Thirty Fathoms Deep

by Ellsberg, Edward

  “I understand it, all right,” replied Bob, pointing to the gesticulating groups of sailors, “but it just struck me that you’ll probably have lots of volunteers for diving from that gang there as soon as they figure out how Tom did it.”

  Carroll grinned himself as the idea sank in.

  “I guess you’re right,” he admitted. “There is some humour in it, but all the same, I’ve just got to find out how Tom did it and then break it up.” He pondered the matter a while longer. “I give up. Harry Houdini himself couldn’t have done that submerged.”

  From bridge to hold, the Lapwing buzzed with excitement, while in his bunk the object of all the mystery slumbered peacefully on.

  There was no diving next morning. Tom Williams, his eyes a little bloodshot, but otherwise sober, was brought up to the mast by the boatswain’s mate. He looked at the captain, shamefaced but silent.

  “Tom, I ought to clap you in the brig for getting drunk on duty, do you realise that?”

  Tom did not answer, only hung his head.

  “See here, Tom, I can’t have any divers getting intoxicated. You’ve been diving long enough to know that it’s dangerous enough even when your head’s clear. Now what happened? Where’d you get it?”

  “I ran across some bottles in the wreck, Captain,” said Tom at last. “And I sez to myself, ‘Here’s some o’ the real old stuff at last!’ So I tried it out.”

  “Yes, I can imagine that all right, but what I want to know is: How did you manage to drink it?”

  Williams looked at the boatswain’s mate, looked at the skipper, twisted his cap nervously in his fingers.

  “I’d rather not say, Captain. Some o’ the other boys might get led into bad habits.”

  Carroll looked at him sternly.

  “Come across, Tom. We’ve got to end this. You’re not going down again until I know what’s happened, and I’ll make sure none of the other boys imitate you. Now, out with it. How did you do it?”

  Tom shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

  “I s’pose I might as well give it away. I couldn’t do it again anyhow. There was only three bottles o’ wine there altogether, an’ I’ve drunk ’em all, one the first time an’ the two others yesterday. Y’ see, Captain, it was this way — ” He leaned against the mast as he proceeded with his story.

  At the end of his first dive, he had crawled through the door leading into the poop and moved on his hands and knees down the passage beyond. A few feet inside, he felt a door over him, and rising, had stood up in the door with his feet still in the passageway beneath. It was completely dark. He felt round, found he could touch the ceiling overhead (it was originally the side of the room) and he had but to reach out only a foot or two to feel the bulkheads on every side. Evidently the room was only a small locker or pantry, possibly belonging to a large cabin farther aft. His fingers came in contact with some shelves; he groped over them, touched several bottles. He could see nothing at all, but judging from the shape of the bottles and the feel of the wire-bound corks, he guessed that they contained wine.

  At that, he paused and wondered how he might smuggle them aboard the Lapwing without detection. He thought of various stratagems to accomplish it, but all left him open to getting caught and having the wine confiscated.

  While he puzzled over that problem, he became half-conscious of an extra weight pressing on his shoulders. At first he ignored it, but soon his shoulders ached from an unusual load which seemed to be growing heavier. He felt that he had been down too long and decided to leave the bottles there and get them later when he could come prepared to smuggle them up. He stooped down to clear the door below. Immediately his helmet rose off his shoulders, the burdensome weight vanished. Williams stopped amazed; straightened up. His helmet settled down heavily again.

  Tom Williams had been diving many years but nothing like that had happened to him before. His helmet had lost its buoyancy. A thought struck him. He reached up into the room over his head.

  He was right. There was no water there, only air! The exhaust air from his helmet had floated up as usual, but as he was in a small room, with no opening in it except the door at the bottom in which he stood, the air had been unable to escape, and as it gradually filled the top of the room, it had forced the water lower and lower out of the door below, until his helmet, no longer in water and consequently without its normal buoyancy, sagged down on his shoulders.

  Williams at first was a little frightened at the situation, but calmed quickly at the recollection that he need only duck through the door and he would be in his element again.

