Where the devil was I now, I wondered? What sort of mantrap had I stepped into? I had not walked off the stern of the dock; before I went down, I could still see the floor of the dock stretching away before me in the water. And I had surely not walked unexpectedly into one of those craters blasted in the floor of the dock by exploding bombs—they were certainly all surrounded like a fence with torn steel turned upward like the one I had just seen.
But wherever I was, I was certainly in a hole and an inky black one at that. There was no profit in staying there while I investigated the inside of that cavern; something unpleasant might happen to me in the process.
There were several ways for a diver to escape that hole, but climbing out was not one of them, since my fingers, clawing about in the dark water, felt nothing within reach. The simplest way out was to be pulled out. Since my lifeline was taut, I couldn’t be sure any signal on it would be felt above. Instead I reached for my slack air hose, seized it, and jerked sharply three times, the signal to haul me up.
In a moment both my lines came taut and I felt myself rising through the water. In another moment, I was up in the light again, clear of that hole, but I did not signal to ’vast heaving. I had already learned enough on that dive; I felt too chafed all over for any eagerness to lengthen it out further. I was quite willing to call it a dive and come up.
So as I came clear I did nothing and the continuing pull on my lines floated me obliquely like a hooked fish on a line through the water towards the side wall till the lines were up and down; after that, I rose vertically towards the surface. For a depth of six fathoms of water, no stops on the way up for decompression to avoid “the bends” were necessary. In another couple of minutes, everybody on the topside who could get a hand on my rig was helping to lift my heavily weighted figure over the gunwale of the dock onto its upper deck, where I promptly sagged down exhausted on the box thrust under my knees.
My helmet was twisted off. I gasped with relief at my first breath of open air, hot though it was, and instantly my wet hands rose to wipe clear of sweat my still wetter eyes.
After I had been undressed and was being rubbed by a towel in the hands of a tender, futilely endeavoring to dry me off, I gathered all the diving party round me for a report.
“It’s the way I thought. The bottom’s torn wide open. The side walls look undamaged, the port side wall anyway. The next man can examine the starboard side wall to make sure. We’ll go ahead on the scheme I laid out, to raise her as a diving bell; the holes in the bottom won’t make any difference. Let’s go.”
In brief, my idea was to convert that blasted dry dock into the equivalent of a huge diving bell, open at the bottom, and raise her solely with compressed air pumped into the side walls which had only to be made airtight on the top and sides. The openings in the bottom made no difference; the compressed air pumped into the tops of both side walls would force the water down steadily and out through those holes in the bottom till enough water had been expelled to make the dock slightly buoyant. After that, it should start to float up, buoyed by the air-filled side walls. The more compressed air we pumped into the side walls, the farther up the dock would rise. It was very simple. All we had to do was to make the undamaged side walls airtight by plugging all openings in them, both top and sides, either in or out of water, and then leave the rest to the big air compressors (which I didn’t have yet).
I dressed again in khaki shorts, put on my sun helmet and dark glasses, and still smarting from the raw spots on my skin, turned to. In a minute or so, everything I had on was completely soaked in sweat.
The next diver was being dressed (against his violent protests, wearing a suit of woolen diving underwear) to examine the starboard side wall and the stern which I had not seen. After he had been warned to beware of unexpected pitfalls in the floor of the dock, everybody else except Bill Reed and two tenders went to work on deck.
The Lord Grey had returned, loaded down with two-inch Italian steel pipe, lumber, and native workmen. All hands started to unload her, part of her cargo going on top the port side wall, the rest to the other side of the dock atop the starboard side wall.
To make my scheme work, a great deal of labor was required, though fortunately most of it could be done above water where labor conditions were normal, if any conditions in Massawa could ever be called that. I should have to lay a compressed air main along the top of each side wall, connect each one of the eight watertight sections in each side wall to that air main, interconnect the port and the starboard air mains across the eighty-foot gap of sea between what little showed on the surface of the side walls, provide air gauges to check the pressure built up in each of sixteen side compartments as the compressed air went in, plug up or seal off every opening of any nature in the tops and sides of both side walls to make them airtight, and finally provide enough big air compressors to expel thousands of tons of water from the dry dock through those holes in its bottom.
There were innumerable small tasks that had to be done also to make the scheme work. The above were the major ones, for which divers were required only for plugging such normal openings, airports, scuppers, and drains, now submerged, as existed in the side walls. Everything else could be done on the surface by ordinary mechanics.
Drinking water service was our first imperative. Arab carpenters hastily knocked together a large wood box to make an impromptu icebox. Into that immediately went several hundred pounds of ice brought out on the Lord Grey and at least two hundred quart bottles of water. A little awning was rigged over the box to protect it from the direct rays of the sun. Three Eritreans were appointed as water boys to rush promptly a bottle of cold water to anyone singing out, “Mai!” (Water!) Each man was provided with his own quota of salt tablets. Those black water boys were always kept on the run.
With the water problem thus disposed of, I went over with Lloyd Williams what else was required of him. I indicated where I wanted the 500-foot long air mains run on each side, where to interconnect them from port to starboard across the water, how he was to run a branch line from the mains to each one of the sixteen dock compartments. I picked out where we would locate the big air compressors (when I got some), and laid out some other work required which I figured would keep Williams and all the men he had, both American and otherwise, busy the rest of that day.
