CHAPTER XIII
Of the many remarkable salvage feats performed during the war, that concerning the s.s. Araby is of more than passing interest. Driven ashore on the French coast on December 21, 1916, owing to an accident to her steering gear, she was towed off two days later and by Christmas Eve arrived at Boulogne. The tugs were shepherding the cripple into harbour when trouble overtook her once more. The towing hawsers parted, and she was swept by the strong tide broadside across the harbour mouth, her bow being jammed against the end of one quay and her stern against the end of the other quay.
The excitement was intense, for she was blocking our most important port of entry into France. To make matters worse, the tide was almost at the full, and unless she were got off at once it was obvious that her days were numbered. As the tide fell she was sure to ground at the bow and stern, and a deep channel between the quays left nothing to support her amidships, so she would be lucky not to break her back.
Despite the utmost efforts, the Araby remained wedged between the two quays, and as the tide ebbed, her huge cargo of oats began to make its weight felt. Slowly she sagged in the middle until her keel was unable longer to support the strain. She broke her back and settled down right across the fairway, doing very effectively to Boulogne what the British Navy so gloriously succeeded in doing to Ostend and Zeebrugge.
It was a desperate case, calling for prompt measures, for somehow, anyhow, Boulogne harbour had to be cleared, and that quickly. Its urgency led to the happy co-operation of army and navy, so while the divers were jettisoning the cargo, in order to lighten the ship, Lieutenant-Colonel R. V. Jellicoe, D.S.O., of the Royal Engineers, was planning to make history by salving the first ship with the aid of ferro-concrete. Never before had anything like this been suggested. It seemed an impossible sort of dream.
The engineer was determined to prove that the seemingly impossible was possible. So on each side of the fracture, which was amidships, wooden moulds were deftly built up in the form of bulkheads stretching right across the inside of the ship. Cement and gravel were carefully mixed in certain proportions laid down by the engineer, and into these moulds the concrete was thrown. It set as hard as rock, forming two watertight walls shutting off the bow and stern of the ship, and leaving the fracture between them open to the sea.
The rapidity with which the work was carried out was so remarkable that by January 11, just eighteen days after the Araby was wrecked, the flooded compartments were being pumped out. To the joy of the salvors the rising tide lifted the ship clear of the bottom, and clever manœuvring enabled Captain H. Pomeroy, the salvage officer, to clear the harbour entrance and haul the ship into position practically parallel with the quay. By the end of the day she had been worked some little distance up the harbour and ships could pass in and out. The falling tide let her down again in the middle of the channel, but although she still interfered with traffic the salvors had carried the work a big step forward.
The hauling and the towing, however, had subjected her to a tremendous strain, as a result of which the crack across her keel began to extend up each side of her hull. This necessitated two strenuous days being spent in strengthening her, before she could again be pumped out and lifted a little farther into the harbour. Again she grounded at the fall of the tide, and once more as the tide rose she was lifted higher up the harbour. Throughout it was only possible to keep her afloat by continuous pumping, and once the pumps stopped she soon sank under the inrush of water.
During these operations the crack had been creeping higher and higher up the hull under the alternating strains to which she was subjected. The mighty steel plates were rent and wrenched open until the greatest calamity of all overtook her and she broke right in two. She just fell apart, as a sliced apple falls apart, and sank to the bottom.
Such a disaster would daunt most men, who would probably decide that the only thing to be done in so parlous a case was to finish the job by blowing the ends to smithereens and then to dredge up the pieces and throw them on the scrap heap. But the men tackling the case were in no wise disconcerted. If the problem had been complicated in one way, it had been simplified in another. For one thing, a ship breaking in halves required more delicate handling than one broken in halves, because the salvors would naturally try to prevent the worst from happening. Once the worst had happened, the salvors could go ahead without any thoughts of impending disaster. So, wasting no time, Captain Pomeroy brought some giant pontoons into play. Each was capable of lifting a weight of 800 tons, and by their aid, after a tremendous tussle, the two ends were lifted and beached out of the way of traffic in the inner harbour.
For weeks the tide washed in and out of them, leaving behind a foul sediment, and the remains of the Araby gradually became part of the landscape of Boulogne harbour—two ends of a broken ship, rusted and scarred, with the boilers in the engine-room exposed to sea and air. A year passed, during which the German submarine campaign kept the Salvage Section busy day and night, then the Araby was found to be interfering once more with our war activities. It was essential to extend the landing-place for flying boats and seaplanes at Boulogne, and the only available space was the strip of beach occupied by the two ends of the Araby.
In July, 1918, the frequenters of the harbour saw figures again at work on the wreck. The job of preparing the two ends to enable them to put to sea was carried forward with vigour. Then, unwittingly, came one of those tragedies which are fortunately rare in the annals of salvage. The ends still contained quantities of oats quite spoiled by the action of the sea. Grain in these conditions gives off fumes so poisonous that any one caught in them is instantly gassed and killed. Generally the fumes are kept down by spraying with chemicals, a procedure adopted during these operations.
One of the divers, however, penetrated too deeply into the hold without his diving dress and somehow got into a foul pocket of this gas. Almost at once he was overcome and fell in a state of collapse. No sooner had he fallen than his mate was also stricken by the fumes and rolled over unconscious.
Followed one of the gallant deeds which add fame to Britain’s name. Discovering that the two men were in difficulties, and knowing full well the deadly danger that lurked below, a salvor lowered himself in an attempt to rescue them. Instantly the gas attacked him, and he, too, went down. By the time the three men were hauled out they were all dead.