  Then an idea struck him, almost overpowering in its novelty. He felt for the bottles on the shelf. They were still there. He felt up and down for the waterline. It was even with his neck.

  He reached up to the face-plate on his helmet, unscrewed the wing-nut which held it shut, and swung it open on its hinges. His air started to blow out of the faceplate instead of through the exhaust-valve.

  Tom seized a bottle from the rack, smashed the neck against the planks overhead, then shoved the bottle through the open face-plate and guzzled the contents.

  “It was wonderful wine, Captain,” he concluded, “more ’n three hundred years old. But there ain’t none left now,” he added mournfully.

  “Thank heaven for that!” exclaimed Bob.

  Carroll gazed at Tom in unconcealed admiration.

  “That’s a swell yarn, Tom. Now go below. I’m not going to punish you, but for the love of Mike, try to exercise your ingenuity next time on what we came out here for.”

  Chapter 16

  Day after day the divers struggled, driving the tunnel deeper. It was slow work. With the low pressure they were forced to use, the cutting-power of the jet was low, and it failed to make much of an impression on the hard clay which underlay the surface cover of sand and shell. As the hole went deeper, a new trouble arose. The heavy clay, instead of floating upward, settled down again in the water, and, after cutting ahead a few inches, the diver had to reverse his hose in order to wash his cuttings up and out of the hole. The divers floundered in the muck, working their way downward. With only four men, not much could be done each day.

  They had been working a week when a storm drove the Lapwing away, and three days went by before it blew over.

  They came back to find that the hose, which had been buoyed off at the surface, was badly fouled up with the foremast and the wire leading upward from the mast to the wreck-buoy on the surface.

  A heavy swell was still running when the Lapwing moored, and the surf-boat danced violently as it rose to the crests while it dragged the hawsers one by one to the mooring-buoys and secured them. Even the Lapwing herself, taking the seas on her starboard bow, rolled steadily as the waves swept by. On the lee quarter the water was a little smoother, and Carroll decided to proceed with the work.

  The first need was to clear the hose. Tom Williams was dressed and went over the side, intending to slip down the wire hawser to the foremast of the Santa Cruz. He carried a pair of spanner wrenches to uncouple a hose-joint near the mast so that the deck force could pull up the upper part of the hose while he cleared the lower end.

  He had a little difficulty going down. As he submerged, still near the surface, with first a crest and then a trough of the waves sweeping over his head, the variations in pressure as the depth of water over him rapidly alternated nearly burst his ear drums. He dropped swiftly down the hawser to escape, and not until he reached a hundred feet did he check his descent by gripping the wire a little more tightly between his legs.

  He went more slowly then, until finally he made out below him the broken foremast of the Santa Cruz with some three or four turns of the hose wrapped tightly round the cross-trees. Tom stopped, and bending over so he could see downward through his helmet, examined the tangled hose carefully. Part of the hose stretched away at an angle downward, leading to the poop, the rest floated upward to where some cork buoys held it at the surface. About twenty feet
above the fouled turns, he saw a brass coupling in the floating fire-hose.

  He lightened himself, climbed up the mooring-wire and tried to reach the coupling, but it was beyond his grasp. The hawser he was on swayed continuously as the ship above, which held its upper end, rolled to the seas. Tom held on tightly with one hand, reached out with the other and waited, hoping that a wider surge on the hawser would swing him within reach of the hose.

  The wire started to swing over. Tom stretched far out, clawing through the water. His fingers touched the hose, he strained a little farther to grasp it. A sudden snap on the wire, and the hawser tore from his other hand.

  Tom started to fall through the water, then stopped with a jerk as he was brought up on his lifeline. He swung his arms round wildly, feeling for the hawser or the hose, but neither met his touch. He looked up. His lifeline was twisted round the wire fifteen feet over his head. He reached up, tried to grasp his own lifeline and climb up it back to the hawser. He had pulled up a foot or two when the hawser surged violently, gave him a sharp jerk, and shot him to the end of his line.

  He clutched again for the lifeline. It was useless. He dangled from the bight of the surging hawser, shooting suddenly away from it every few seconds as it tautened out, sending him sprawling like the end boy in the old game of ‘snap the whip’.