After some further instructions to Bill Reed (who now had his first diver down inspecting the starboard side wall) about locating underwater openings in the side walls with succeeding divers, I piled into the Lord Grey myself to go ashore and get that which was the sine qua non of the whole plan—some big air compressors.
I had no fears about the physical lack of the necessary air compressors in Massawa—there are always air compressors of some kind in every place on earth where there is any machinery at all, or where there has been any road-building. While the Naval Base itself had not a single air compressor, there were, I knew, in Massawa the very air compressors I needed—in fact, the mates to the air compressors I had ordered in America for my salvage work but which had not yet arrived.
For a strange situation existed in Massawa in connection with salvage, which I had learned immediately after my arrival—the British themselves already had a substantial salvage undertaking under way months before I saw the place. It was another one of those “Alice in Wonderland” situations which have to be seen to be believed.
Lying near the docks in the town of Massawa was a huge warehouse stuffed with salvage equipment of all kinds—more salvage gear than I had ever before in my life seen collected in one spot, all of it the property of the British Admiralty. Lying in the commercial harbor of Massawa was a beautiful Danish salvage ship and its Danish salvage crew, a finer ship by far for salvage than any I should ever have, under charter to the British Admiralty. Controlling all this salvage equipment and this Danish salvage ship was a private British company which had a contract (and what a contract!) from the Admiralty for the salvage on a commercial basis of the wrecks ins
ide the commercial harbor only of Massawa, the center harbor of the three at Massawa.
The British company (a firm of shipping agents) which held that salvage contract had never been in the salvage business before; neither had they any equipment for the job, so the Admiralty had generously furnished them with sufficient British equipment at no cost to make any salvage man’s mouth water, and in addition had given them control of its chartered Danish salvage ship and crew.
In explanation of the course of the Admiralty in this case, it must be said that every British concern with salvage experience already had its hands full around the British Isles; I can think of no other reason for giving a salvage, contract to a concern with neither salvage nor engineering experience.
The British company had sent out to Massawa as its Salvage Officer to run this operation, a Captain McCance, presumably a merchant service captain (if one at all), for he certainly was not in the Royal Navy. If anything further was needed to give an opéra bouffe touch to the whole situation, Captain McCance gave it. He knew no more about salvage than the company employing him, and to top off all, he was the very embodiment of the low comedy Englishman, and the butt for the caustic humor of every Royal Navy officer in Massawa. He wore a monocle, the only one in Eritrea. Exceedingly affected in his manner and his speech, he signed all his letters (written always in a bizarre green ink) “Younger Brother of Trinity House,” which dubious claim to distinction never failed to draw a raucous laugh from the British naval staff in the port. Had he been put on any American stage just as he was as a burlesque Englishman, the dramatic critics would have denounced him as a caricature too grotesque for belief.
As little like a seaman as can be imagined, he was never dressed other than in perfectly laundered whites—white shoes, white socks, white shorts, white shirt, white sun helmet—that rig on a salvage officer, especially when topped off with a monocle, was enough to make any real salvage man accustomed to work in the muck and filth of wrecks, doubt the evidence of his own eyes. Most of his time, probably six days out of seven on the average, he spent in Asmara where it was cool, seventy miles away from and 7500 feet above the wrecks in hot Massawa that he was supposed to be salvaging. The seventh day, very careful not to soil his lovely white clothes, he came to Massawa to examine languidly through his monocle the progress on the wrecks his men were working on—that the progress was negligible went, of course, without saying.
To make matters worse, he refused to use on either of the two wrecks he was engaged on, the solitary capable group he had, the Danish salvage ship and her crew, leaving her lie idle month after month in the harbor, useless to anybody, useless to the war effort, while her men ate their hearts out in bitterness, looking at all the wrecks about them. I swore every time I thought of that idle ship, till finally some months later, the Admiralty sent her elsewhere.
The two jobs McCance had his men on, the huge floating crane sunk alongside the main Massawa wharf and the Italian combination passenger ship and freighter, the Gera, scuttled in the middle of the commercial harbor, they had been busy with since the previous December, when it was reported to London they were making excellent progress. It was now May, but neither of his two wrecks showed any signs yet of coming up. In about six months, McCance and his men (quite a sizable civilian force) had raised exactly nothing. I judged that in his incompetent ignorance, he was botching both jobs, at the expense of the British Admiralty which was standing all the costs.
I sensed immediately after my arrival in Massawa that I was not welcome on board either of McCance’s salvage jobs. I learned from some of his men whom on the quay in Massawa I had asked a casual question as to how they were getting along with the sunken crane, that they had all been warned to give me no information. So since that moment, Captain McCance and I had gone separate ways—not a difficult matter since most of his time was being spent in Asmara.
