CHAPTER XV
There have been few pluckier fights for a ship than that waged over a great, camouflaged merchantman torpedoed by the Germans off the Cornish coast during the war. She was badly holed, but her captain bravely stuck to her and managed to beach her near Bude.
Hastening to her aid, the salvage officer found her on a beach exposed to the full force of the Atlantic. With wind and sea rapidly rising, it was obvious that nothing could prevent her from going to pieces. The rollers were battering her, shaking and straining her ominously, seeking to finish what the German torpedo had begun.
So desperate was her situation that her one chance lay in reaching a more sheltered spot. The salvage officer looked at the sky, saw the wind blowing the crests off the waves, then he got busy. Working at pressure, he and his men managed to set a few baulks of timber within the ship to strengthen the damaged hull, and as the tide rose his tugs and salvage vessel started to haul her off the beach. He knew she was in a sinking condition, that she might go down before he could get her to a place of safety, but against this risk was her certain loss if she remained where she was.
Then began his struggle to beat the coming gale. The steamer was quite unmanageable, so he set two tugs hauling away in front, while he hung on behind with the salvage vessel, making his ship play the part of a rudder to the damaged craft. Along the coast northward the little procession made its way. The pumps were working continuously, throwing out tons of water, but they could not conquer the inrush. The captain and crew were still aboard, fighting hard to keep down the water. But all their efforts were useless. Gradually the ship sank lower and lower in the seas, and by the time they had reached Hartland Point—one of the most dangerous spots on that exposed coast—her end seemed but a matter of minutes. Her decks were practically awash. Heavy seas rolled right over them, and it became imperative to take off the men aboard. A dozen attempts were made in those heaving seas before the crew were rescued, and as the last man left he cast off the towing hawsers.
Only the Ranger, that famous salvage ship, hung on, still straining at the stern of the sinking steamer. A man stood by to slip the cable as she foundered, and the rescued crew crowded round to see her go, all waiting tensely for the end.
For a few moments the salvage officer watched the torpedoed ship. A few miles along the coast was Clovelly and safety. He wondered if he could make it in spite of everything, if there was yet a chance of snatching a victory over wind and wave, not to mention the Germans. After a close scrutiny of the ship, he determined to try.
Turning to his men, he called for volunteers to help him make one last attempt. Half a dozen men stepped forward. All knew the odds were against them, that a watery grave probably awaited them. Yet none hesitated.
Watching their opportunity, they brought their boat alongside the sinking ship and scrambled aboard. Then they took up the fight again. By great good fortune she had a donkey-engine on her upper deck, and the salvors succeeded in starting it up and getting the pumps working again. That donkey-engine proved their salvation, just enabled her to keep afloat. But it was touch and go all the time.
These seven gallant men in the end brought the ship to Clovelly harbour and put her ashore on that stony beach right under the picturesque village. She was nicely sheltered, and the salvors were able to fit her with a standard patch before taking her to dry dock. Thus the salvors wrested a victory out of the very jaws of defeat.
Several successful dramatists have staged a thrilling fight between divers, many a novelist penned vivid descriptions of similar encounters to make the hearts of his readers beat a little faster. Yet such struggles between real divers in the depths of the sea are so rare that it is doubtful if more than one authentic case exists.
This historic fight between divers took place at the bottom of the Solent during the recovery of some of the relics from the Royal George. The two divers, Jones and Girvan, were keen men, proud of their skill as submarine workers, each a little jealous of the other. One day Jones came across a cannon buried in the sand and, being unable to deal with it, marked it for a future occasion. Divers as a rule are extremely chivalrous. They would scorn to take a mean advantage, and they would never think of breaking the rule that what one finds, the finder salves. Whether Girvan, coming on the cannon, thought it a new find that he was entitled to salve, or whether he deliberately made up his mind to try to salve the other diver’s find, is not known. All we know is that Jones, who had been working some little distance away, came on Girvan trying to get out the cannon. Naturally, Jones was indignant, and indicated to Girvan by energetic dumb show that the latter had no right to deal with the piece.
Girvan was by no means inclined to relinquish the cannon, and further remonstrances were followed up by blows. The divers began a rough and tumble fight at the bottom of the sea, striking at each other savagely with their fists. They were by no means equally matched, for Jones was much the smaller man of the two. Realizing that the encounter might cost him his life, he took the first opportunity of trying to get to the surface. Reaching the shot-rope, he went up it about 5 or 6 feet, closely pursued by Girvan who, grabbing his legs, did his utmost to pull him down again. The divers fought desperately in their rage, Jones to get away from those clutching hands that gripped his legs, Girvan to drag him to the seabed again, and that dramatic fight reached its climax in the greatest disaster that can overtake a diver. The glass of Girvan’s helmet was smashed by a blow, and as the water swept in it seemed that his end was nigh.