  Tom felt himself going fast. Under the high pressure his senses began to cloud; as he suddenly brought up on his lifeline after each jerk, his heavy lead shoes gave his legs a terrible wrench. He shouted feebly for help.

  On deck, Carroll listening on the telephone caught the sound.

  “Hello, Tom!” he called.

  No answer.

  Carroll turned to the tender.

  “Give Tom ‘One’ on his lifeline.”

  The tender jerked the line, waited a moment. No answering signal came back. The tender signalled again. No result.

  “Line feels fouled to me, Captain,” sang out the tender. “There’s no give to it!”

  Frank Martin was on the quarter-deck, partly dressed, waiting to start on the tunnel when Tom had cleared the hose. Hurriedly the dressers secured his weights and tested his telephone.

  Briefly Carroll instructed him. “Tom’s in trouble. Must be fouled. Doesn’t answer signals and won’t reply on the telephone. I think I got one call from him, but I’m not sure. Got your knife? Take a stillson wrench with you. If Tom’s foul on the wire, let go that shackle round the mast and we’ll haul him up, wire and all.” Martin’s helmet was clapped on, and he was assisted to the platform.

  “Up stage!”

  Martin went up, over, and down until the water enveloped him. He was dragged to the wire, seized it. The Lapwing rolled heavily.

  “Lower away!” he called. The tenders slacked out.

  On the Lapwing’s rail, Martin’s lines slipped out rapidly to the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot mark, then stopped.

  Tom’s tender ‘fished’ his air-lines carefully, signalling occasionally but never getting a reply. Carroll called every few minutes: “Hello, Tom!” but the whistling of the air as it rushed through Tom’s helmet was all that he heard. On deck there was nothing to do but wait.

  Martin reached the point on the hawser where Tom was fouled. He found Tom’s lifeline and air-hose badly tangled round the wire; below he could see Tom snapping violently each time the wire jerked. He slid down a little farther and tried to get some slack on Tom’s lines to clear the turns, but they were jammed too tight, he could not free them. He tried to haul Tom over to the wire but his dead weight was too much; Tom streamed off at too great an angle to allow Martin to haul him to the hawser and swing him round it to free the foul turns.

  Tom’s arms and legs dangled loosely as he swayed, and they flew out crazily as he tossed on the end of his lines. Martin watched him a second as he swung through the water and realised that he would get no aid from his shipmate.

  “Unconscious already,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll have to hurry!”

  He slid down the wire to the cross-trees, crawled cautiously round them, and climbed down the mast a few feet until he came to the spot where the running-loop on the wire encircled the mast. Clinging with one arm to the mast, he pulled up the wrench hanging from his belt, tightened the jaws round the end of the shackle pin, tried to unscrew it and release the wire. The pin would not turn. He heaved harder. Still no result. Desperately he pulled on the wrench, but he could not start the pin. He let go, shoved his helmet close to the shackle and peered through his face-plate at the pin. He swore bitterly. Under the strain on the wire, the shackle had sprung and the pin was badly bent. It would never unscrew.

  In despair, he cast loose his diving-knife and started to hack violently at the wire. It was futile — he made no impression on the steel strands.

  He stopped, turned off his air.

  “On deck!”

  “Hello, Frank!”

  Fortunately the telephone connections were good. In the flat, far away tones of a man under pressure, Carroll heard: “Tom’s foul of the wire. I can’t clear him. The shackle’s jammed, and it won’t come apart.” Martin paused a moment, turned on his air to get another breath, then resumed. “Send down an axe. I’ll try an’ cut away the cross-trees and slip the wire over the top of the mast.” He turned on his air again.

  Carroll thought rapidly. Martin must be in a frenzy. No man could expect to cut away those heavy cross-trees in time to do Tom any good. They would have to cut the wire somehow.

  The entire deck force was lining the rail, watching anxiously the streams of air-bubbles bursting through the surface, helplessly standing by while Martin struggled below.

  Carroll turned suddenly to them.

