountered sharks under water, but declared that, as a rule, there is little to be feared from them. A former mate of his named March, however, once had an ugly experience with these creatures. The diver in question was at work in a wreck which had been loaded with live cattle. When she had been at the bottom for a month or so the cattle became light and began rising to the surface. The locality was infested with sharks, which quickly gathered round the hatchway, seizing the carcasses as they came out and following them to the surface. Some of the cattle had been tied, and these floating out to their ropes' end, were torn to pieces by the sharks, which soon began to fight among themselves, with the diver an unwilling witness to their struggles. March, hesitating to ascend for fear he might be attacked, and afraid to remain below lest the snap of a shark's mouth should sever his air hose, in the end gave the signal to be hauled up, and the next instant was jerked into and through the school of sharks. He came out of the water maimed for life, as in his upward passage a shark snapped at him and took off his right hand, thus rendering him incapable of further service as a diver.
Another of Captain Abe's old mates, McGavern by name, while at work in New Zealand waters, had an equally harrowing, although fortunately less harmful, encounter with that most formidable of all marine monsters, the devil fish. The diver was laying some wharf-blocks when suddenly surprised by his uncanny foe. Despite his struggles—and he was a giant in stature and strength—the monster quickly and completely overpowered him. He was locked in the tremendous claws of the devil fish, and fastened helpless against a submerged spile. McGavern realized his peril, and kept quiet until his assailant, whose arms measured nearly nine feet, loosened his hold. Then he signalled to be drawn up, and came to the surface with the writhing creature still clinging to his back.
Captain Abe served before the mast in his youth, and I find that, other things being equal, sailors make the best divers of all. Their former experience is apt to render them cool and quick-witted in the presence of danger, and their knowledge of a ship's rigging and construction proves of untold value to them in their work. To his training as a sailor Captain Charles Smith, a well-known Boston diver, probably owed his truly marvelous escape from death when overtaken by accident while at work on the sunken hull of the Clara Post, in the harbor of Bridgeport, Conn., a few years ago. The wreck lay sixteen fathoms deep, and when Captain Smith descended to examine it, he found that the masts had gone by the board, and that the deck had been torn off by the waves, while the cross timbers strewed with the wreckage, hung over the decks and into the hold. Captain Smith began to cut them away, when suddenly the tangled mass shifted and fell part way in the hold, catching him with it and prisoning him as in a vise. The diver could not see far in the deep water in which he was at work, and finding himself pinned in, how he could not tell, he pulled the life-line three times—the signal that his life was in peril. He felt himself rising a few feet; then all the wreckage fell in upon him, pinning him more securely than before. Worse still, when he tried to free himself, he found that the air-pipe had encountered some unseen obstruction, and that to attempt to move about would shut off his supply of air. The peril was one that made each moment seem like eternity.
A DIVER READY TO DESCEND
Meanwhile the diver's assistants were trying to discover what had happened to him. It seemed to them that the signal to haul up had been instantly followed by one to lower, and then by one to stop. The men at the life-line, confused at these apparently contradictory commands, ordered the derrick to haul on the blocks. Nothing yielded to the strain, and the men at the pumps labored until they were exhausted, and had to give way to others, but still no signs of release. A new danger now threatened the imprisoned man. In catching hold of some iron bolts he had cut a small hole in the valve of one of his rubber gloves, and water, filling the glove, was slowly oozing past the clamps at the wrist, and creeping up the arm. It seemed to the helpless diver, held fast in the tide-swept mass, that he would soon be strangled or crushed to death. Confused by the great air pressure in his helmet, he had about concluded that his end had come, when—unlooked for relief—the wreckage gave a lurch, and he found that he could climb up to one of the deck timbers. He grasped his ax, and was hewing desperately for freedom, when suddenly the whole mass broke away, and began to rise rapidly, carrying the diver, now head downward, with it. His queer ascent did not consume more than ten seconds, but it was long enough for him to live over in memory all the events of a lifetime of two-score years. At first his comrades failed to discover him in the mass of tangled material, and their surprise can be imagined when he shot up through the wreckage, feet first. Captain Smith described this as his closest call to death's door, "and" he added, "I have peeped through the keyhole pretty often."