Luckily, however, the men on the surface, unable to explain the violent agitation of the lines and feeling that something serious must be wrong, dragged both men to the top. Girvan’s smashed helmet told its own tale and set them working frantically to pull him round. He was at his last gasp. Another minute and they would have been too late. He was removed to hospital, where his splendid physique, coupled with excellent nursing, enabled him to pull round. Those two divers who fought that strange fight at the bottom of the Solent came to the conclusion that it did not pay for divers to disagree, so they ended their differences by becoming the staunchest of friends.
Other attendants in tropic waters, feeling a strange dragging at the lines, have also drawn the divers to the surface without loss of time, to find them in the clutches of the deadly octopus, whose horrible tentacles have been coiling round the divers, striving to draw them within reach of the deadly beak that would go through the rubber diving dress as though it were paper. There, on the deck of the diving vessel, they have had to fight desperately to free the divers from the grip of the loathsome creature, only succeeding in the end by chopping and hacking away the encircling tentacles. As recently as the spring of 1924, when I happened to be in the South of France, a diver at Marseilles had to be rescued from an octopus in this thrilling manner.
The octopus, or squid, is, indeed, the greatest danger that the diver has to face beneath the surface of the sea so far as the denizens of the deep are concerned. Those squids occasionally found round the British coast are too small to threaten the diver, but in warmer waters, where the squid attains a huge size, he will rapidly attack any unlucky diver who unconsciously ventures too near his deep-sea lair.
The habits of fish are rather quaint. Should they be near the surface when a shadow falls on the water, a flick of the tail sends them disappearing into the depths. But undersea they are as inquisitive as cows. When fish see a diver standing still on the bottom, they find something about him too fascinating to withstand. Perhaps it is his form, perhaps the long line of bubbles flowing continually from the exhaust valve of his helmet. Whatever it is, they are drawn to the strange creature, and their fishy mouths suck at arms and legs and body in an effort to find out whether the diver is good to eat. The least movement sends them speeding away. The bigger fish are just as inquisitive, and just as easily scared. The diver needs only to open his air valve to let a little air escape in order to frighten them out of their fishy wits. Even the shark, the so-called tiger of the seas, is not generally feared by divers, for he is as scared by a sudden escape of air from the valve as are the smaller fish.
Yet the shark is fearfully inquisitive, and will come back again and again to see what the strange figure is doing. Sometimes, indeed, the same shark becomes such a confounded nuisance, and the diver wastes so much time in scaring him away, that he is forced to put an end to the intrusion by slaying the monster. One diver, who had been worried day after day by the same shark, was compelled to signal to the surface for a knife. He then calmly held out his hand as bait, just as you hold out a bone to a dog, and as the monster turned to snap the delicacy, he stabbed it to death. Slipping a noose round the body of the fish, he sent it to the surface so that it would not attract other unwelcome visitors—for the scent of death in the sea is carried far afield by the invisible currents and soon brings the sea creatures swarming round—and was then able to resume his work in peace.
As already mentioned, it is often difficult for divers to see owing to the sand and mud suspended in the water, especially near the mouths of big rivers. A few feet down, and the light is quite shut out by the clouds of mud and sand floating about. Sometimes the divers work up to their armpits in foul slime—I recollect some years ago when a racing yacht was recovered from underneath 20 feet of mud—at other times the mud is so deep and thick that they spread-eagle themselves on its surface and manage to work in this recumbent attitude.
But when the diver gets to a hard bottom he is not handicapped in this way, and in sunnier climes and seas he can easily see at a depth of 100 feet. The sea-growths around Great Britain are not to be compared in size and colouring with the lovely tropic growths of coral and fern-like weed found in the warmer waters. Out, for instance, in the Pacific the depths of some of the lagoons are just like Fairyland: filmy forests of ribbons and ferns, inhabited by fish of the most gorgeous and dazzling colours, butterflies of the deep. This submarine scenery, in its way, is as beautiful as anything to be found on earth.
More than one salvage man in the past has made a snug fortune salving ships on the distant coasts of South America and the Pacific, often in the most simple manner by patching and pumping. Until comparatively recently the salvage man, if he wanted to lift a vessel, generally bought up a couple of old hulks and used these for slinging the wreck inshore. By the time the wreck was beached, the hulks were about smashed to pieces.
The principle of lifting a ship by means of a coffer-dam has already been indicated. It was a principle of which Mr. Tom Armit was a brilliant exponent. He raised several ships this way, building timbers all round to extend the hull upward, and then timbering all this over, virtually adding another deck to the ship. This coffer-dam, covering the whole ship, was made watertight, and, as it was pumped out, the added buoyancy refloated the ship. If leaks happened to manifest in the coffer-dam during pumping operations, the salvors calmly fed spun oakum into the water which carried it into the leak and soon stopped it!