Marred as it was by this sad tragedy, the work aboard the Araby was pushed ahead with unabated zeal. The concrete bulkheads, erected as described under the direction of Lieutenant-Colonel Jellicoe some fifteen months earlier, remained solid walls, impervious to the encroachments of the sea. So the Admiralty salvage officer completed arrangements for removing the remains of the Araby, and about the middle of July powerful tugs were hauling on the after end of the ship. At high tide they succeeded in towing the end off the beach into deep water, and the sailors of the Dover patrol later witnessed the strange sight of half a ship floating serenely to England. They were more astonished a few days later to see the other half being towed across.
In this wonderful way did a soldier, forsaking his own element, assist to salve a ship that broke in two, and so brilliantly successful was his work that he was “lent” to the Admiralty Salvage Section. On another occasion his genius was exercised upon a steamer which had a vast hole blown in her hull by a torpedo. Taking the case in hand, the soldier salvage officer determined to prove that ferro-concrete used under expert supervision would unite perfectly with the steel hull and make the ship as tight and sound as she had ever been. That concrete ships were possible was already proved, for there were one or two afloat to confound the sceptic, but the patching of a steel ship with concrete was not generally considered feasible.
However, the engineer set to work, and under his supervision divers built a huge mould over the gaping wound. The engineer himself donned a diving dress and went to the bottom to inspect the work and see that everything had been carried out to make the experiment successful. The concrete, reinforced with steel rods, was rammed into the mould, where it set almost as hard as the iron with which its edges were solidly united. Concrete piers were moulded inside the ship to strengthen the back of the patch and enable it to sustain the force of the waves, and when the vessel was pumped out and floated officials of the seamen’s union, calling to inspect it, expressed their approval by certifying the ship as fit to go anywhere. It was an amazing new departure in salvage that proved an unqualified success. It was probably the first ship to be patched with concrete, although it was rumoured that the German cruiser Goeben, which gave us so much trouble in the Mediterranean, was also patched up with that material.
The Araby, however, was by no means the first ship to be salved in halves, for years ago Mr. Tom Armit, one of the cleverest salvage experts who ever tackled a wreck, undertook to recover the s.s. Montgomery which had sunk and broken in two in the river Garonne. Under his instructions divers timbered in the open ends of the vessel to make them watertight, and eventually each end was pumped out and raised. They were afterwards taken to dock and joined together again without the ship being one whit the worse for her adventure.
Equally remarkable was the salvage of the steamer Milwaukee which, going ashore on the rocks near Aberdeen during her maiden voyage in 1898, was held so securely that there was no hope of ever towing her off again. The salvors who were called in to deal with the case recognized this in a flash, but, gifted with a vivid imagination, they determined on an extraordinary experiment. It was the bow of the ship that was caught by the rocks, but all the valuable machinery was in the afterpart. Unable to save the ship whole, they made up their minds to try to save the half that mattered, planning to operate on the vessel just as a surgeon operates on a man, but, instead of using scalpels, they sought to cut with dynamite. A belt of dynamite cartridges was fastened round the ship just forward of the engine-room bulkhead. The brainy salvage men pressed the button. Scarcely had the sound of the explosion reached their ears when they saw the ship break in two and the stern slide into the sea.
They had reason to be proud of their success, for it requires courage as well as imagination to operate on a ship in this manner. Eventually they towed the stern of the Milwaukee back to the Tyne, and in due course another bow was built and spliced on to the stern, thus making a new ship of her.
This noteworthy instance of ship surgery was duplicated in the case of the Atlantic liner Seuvic which went ashore on the Stag Rocks on the ragged Cornish coast. The untiring efforts of the salvors failed to move her, so they calmly cut her in two with dynamite and brought the after end to port, where she was made whole again!
Those who get a living by marine salvage need be resourceful, masters of a hundred tricks to win ships from the grip of the sea. When the liner City of Paris came to grief on the same cruel coast, the jagged rocks cut right up through her hull and held her so tightly that her position from the first appeared hopeless. It seemed that she was destined to remain there hard and fast until the sea had battered her to pieces.
Whatever the underwriters thought, there was one enterprising salvage man who was prepared to match his skill against the strength of the sea. Offering to salve the ship on the “no cure, no pay” principle, he set his divers to work and little by little they blew away the rocks that transfixed the ship. It was a ticklish operation. Too strong a charge of dynamite would have injured the hull and made the case worse than ever; too weak a charge would have failed to remove the rock, so it was necessary to wed judgment with caution in this work. Bit by bit the rocks were blasted away and in the end the City of Paris was patched and floated. She was taken into Falmouth harbour for repairs, and when she again took the seas she was known as the Philadelphia.
That feat, performed a good many years ago, was equalled by Commander Cunningham of the Salvage and Towage Company when the Furness Withy steamer Norton ran ashore on Zogria Island off the coast of Greece a year or two ago. The rocks threatened to tear the whole bottom out of the ship if an attempt were made to tow her off, so the salvage expert, seeing there was no other way back to the sea, decided to blow the age-old rocks from beneath the bilges of the steamer. He set to work, and, using extraordinary judgment in placing the dynamite and gauging the power of the charges, succeeded in eight strenuous days in pulverizing the imprisoning rocks without doing any further injury to the steamer. At the top of the tide the tugs and salvage craft towed her into deep water and finally took her to port.
She was a rich prize, worth with her cargo some £330,000. The repairs to the steamer cost about £20,000, and the salvors by their fine work earned an award of £22,000. This seems a large sum for the salvors to make in so short a time, but it must be borne in mind that such prizes do not often come along, and the upkeep of a salvage steamer and her trained crew may easily run to £150 or more a week, without reckoning the cost of the steamer and plant, so it is plain that a big capital is required to keep a salvage unit in continual commission. In other words, although the award was good, taken in conjunction with the capital employed and the risk run, it was not by any means excessive.