style="font-size:15px;"> "I told him I thought I could do the job myself, so why shouldn't he? but that was partly to encourage him.
"Anyhow, Hansen went down, and I got a signal 'All right' from him when he struck the bottom. Then the line kept very still, and pretty soon I jerked it again. No answer. So I knew something was wrong, and began to haul him up quick, telling the boys to turn faster. He was unconscious when we got him on deck, but he soon came round, and said he felt like he'd been dreaming. He'll tell you if that ain't right."
"It's right," said Hansen.
"We couldn't work any more that day, on account of the tide, but Captain Timmans said the thing had to be done the next morning, and wanted Hansen to try it again; but Hansen wouldn't."
"Wasn't no use of trying again," put in Hansen.
"That's it; he'd passed his limit. But it seems I had a longer one. Anyhow, when the captain called on me, I got into the suit and went down, and I stayed down until that chain was under the shaft. It took me twenty minutes, and I don't believe I could have stood it much longer. The pressure was terrible, and those twenty minutes took more out of me than four hours would, say, at fifty feet. But we got the tug-boat up, and she's running yet."
After this Hansen told a story showing what power the suction-pipes exert in pumping out a vessel. He was working on a wreck off City Island, at the entrance to the Sound. He had signaled for rags to stuff up a long crack, and the tender had tied a bundle of them to the life-line, and lowered it to him by slacking out the line. All this time the pump was working at full pressure, throwing out streams from the wreck through four big pipes. Suddenly the life-line came near the crack, and was instantly drawn into it and jammed fast, so that Hansen would have been held prisoner by the very rope intended to save him, had it not been for the slack paid out, which was fortunately long enough to bring him up. Had it been his hand or foot that was seized in that sucking clutch, the incident would have had a sadder ending.
Then came other stories, until the day was fading and the tide was right, and Atkinson was ready for the grounding of this soaked and battered tug-boat. Presently he calls "Look out for that rope. Get yer jacks ready. Now slack away!" And forthwith pulleys are creaking and great chains are grinding down link by link as the men pump at the little "jacks" and the forty-foot timbers that stretch across pontoons and hold the wreck-chains groan on their blocks, and at last the America comes to rest safely, ingloriously on the mud. Poor America! so proud and saucily tooting only the other day, now a bedraggled wreck on these Weehawken flats, destined to what fate who knows? To be lifted from the mud, patched up, rebuilt, quarreled over by owners and insurance people, or perhaps simply left here, with the others, for wharf-rats to swarm in and boys to go crabbing on!
The burying-ground of wrecks! What a sight from the rugged height back of the water! Here are blackened, shapeless hulks from the great river fire of 1900, when red-hot liners drifted blazing to these very flats. Here is the ferry-boat River Bell, decked with flags in her day, and danced on by gay excursionists, now thick with mud and slime, her deck-beams spongy under foot, her wheel-frames twisted like a broken spider's-web. Here are the half-sunken halves of some ice-barge, cut clean in two by a liner. Here, heaving with the tide, is an aged car-float with a watchman's shanty on it, heaped with its rusted boilers, its anchors, cranes, gear-wheels, cables, pumps, a tangle of iron things that were once important. Here is a scuttled tug-boat that has been in a law-suit (and the mud) for years. Here is a coal-barge, wedged open and sunk by her owner to steal the insurance money. Wrecks spread all about us, and above them rise the masts and cranes of pontoons and pumping-craft, that seem, in the shadows and desolation, like things of evil omen guarding their prey.
Night is coming on. Lights show in the great city across the river. Ferry-boats pass. Lines of barges pass. Whistles sound. The waves splash, splash against the wrecks, touching them gently, one would say. But nobody else cares. Nobody comes near. Nobody looks. The divers go home. The wrecking-crews eat and turn in to sleep. A rat squeals somewhere. These helpless, crippled hulks are alone in the night, and they grind, grind against decaying stumps. They are wrecks, they are dead, they are buried – and yet they can move a little in the mud!
III
AN AFTERNOON OF STORY-TELLING ON THE STEAM-PUMP "DUNDERBERG"
WHEN there is difficult diving to be done in the East River, or in any river where the tide runs strong, you will see the wrecking-boats swing idly at anchor for hours waiting for slack water, the only time when divers dare go down. And often there is half a day's waiting for half an hour's work, and often a week goes by on a two hours' job, say, in full midstream, where not even the most venturesome beginner will stay down more than twenty minutes at the turn, lest he be swept away, ponderous suit and all, by the rush of the river. It's start your patch and leave it to be ripped open by the beating sea; it's get your chain fast nine weary times, and have it nine times torn away over night by some foolish, bumping tug-boat; in fact, it's worry and aggravation until the thing is over.
Also, this is the time of times, if you can get aboard, to make acquaintance with the wreckers, to pick up lore of the diving-suit and tales of the divers.
It was bad weather when we, on the sturdy old Dunderberg, were busy at a wreck off the Brooklyn shore, not far from Grand Street ferry (I had as much to do with lifting this wreck as the pewter spoons stuck around the little cabin). It wasn't much of a wreck anyhow – only a grain-boat – but it had my gratitude for stubbornly refusing to come up. And so we had hours to spend down in the cabin aforesaid, which could barely hold cook-stove and dining-table, but managed to be parlor and bedroom besides; also laundry on occasions. The Dunderberg, I should explain, was originally a mud-scow, but for good conduct and an injury to her nose had been changed into a steam-pump. She could suck her forty tons of coal an hour out of a wreck with the best of them. And she traveled with four pontoons, no one of which could touch her in table fare, especially coffee.
Late one afternoon, when the rain was drizzling and the swinging brass lamps lit, we sat about on wooden stools (and some were curled up in bunks along the walls) and listened to the talk of Atkinson and Timmans and Hansen, who had seen and done strange things in their time.
They were discussing the escape-valve in a diver's helmet, and arguing whether it pays to stiffen the spring for very deep diving. Atkinson, who had worked eight fathoms deeper than either of them, said he left his spring alone; he used the same suit and the same valve action for any depth.
"But I look out for sand-banks," said he, "ever since that fellow – you know who I mean – had one cave in on him in the North River. He was tunneling under a vessel with a wall of sand beside him higher than his head, and the first thing he knew he was flat on his back, with sand jammed in his valve so it couldn't open. It wasn't a minute before he was shot up to the surface like a balloon. The reason of that," he explained for my benefit, "is because a diving-suit with its valve shut gets lighter and lighter as they drive down air from the air-pump, until all of a sudden it comes up, man and all, just as a plank would if you held it on the bottom and then let it go."
"Talking about planks coming up," said Timmans, who was seated under the picture of a prize-fighter, "I was down on the North German Lloyd steamer Main, the one that was burned and sunk, fixing a suction-pipe to pump grain out of her, when a big wooden hatch got loose and came up under me. I was working between decks, and the hatch swung me right up against the overhead beams and held me there, squeezing the life-line and hose so tight I couldn't signal. It's lucky the hose was wire wound, or that would have been the last of me. But I got my air all right, and after a while I worked free."
"Wire wound and all," observed Atkinson, "I've had my hose squeezed so the air was shut off. I was on a wreck off one of the Hoboken docks once, when an eight-inch suction-pipe caught the hose coming down through a hatch, and the next second I felt my air stop, though I could hear the pump
