The dream of flight exists in each newborn. From time to time the dream finds a dreamer who can image it in ways more specific. Hence Leonardo, whose sketches for a flying machine provide in enchantment what they lack in practicality.
But the dream of submersion is equally strong, equally pervasive. It was captured in a net of ink and paper, perhaps for the first time, by a nameless Mussulman in Gwalior: a man who had been born and died without ever having seen the ocean.
The man from Gwalior died but the dream did not. The submersion machine found its next dreamer in Archimedes, who envisioned both a craft and that craft’s propulsion by means of the spiral water screw. The dream left Archimedes, moved on, gathering force and detail as it went. During the siege of Tyre, Alexander the Great descended below the Mediterranean in “a very fine barrel made entirely of white glass.” The dream passed through Bourne, Drebbel, and Mersenne; through Borelli, Papin, and Bushnell; through the American Robert Fulton. Through me, most certainly, when I was on the boat that took me from my parents’ land across the sea to England. Six weeks above the waves, which time I passed by imagining six weeks beneath them.
Most recently the dream first glimpsed in Gwalior possessed a Bombay shipbuilder, H. Lal, who in opiated reverie saw it in fine specificity. I woke him from that reverie as if I were the person from Porlock but he remembered enough of it to sketch it down. I fear there was more in his head, but it scattered as images on the surface of a pond into which a stone has been cast. Hence I summoned Mr. Brunel: to ink in the lacunae left blank by the abruptness of H. Lal’s awakening.
The dream first glimpsed in Gwalior is wrapped around us. It was made of aether and now, thanks to much labor, of thick metal plates. But neither I nor anyone who lives and dies can be said to own the dream.
If we perish, if the craft implode, we will have been a link in a chain. And the next dreamer, in Reykjavík or Samarqand, will glimpse a vessel faster, sleeker, more robust: a vessel that will be, for its century, what this one is for ours. The chain cannot be broken; our place upon that chain is not for us to decide. Hence I say, with oceanic calm: full rudder down.
THIRTEEN
BEFORE THE DAMP rag of sleep is passed over the slate board of memory, I wish to set down in this Hawkins journal an account of the Neptune as its possessed and accursèd captain did give the order to descend.
Mr. Singh and I stared through the iris’d window. Outside of us were walls of ice, throwing back in wild iridescence the arclight that Neptune hurled at them. A green almost indigo in its intensity, a blue more deep hued, a yellow more intense, a salmon so pink that it rends the heart. The colors became for me sounds as if the play of light were the play of fingers on the keyboard of a Cavaillé-Coll organ. Thus the ice sang to me, each color accompanied by its synaesthetic tone. What symphonies resided in that refraction! What grand musical narratives, heard now by eye and ear! Whether this be due to the wildly increased atmospheric pressure, or the nearness to death, or the Mesmeric effect of the play of colors, can not be ascertained.
I was not dreaming—but now, with a grand shudder, found myself awakened! There was a terrible low scream of metal against ice, a bursting high-orange scraping sound, the yellow of ammonia high in the nostrils. I could hear screams through the speaking tube and, distant, from the other side of the bulkhead. Something had been breached.
I looked up to the captain but he was not there. He was already through the hatch, moving toward the back of the craft even as it continued its forward motion. I followed.
The sound became louder as we moved sternward. Water, rushing, not a drip but something more continuous. My feet and trousers were wet, water well over my ankles. Ahead was the captain, traversing, with long strides, the chart room, the dining hall, the crew’s quarters.
Through the next bulkhead and the water was deeper still. This was the engine room. A half-dozen men at a half-dozen pumps forcing the water out. They pushed and pulled, bent and straightened, each 30 degrees out of phase with the next, pumping seawater back out into the sea as if they were pistons in a giant Otto engine. I found myself captivated by their taut, synchronous ballet mécanique.
But then remembered why I was here: I could see the breach. And something more than seepage, further aft. The pumpers were working methodically and well, but the waters coming through exceeded their ability to evacuate them.
“Mister Mohan,” said the captain to his first mate. “Will you go to the machine room? We have need, as you can see, of increasing the air pressure.” His voice was calm and he spoke as if discoursing upon Boyle’s law before some royal academy.
I placed myself between the captain and his mate, and the captain, to his credit, did meet my eye. To him directly I then did say, “Sufficient pressure to force the water from the craft would be more than sufficient to force the air from our lungs. You would have a craft from which the water had been expelled. But also: the life.”
“Then we will put the pressure in one section, the humans in another. Were not these bulkheads devised to contain such pressure?”
I calculated in my head. Then: “We would have to pressure everything from here aft. But we’d lose the capacity to expel ballast. And your engines will full stop under more atmosphere. You would lose all motive power.”
Even as I spoke I registered the use of the second-person pronoun. But there was no time to self-recriminate.
“What if we reversed the ballast pumps?” asked the captain. “That their pressure be directed toward the interior of the craft, not the outside. Would not that expel the water from the aft sections?”
I considered for less than a second. “That it would. But—”
“Done.” The captain did not try to shout over the roar of waters. Rather, he raised and lowered his hands as if conducting an orchestra: with his left, telling the pumpers to halt their work, to walk, in a rapid but orderly fashion, amidships; with his right, telling his first mate Mohan to prepare the hatch.
