There are novel difficulties as well as dangers to be encountered. The native courage of the man must be tempered, ground and polished. On land it is the massing of numbers that accomplishes the result—the accumulation of vital forces and intelligence upon the objective point. The innumerable threads of individual enterprise, like the twist of a Manton barrel, give the toughest tensile power. Under the sea, however, it is often the strength of the single thread, the wit of the individual pitted against the solid impregnability of the elements, the vis inertiae of the sea. It looks as if uneducated Nature built her rude fastnesses and rocky battlements with a special I view to resistance, making the fickle and I unstable her strongest barricade. An example of the skill and address necessary to conquer obstacles of the latter kind was illustrated in Mobile Bay. There lay about a sunken vessel an impenetrable mail of quicksand. It became necessary to sink piles into this material. The obstacle does not lie in its fickle, unstable character, but its elastic tension. It swallows a nail or a beam by slow, serpent-like deglutition. It is hungry, insatiable, impenetrable. Try to force it, to drive down a pile by direct force: it resists. The mallet is struck back by reverberating elasticity with an equal force, and the huge pointed stake rebounds. Brute force beats and beats in vain. The fickle sand will not be driven—no, not an inch.
Wit comes in where weight breaks down. A force-pump, a common old-style fire-engine, was rigged up, the nozzle and hose bound to a huge pile,
to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great ammiral, were but a wand.
The pump was set to work. The water tore through the nostril-pipe, boring a hole with such rapidity that the tall beam dropped into the socket with startling suddenness. Still breathing torrents, the pipe was withdrawn: the clutching sand seized, grappled the stake. It is cemented in.
You may break, you may shatter the stake, if you will,
but—you can never pull it out.
Perhaps the most singular and venturesome exploit ever performed in submarine diving was that of searching the sunken monitor Milwaukee during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor. This sea-going fortress was a huge double-turreted monitor, with a ponderous, crushing projectile force in her. Her battery of four fifteen-inch guns, and the tough, insensible solidity of her huge wrought-iron turrets and heavy plated hulk, burdened the sleepy waters of the bay. Upon a time she braced her iron jacket about her, girded her huge sides with fifteen-inch pistolry, and went rolling her clumsy volume down the bay to mash Fort Taylor to rubbish and débacle. The sea staggered under her ponderous gliding and groaned about her massive bulk as she wended her awkward course toward the bay-shore over against the fort. She sighted her blunderbusses, and, rolling, grunting, wheezing in her revolving towers like a Falstaff ill at ease, spat her gobbets of flame and death. The poor little water-spaniel fort ran down to the shore and barked at her of course. Cui bono or malo? Why, like Job's mates, fill its poor belly with the east wind, or try to draw out leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord thou lettest down? Yet who treads of the fight between invulnerable Achilles and heroic Hector, and admires Achilles? The admiral of the American fleet, sick of the premature pother, signaled the lazy solidity to return. The loathly monster, slowly, like a bull-dog wrenched from his victim, rolled snarling, lazily, leisurely down the bay, not obeying and yet not disobeying the signal.
All along the sunny coast, like flowers springing up in a battle-field, were rows of little white cottages, tenanted by women and children—love, life and peace in the midst of ruin and sudden death. At the offending spectacle of homely peace among its enemies the unglutted monster eased its huge wrath. Tumbling and bursting among the poor little pasteboard shells of cottages, where children played and women gossiped of the war, and prayed for its end, no matter how, fell the huge globes and cones of murder. Shrieks and cries, slain babes and wounded women on shore; surly, half-mutinous officers and crew on that iron hulk, shocked at the fell work they were set to do; and the glimmer and wash of the bay-water below—that sweet, tranquil, half-transparent liquid, with idle weeds and chips upon it, empty crates and boxes of dead merchandise, sacked of their life and substance by the war, as one might swallow an oyster; the soft veils of shadowy ships and the distant city spires; umbrageous fires and slips of shining sand all mirrored in the soft and quiet sea, while this devilish pother went on. There is a buoy adrift! No, it is a sodden cask, perhaps of spoiling meat, while the people in the town yonder are starving; and still the huge iron, gluttonous monster bursts its foam of blood and death, while the surly crew curse and think of mothers and babes at home. Better to look at the bay, the idle, pleasing summer water, with chips and corks and weeds upon it; better to look at the bubbling cask yonder—much better, captain, if you only knew it! But the reluctant, heavy iron turret groans and wheezes on its pivotal round, and it will be a minute or half a minute before the throated hell speaks again. But it will speak: machinery is fatally accurate to time and place. Can nothing stay it, or stop the trembling of those bursting iron spheres among yon pretty print-like homes? No: look at the buoy, wish-wash, rolling lazily, bobbing in the water, a lazy, idle cask, with nothing in the world to do on this day of busy mischief. What hands coopered it in the new West? what farmer filled it? There is the grunting of swine, lowing of cattle, in the look of the staves. But the turret groans and wheezes and goes around, whether you look at it or not. What cottage this time? The soft lap-lap of the water goes on, and the tedious cask gets nearer: it will slide by the counter. You have a curious interest in that. No: it grates under the bow; it—Thunder and wreck and ruin! Has the bay burst open and swallowed us? The huge, invulnerable iron monster—not invulnerable after all—has met its master in the idle cask. It is blind, imprisoned Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. The tough iron plates at the bow are rent and torn and twisted like wet paper. A terrible hole is gashed in the hull. The monster wobbles, rolls, gasps, and drinks huge gulps of water like a wounded man—desperately wounded, and dying in his thirsty veins and arteries. The swallowed torrent rushes aft, hissing and quenching the fires; beats against the stern, and comes forward with the rush of that repulse to meet the incoming wave. Into the boats, the water—anywhere but here. She reels again and groans; and then, as a desperate hero dies, she slopes her huge warlike beak at the hostile water and rushes to her own ruin with a surge and convulsion. The victorious sea sweeps over it and hides it, laughing at her work. She will keep it safely. That is the unsung epic of the Milwaukee, without which I should have little to say of the submarine diving during the bay-fight.