  “Bill, get the torch on the double. Joe, couple up the torch-hoses to those gas bottles. Sparks, you get out the igniter and plug ’er in.”

  The men rushed off, returning hastily.

  In a trice, the torch was coupled up; Carroll tested each gas quickly, tried the flash on the igniter, then slipped a shackle round Martin’s air-hose, and seized the torch to the shackle with a marline lanyard. Joe Hawkins lowered it away rapidly.

  Carroll lifted Martin’s telephone.

  “Hello, Frank!” He listened a moment. Martin turned off his air and acknowledged the call.

  “I’m sending down the torch on your air-hose. Burn that wire in half just below where Tom is foul!”

  Martin dragged himself on to the cross-trees. The heavy wire hawser surged at his feet as it rose and fell with the surface waves. Prudently he kept clear of it, and waited seemingly an endless time. Vaguely he could make out Tom’s figure snapping through the water over his head.

  A metallic ring on his helmet — the shackle at last.

  He clawed forward, caught the torch dangling from his lifeline, and cut it loose. Quickly he turned on the air, the oxygen, the hydrogen, adjusting each valve a little. A stream of gas bubbled from the tip of the torch. Martin held the torch in one hand, gripping the igniter with the other. He turned his head towards his telephone transmitter and shouted: “Turn on the igniter!”

  On deck, Carroll, listening intently, repeated the call. The electrician threw in the switch; Carroll sang out: “Hello, Frank! The igniter is on!”

  Balancing precariously in his lead-soled shoes on the cross-trees of the Santa Cruz, Martin swung the igniter through the turbid water into the stream of gas issuing from the torch, pressed the igniter contacts together, then let them go. A spark flashed across the gap.

  Immediately there was a sharp explosion in the water, a ball of orange-coloured flame leapt from the torch as the gases ignited and burned with a muffled roar. Frank dropped the igniter, lifted the torch in front of his face-plate, readjusted the valves until the flame shortened enough to suit him.

  He gripped the wire hawser with one hand, clinging carefully to the flaming torch with the other.

  “On deck! Take me up about twenty feet!”

  Wrapping his legs round the wire, he was hauled
by his lifeline off the mast and moved slowly up the hawser, as hand over hand, his tenders above heaved in.

  Tom’s limp figure came more clearly in sight. Another heave and the fouled turns of Tom’s air-hose rubbed across Frank’s suit.

  “On deck! Vast heaving!” shouted Frank. He stopped, swept up and down as the hawser swayed.

  Clinging tightly to the hawser with his left hand, he swung the roaring torch through the sea, brought the flame against the wire just below his feet, and held it there for a moment.

  The steel strands glowed and became red hot. Frank pressed his trigger.

  A jet of oxygen shot through the centre of the flame, hitting the glowing steel. Instantly the flame changed from orange to a pure white, and a long stream of brilliant sparks flew through the water as the steel caught fire. Slowly Frank moved the flaming jet across the hawser; the strands sparkled for an instant and then parted.

  The hawser snapped in two; Martin swung wildly through the sea as the upper part, no longer restrained, swung away from the mast. Instinctively he thrust the torch out straight to avoid burning himself, then turned off the gases. The flame vanished, the noise ceased.

  “On deck! Take up the torch!” He let it go, it disappeared overhead.

  He felt himself ascending. The Lapwing was heaving in the hawser. At eighty feet they stopped and lowered down the stage. Martin clambered aboard, seized the lifeline leading from the severed wire down to Tom, pulled him up, and dragged him on the stage, limp and motionless. Martin pressed his hand over Tom’s heart. A faint pulsation. Tom was still alive!

  Martin dragged his shipmate to a sitting position on the stage, braced him against a bail, and while they slowly rose to the surface, massaged as best he could through the stiff diving-suit to help the circulation of the unconscious diver.

  Carroll made the pauses at the various stages as brief as he dared; twenty minutes later the stage swung in on deck; the helmets were twisted off the divers. Without waiting to undress further, Martin and Tom were carried through the door of the ‘iron doctor.’ Carroll, inside with them, hastily ran the pressure up to forty pounds to minimise the chances of bubbles.