“The switch. The junction. The one that activates the pumps.”
Mohan spoke with the calm, even tone with which first mates the world round greet disaster. “That switch be aft of the hatch you now presume to close.”
“Would there be no way to route the leads to this side?” asked the captain.
“Had we a day or two.”
The captain looked down at the accumulation of water. The inrush of cold ocean. Then turned his gaze back to Mohan.
“Our time is now,” said the captain. Mohan nodded gravely, as if in full awareness of the impossibility of the choice he had with those four words been assigned.
“I shall, sir,” said Mohan. The ease, near-reflexive, with which he offered up his own life was not lost on me.
“You are needed here,” replied the captain. A long silence followed. Finally Mohan did speak:
“There is a man,” he said, “whom I love more than life itself. But if there is to be one who gives for all he would be the one. He is my cousin and he is your second mate.”
They were both of them now gazing at that second mate: Feringheea, who by countenance and demeanor displayed full recognition of the request about to be uttered. It was not really a request. And at this juncture, did not really have to be uttered.
Feringheea—it was the work of seconds—wrapped his arms around each of his mates, Mohan last. Then without speaking went directly, six long strides, through the aft bulkhead. Turned home the hatchlock, noon to three to six to nine on his side, while before us the wheel spun nine to six to three.
The hatch between us and the Neptune‘s aft was now firmly secured. The hatch rearward—the one that separated Feringheea from the ballast hold and the sea beyond—was about to be opened. E’en at the expense of the life of any who would that hatch open.
Now we saw Mohan slap his flat palm on the hatch door. Once, twice, three times. There was a long, low, hollow peal. A knell. Feringheea, on the other side, did knock back thrice. And even before the last reverberati
on damped out there was another sound: a whoosh unimaginable, a torrent, an expulsion, as the unseen Feringheea brought the ballast pumps to speed.
Without word or thought we rushed all of us at once out of the chamber at full speed, now amidships, now fore-ward toward the salon—to the iris’d window, Neptune‘s umbilicus, giving view. The ice was white, as if glowing from within; the water had astonishing clarity. And as we looked out we saw the perturbance as our ballast—treasure from the Bay of Vigo, as gold has no worth down here save for its weight—rushed out of us and into the sea. It glinted in the eerie and sputtering light, a slow rich dance, a kaleidoscope of poise, of beauty.
And within the billow of gold: the mortal remains of he who had been the second mate but was now but human-sized mass, tumbling random, sinuous amidst the onrush of treasure.
And with this wild expulsion the Neptune lurched its way upward. We looked down now to the panorama below. The ballast, jetting out in smooth, slow convulsions, as a squid expelling ink. Ever more distant as we moved forward, as we rose, heading toward surface, heading toward the Pole, heading toward the collision with ice that would likely kill us all. We all of us gazed, rapt, at the surge and flow of treasure. Second mate Feringheea, borne to icy grave within a pall of gold.
Yet now I espied a second body! Near-lost among the glitter and gush yet unmistakable. Tumbling in slow glycerin motion through the arc-lit sea beneath rising Neptune. A second body. That of the treasured Mr. Singh.
How did he get there? He had been here, in the sealed portion of the craft. Had he somehow, unnoticed by all, gone aft to assist Feringheea in his noble, doom-struck task? I gazed out through the glass as if in Mesmeric trance. And watched the captain as he came to understand that his best tutor, his most trusted friend, his wisest companion, his solver of all problems was now in permanent residence beneath the Pole.
I studied our captain. If the loss of these two lives induced in him any quantity of melancholy or e’en regret, those thoughts could in no ways on his face be discerned. Then we heard—felt—a low reverberant thud as the tower of Neptune hit something solid, the top layer of ice atop the cold and unfathomable sea. We hit it and—
Went through.
It was scarce short of miraculous: the sacrifice of Feringheea, of Mr. Singh, had in this cold and astonishing place allowed us to find our deliverance.
Now we had fully broken surface. We stared out. The layer of ice here was as thin as the rime on a windowpane. We’d broken it with no more difficulty than that of an Englishman, at breakfast, tapping the shell of his four-minute egg.
For the longest moment no one moved or e’en breathed. Then Mohan he climbed the cramped metal ladder to the tower. Spun the hatch lock. Pushed upward. For the first time in four days there was fresh, dry air, and so we breathed deep into our lungs. He clambered on deck, followed by, followed by. The sky was white, a translucent shallow dome lit uniformly from behind. The sun was low in the sky and it was white, the same white. The ground: flat white ice, all the way toward the horizon. It would not be hard to imagine spheres within spheres, the whole borne on the back of a giant tortoise.
We were at the Pole now. Could see it. Feel it. The still point round which all else revolves. Nine crewmen silhouetted, backlit, stark black against the glowing white world.
The captain he surveyed. Hand to forehead, shading his eyes as if posing for an heroic gravure. What he espied, shiny white ‘gainst matte white: a thin river, lightly rimed with ice, leading from here to there.