Now I had observed, on one of my few inspection jaunts about the town of Massawa, through the open doors of his warehouse all the unused salvage gear the British Admiralty had placed at Captain McCance’s disposal—in particular two large Ingersoll-Rand air compressors which were just what I needed for the salvage job on the large Italian dry dock. I had not entered the warehouse—I had no desire to give McCance the opportunity of accusing me of trespassing on his domain—but even from the doors I couldn’t miss a good view of those two big air compressors, shining in glossy paint, apparently new and unused. I had never mentioned those heaven-sent compressors or my need of them to anyone before; I preferred to wait till my own inspection of the sunken dry dock showed the job could be done the way I had hoped. But now I knew.
Immediately I had disembarked from the Lord Grey, I went to my near-by office. Austin Byrne, my master mechanic, and Commander Davy, liaison officer, looking out over the naval harbor, were scanning through binoculars the motley crew of men now swarming over the top of the sunken dock. Both of them turned questioning eyes on me the moment I entered. I tossed aside my sun helmet and my sun glasses and, looking very much like a beachcomber, sank wearily into my chair. Mrs. Maton looked me over sharply, then went immediately for a glass of ice water. I swallowed a salt tablet, guzzled the ice water, and thanked her heartily. Mrs. Maton went to the cooler to refill the glass.
“Commander,” I said to Davy while I swabbed the sweat off my grimy face, “you can send a wireless to the C.-in-C., Alex, with a copy to the Admiralty in London, reporting that this day salvage operations on the large Italian dry dock have commenced.” I paused, seized the second glass of water, and gulped that also. Mrs. Maton went for a third one, and Commander Davy, thinking that was all, with a respectful, “Aye, aye, sir,” started for the door.
“Wait a minute, Davy,” I sang out after him, “there’s lots more.” He came back, regarded me quizzically. “Look, Commander, now’s your chance to do some real liaison work. I need a couple of big Ingersoll-Rand air compressors for that salvage job. Now your Royal Navy owns a pair right in this town, some big 210 cubic feet a minute air compressors, just what I need, only they are in the hands of Captain McCance in his salvage warehouse over in Massawa. He’s not using them at present, it’s doubtful if he ever will, but you know McCance. He’s like some other—” I paused suddenly, considering the rest of my intended remark undiplomatic, for I had meant to say “Englishmen around here,” meaning the Cable and Wireless outfit who were clinging like grim death to title to Building 108. “He’s, you know, a regular dog-in-the-manger over everything he gets his hands on,” I concluded instead.
“Now, Commander, let’s see how good a liaison officer you are. Maybe you can fix it through Captain Lucas, but if you can’t, keep going right on up the line to the First Lord of the Admiralty himself in London, if necessary. I want those two big Ingersoll-Rand babies out of McCance’s warehouse for as long as I need them on this salvage job, and I want them loaded aboard that Danish salvage ship he’s got lying around doing nothing, so she can steam over and land those compressors with her salvage boom on top of our sunken dry dock just where I want them. And I want them landed there by Tuesday morning, that’s tomorrow, at the very latest. That is all, Davy. You get me those two compressors and you’ll have done more for your country than you’ve had a chance to do since you kept the Queen Elizabeth from sinking when the Eyties mined her.”
Commander Davy blushed a bit at this reference to his heroism (for which King George had decorated him) but all he said was a very serious “Aye, aye, sir,” and departed on his tasks.
I turned to my master mechanic.
“Byrne,” I informed him, “all the air compressors we can get won’t be any too many for this job—that dry dock is going to take lots of air before she comes up. You get on the telephone to Asmara and see what you can do with Colonel Claterbos in getting me all the air compressors the Army can lay its hands on in Eritrea. There ought to be some Eytie compressors around this country the Army can commandeer. I want them in Massawa tonight so they can go out on that Danish salvage
ship tomorrow morning along with those two Ingersoll-Rands Davy is going to finesse for us from McCance.”
“Aye, aye, skipper; leave it to me,” replied Byrne. “If they’re in Eritrea, you’ll have ’em.” He seized the telephone and went to work to get Asmara; a harder task, I felt, than getting the air compressors. By now I was firmly convinced the best way to solve the long distance telephone communication problem in Eritrea was to shoot half the Italian operators out of hand, put the other half in a concentration camp, and then take an automobile for Asmara whenever a discussion was necessary.
“You can tell anyone who comes in, Mrs. Maton, that I’ve gone to my quarters for a shower. After that, I’m going to see Dr. Plummer for some ointment for my hide—I feel as if I’d been flayed. I’ll be back here in about an hour,” and I went out to collect my Italian chauffeur for the ride to Building 108.
When I got back an hour later, feeling a little better for the shower bath and the skin lotions which had been liberally applied all over me, Byrne, his soaked shirt clinging tightly to his back, was expostulating with some Italian somewhere in Eritrea to whom he didn’t wish to speak but with whom he had suddenly found himself talking nevertheless. He started jiggling the telephone switch.
“I just lost Colonel Claterbos again,” he muttered grimly, “but I’ll get him once more if it’s the last thing I do on earth. If I ever get back where I can use American Tel. and Tel. again, I’m going to kiss everybody in the company from the President down, on both cheeks, I’ll be that glad to- Hello, Colonel Claterbos? Thank God! When did you say you would load those compressors, Colonel?”
Under the Red Sea Sun Page 23
