Mary Lee), then, gentlemen, I looked through as beautiful clear water as you could find in a drug-store filter. Why, it reminded me of the West Indies. I could see plainly for, well, certainly seventy-five feet over swaying kelp-weed, eight feet high, with blood-red leaves as big as a barrel, all dotted over with black spots. There were acres and acres of it, swarming with rock-crabs and lobsters and all kinds of fish."
"Any sharks?" said I.
Hansen and Atkinson smiled, for this is a question always put to divers, who usually have to admit that they never even saw a shark. Not so Timmans.
"I had an experience with a shark," he answered gravely, "but it wasn't up in Maine. It was while we were trying to save a three-thousand-ton steamer of the Hamburg-American Packet Company, wrecked on a bar in the Magdalena River, United States of Colombia. I'd been working for days patching her keel, hung on a swinging shelf we'd lowered along her side, and every time I went down I saw swarms of red snappers and butterfish under my shelf, darting after the refuse I'd scrape off her plates; and there were big jewfish, too, and I used to harpoon 'em for the men to eat. In-fact, I about kept our crew supplied with fresh fish that way. Well, on one particular day I noticed a sudden shadow against the light, and there was a shark sure enough; not such an enormous one, but twelve feet long anyhow – big enough to make me uneasy. He swam slowly around me, and then kept perfectly still, looking straight at me with his little wicked eyes. I didn't know what minute he might make a rush, so I caught up a hammer I was working with – it was my only weapon – and struck it against the steamer's iron side as hard as I could. You know a blow like that sounds louder under water than it does in the air, and it frightened the shark so he went off like a flash."
"Perhaps he wasn't hungry," laughed one of the crew.
"Not hungry? I'll tell you how hungry those sharks were. They'd swallow big chunks of pork, sir, nailed and wired to barrel heads, as fast as we could chuck 'em overboard; swallow nails, wire, barrel heads, and all, and then we'd haul 'em in by ropes, that did for fish-lines, only it took twenty or thirty men to do the hauling. And there were plenty of sharks 'round, only they never seemed to tackle a man in the suit."
"Some say it's the fire-light of the valve bubbles that scares sharks off," commented Atkinson. "I don't know what it is, but I know the bubbles shine something wonderful as you watch 'em boiling up out of your helmet."
"Phosphorescence," I suggested, and then went back into the talk for some broken threads.
"How about that steamer you were telling about," I asked; "the one that was wrecked on the bar? Did you save her?"
"I should say we did," replied Timmans, "and I guess the company wished we hadn't; it cost them more money than the job was worth. Why, if I should start telling how we saved that steamer I don't know when I'd get through. It took us eight solid months. Yes, sir, and that meant sixty men to feed and pay wages to – forty in the wrecking-crew and twenty on the tug. Oh, but we did have trouble – trouble all the time, but we had fun, too, especially when some o' these gay Bowery lads we'd picked up got loose on the mainland. Talk about scraps!"
Timmans paused as if for invitations to spin the whole yarn, and these he immediately received.
"Tell about painting the alligator," urged Hansen.
"Oh, that was a bit of foolishness me an' another fellow done. He was a Dutchman, and got me to help him catch an alligator one day. He said he could bring him up North and get a big price for him. Well, we noosed one after a whole lot of chasing in a lagoon, and kept him four or five weeks, but he wouldn't eat, and the boys all gave us the laugh. So the Dutchman got up a scheme to paint him white and put him back in the lagoon. His idea was that this white alligator would scare out all the other alligators, and then we'd capture mebbe twenty or thirty on the banks, and make our fortune."
He paused a moment with a twinkling eye, and Hansen snickered.
"Well, we done it. We painted that alligator white, and put him back in the lagoon, and you can shoot me if those other alligators didn't eat him. Yes, sir; they chewed him clean up before we'd hardly got the ropes off him."
"What did the Dutchman say?" asked Hansen, shaking with mirth.
"He stuck to it his idea was all right, but it was the blamed alligator's fault for being too weak with fasting to fight the ones as weren't painted, and he wanted somebody to help him catch another, but nobody would."
Then Timmans came back to the saving of the wreck, and it really was an amazing story of patience and ingenuity against endless obstacles. I doubt if men from anywhere but America would have carried such a hopeless undertaking through to success. First they rigged up a wire railway from wreck to shore, and slid off a valuable cargo of alpaca, silks, and beer bit by bit along the wire to land (where they conscientiously drank the beer). Then they hitched a hawser to the steamer, and by clever engineering managed to drag her off the bar against the river current; but presently this current, sweeping down from the mountains, grew too swift for the wrecking-tug, and she in turn was dragged down stream against all the strength of her engines, and saw herself threatened with destruction on the bar. Then the captain of the tug, in his peril, ordered the hawser cut, and thirty-nine men of the wrecking-crew were left to their fate on the abandoned wreck. Their adventures alone would make a thrilling chapter, but they were rescued finally from the half-sinking steamer, after she had somehow crossed the bar and wrecked herself anew in the breakers some miles down the coast.
Then weeks passed while the wrecking-crew worked at patching the steamer's holes so that she would float, and every day Timmans went down in his suit and did blacksmith work and carpenter work on her torn plates and beams, in constant danger of being crushed in the deep sand trough she rocked and slid in. Sometimes the whole iron hull, beaten against by the ocean, would go grinding along, breaking down a wall of sand ten feet high, almost as fast as Timmans could walk. And to be caught between her side and that wall would have ended his days forthwith. Diving-suit and man would have been crushed like an egg-shell.
Finally, when she was ready they made fast a sixteen-inch hawser, and put on full steam to pull her off into deep water. Off she came, and all was going well with the towing when a fierce tropical storm came upon them, and the steamer turned broadside to its fury, and the great hawser snapped like a kite-string, and back she went on a coral-reef.
Once more they began at the beginning, and in time had another hawser ready, and tried again. This time the hawser parted by grinding on the beach as they dragged her.
Then, after long delay, they got a sixteen-inch hawser, wound with wire, that would resist the friction of rocks and sand, and all would have happened as they hoped had not a sawfish, sent by the evil power that thwarted them, thrust its jagged weapon through the hawser strands, piercing the wire and severing the big tow-line. The wrecking company still shows the saw of that mischievous fish among its curiosities.
So Timmans's narrative ran on endlessly, with details of how they stopped some fresh leaks with sixty-five barrels of cement, and how they quelled a mutiny and how they finally got the steamer off, and rigged up a patent rudder that steered her over twenty-five hundred miles, until they landed her home, two hundred and fifty-odd days after the expedition started. All going to show the kind of stuff American wreckers are made of.
V
IN WHICH THE AUTHOR PUTS ON A DIVING-SUIT AND GOES DOWN TO A WRECK
ONE day I asked Atkinson, as master diver of the wrecking company, if he would let me go down in his diving-suit; and he said yes very promptly, with an odd little smile, and immediately began telling of people who, on various occasions, had teased to go down, and then had backed out at the critical moment, sometimes at the very last, just as the face-glass was being screwed on. It was a bit disconcerting to me,