The line of liquid between solid floes, out to the Chukchi Sea, the Bering straits, thence to Mr. Cook’s islands. The Almighty will forgive if I shouted a hallelujah.
Clambering. Clanging. More crewmen emerged from the hatch. Stretched. Breathed air. Looked out across the sheet of ice under the glowing dome of sky. Everywhere they looked was south. The heat from Neptune warmed the air where they stood, steam rising from the deck and from each face as they exhaled.
Now, without being led or commanded, they found themselves in song. A few, then all. It was a song of air, of breath, of life, after the possibility of life had been abandoned. They sang in their native tongue. But every now and then I could discern a verse in English: for English is the language of the sea.
It’s round the pole we’ve got to go
Go down, ye blood red roses, go down
To find the line ‘tween ice and snow
Go down, ye blood red roses, go down
The song it had many verses. (Melody and rhyme are mnemonic devices, enabling the memorization of long text otherwise without discerning feature.)
It’s one more pull and that will do
Go down, ye blood red roses, go down
For we’re the mates to kick her through
Go down, ye blood red roses, go down
They sang their song for a full quarter hour, each verse different, each chorus the same. It was a saga of life on land, life at sea, then life on land once more.
My dear old mother said to me
Go down, ye blood red roses, go down
My dearest son, come home from sea
Go down, ye blood red roses, go down.
There were many adventures, told in specific order, with recurrent themes including, but not limited to, the elements; fellow sailors; piracy; creatures of the sea; demigods; exotic locales; ecstatic sexual congress.
Oh you pinks and posies
Go down, ye blood red roses
Go down.
E’en the captain, whose face now bore the sorrow of Feringheea’s loss, and more, that of his beloved Mr. Singh, could be seen to join the chorus. I alone did not celebrate salvation.
And so we breathed the Polar air, and looked up at the ice-colored sky, and across at the sky-colored ice, and down from the top of the world. Everything—the world entire—now spun round our axis. It was a moment that had some magnificence in it, and more than a touch of the Sublime.
But e’en as time and rotation did seem to cease, I knew this was pause, not full stop. And that within a very few moments we would be back inside the Neptune, headed for the captain’s preferred atoll in the South Pacific, where he would repair and improve his ship before recommencing his career of evil.
I know some of this intent from our conversations; and I know additional from remarks made by his dusky crew when they for one reason or another did English speak. He meant to fix his machine, and, once fixed, to kill once more. Striking out at England, indeed at civilization itself. And in this latter war there were for him no innocents, no civilians. We were, all of us who lived and breathed the air of freedom, la chair à canon for his submersible cannon.
All of this was, to him, certain—the only matter left undetermined was where, or what, he would strike next. I fear the fate of English merchantmen, and e’en of English passenger ships, whose lookout is to the waves themselves, and not to whate’er malignity might lie below.
Go down, ye blood red roses.
Go down.
FOURTEEN
The Great Eastern.
THE MANAGERS OF the Great Eastern seem determined to play with the public impatience to the last. Either they have no settled and matured plan of operations, or they are determined that the world at large shall not know what it is. The London journal received by the Niagara all announced that the great steamer would positively sail on the 9th, the day advertised. The Times, on the morning of the 2d, the day of the Niagara‘s departure, said: “The Great Eastern will proceed to sea on the day appointed, whatever may be her internal condition as regards general accommodation.” These assurances, in which all the other papers concur, must evidently have emanated from the management: yet we now receive from Messrs. GRINNELL, MINITURN & Co., her New-York consignees, the following official announcement that her day of sailing has been again postponed:
“THE GREAT EASTERN.—Owing to the delay in procuring reports from the Surveyors of the Board of Trade, which must precede the clearance of a ship with passengers, an
d also with the view of arriving off Sandy Hook at the period of spring tides, it has been determined that the departure of the Great Eastern from England shall be postponed until about the 23d inst.”
This note came by the Niagara, and bears, of course, the same date with the newspaper announcements, that she would sail on the 9th. The reasons assigned for the delay are not especially satisfactory. The date of the spring tides could have been ascertained six months ago as well as now, and it is scarcely conceivable that the time of departure should have been fixed originally without any reference to these tides. This reason, therefore, very possibly covers the real cause of a delay which the owners may not care about accounting for more definitely. This is the more probable, that the Assistant Secretary of the Company, in a note to the Times of June 4, gives “delay in the completion of the vessel” as the ground for deferring her departure.
It has also been related, though with no official imprimatur, that the Great Eastern may not be carrying passengers on this voyage, but rather, will be freighted with common cargo. This would represent a humiliation for The Great Eastern Company, who in all of their statements did purvey the craft as the pinnacle of luxury.
The whole career of this gigantic ship seems to have been one gigantic blunder. The most culpable mismanagement appears to have marked every step of her progress. Her cost has been enormously beyond the estimates: the time consumed in getting her ready for sea has been twice as long as was anticipated:—she is not well fitted for the service for which she has been built, and there are very grave suspicions that, in spite of all that has been said of her performances on her trial trips, she is really not seaworthy. Yet should she set sail, on “about the 23rd” or on some subsequent date, all luck and grace is wished to her.
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