On occasions during a collision at sea, mattresses and clothes have been thrown into the water, which has carried them to the leak, where they have become wedged, enabling the sailors aboard ship to tackle the damage from the inside. Collision mats are specially made for such emergencies so that they may be lowered over the hole, the pressure of the water holding them tightly against the side of the ship and enabling the carpenter to get to work on the inside as the inrush of water is stopped. Another salvor’s trick is to stretch a tarpaulin over the hole to hold back the water. It is but temporary, yet it enables him to gain time to get timbers in place inside so that the pumps can then deal with the water that finds its way in. There are also special patches that may be pushed through the hole in the hull from the inside of the ship and opened out like an umbrella, after which they are drawn tightly against the hull by screwing up from the inside.
Pontoons alone have raised more than one little wreck in the manner already described. Other small ships have been raised by filling their holds with air-tight bags which, upon being blown up, have striven to rise to the surface, carrying the wreck with them, much to the delight of the salvors.
Vickers, the great armament firm, have their own patent system of raising wrecks by means of canvas containers. An American concern has a submarine machine, something like an army tank in appearance, for drilling holes in the hull of a sunken ship. These holes are drilled in line and large hooks are inserted, to which are attached strong, air-tight containers, one to each hook. The intention is to drill holes along each side of the hull of a wreck, attach the air bags, blow them up and lift the craft.
Whether the plates composing the hull of a ship are strong enough to support the entire weight of a ship in this way, or whether they would collapse under the strain of raising the ship from the bottom remains to be seen. It must be borne in mind that the backbone of a ship is the keel, that the whole ship is built up from the keel, which is its strongest part, the foundation of the ship. The inventors of this new system propose to lift the dead weight of the ship from the seabed, but hitherto salvors who have accomplished these feats have always swept their cables under the keel of the vessel to avoid the risk of pulling her to pieces.
Before the War there existed at least one special lifting craft, consisting of two steamers linked together by strong girders. These twin craft were brought into position so that the wreck lay between them, cables were fixed under the wreck, and the lifting craft picked up the sunken ship as the tide rose, steamed away with it until it grounded again, when the operation would be repeated next tide.
The salvors have several ingenious ways of getting cables into position. Sometimes two tugs towing cables between them sweep them under the wreck. At other times the end is let down to a diver who digs or scrapes a hole under the keel and forces the cable through; another rope is then let down from above, the diver attaches it to the end of the cable, which is drawn to the surface and attached to the lifting craft. A quicker method of forcing a hole under the keel is to use a powerful pump which, directed by the diver, rapidly drives a way under the wreck for the lifting cable.
It was while using a pump for this purpose on the wreck of the Intrepid on the Belgian seaboard that a most amazing adventure befell a diver of the Salvage Section. The wreck was buried 20 feet in clay and mud, and the diver by skilful use of the pump dug his way down to the keel. He was standing at the bottom of this pit when it caved in on top of him. He was buried alive, held as in a vice under a dozen feet of mud and clay, the weight of which doubled him up.
Luckily he still retained his hold of the pump, and after a desperate struggle managed to direct the jet of water on to himself until he loosened one arm. As the water softened the clay, he worked the other arm free, then little by little his legs. Wrapping them round a wire, he directed the pump upwards and inch by inch wriggled and burrowed his way through that dozen feet of clay to the surface. His air-pipe was hopelessly entangled, so he was compelled to cut it before he could be hauled up to safety. No diver would care to undergo such an experience a second time.
Comedy so seldom plays a part in diving adventures that a case which occurred some years ago is worth recording. Divers had been at work for some time hauling the cargo out of a submerged wreck, when one of them, upon being drawn up, displayed quite exceptional signs of exhaustion. A sleep soon put him right, and he resumed work next day.
Again he showed signs of acute fatigue, which passed away after a night’s rest. The following morning he went down as usual, and this time when he came up he was quite unable to stand. He collapsed on the deck, while those aboard crowded round, very concerned about his safety.
Hastily unscrewing his helmet, one of the salvors sniffed in a puzzled sort of way. A familiar smell came to his nostrils. He sniffed once more, the others looking at him queerly.
“What’s wrong?”
“Whisky!” muttered the kneeling man, thinking his sense of smell must have betrayed him.
They all sniffed in unison, and the smell was unmistakable.
“He’s drunk!” said the first man.
The idea was preposterous!
“But how——?” queried another.
That was the question which baffled them. How was it possible for a diver to get drunk under water? The mystery would have delighted Sherlock Holmes. There were cases of whisky in the wreck at the bottom of the sea, but the diver would be drowned if he attempted to drink it. He was imprisoned in his suit. So how?
Not a word did they say to the drowsy diver, but when he went down the following day another diver discreetly followed. He saw the first diver take a bottle of whisky and proceed to a cabin. Instantly the mystery was cleared up. The exhaust air from his helmet, collecting here, had formed an air pocket, and the diver, poking his helmet out of the water, calmly unscrewed the glass front and took a good pull at the bottle. In this ingenious manner did he manage to get drunk under water!
For recovering metal objects, such as anchors accidentally lost in dock, there is the electric magnet. Among other inventions for seeing on the seabed and recovering lost treasure is the hydroscope of the Italian, Cavaliere Pino. The hydroscope is a floating chamber, from which depends a series of steel pipes that may be extended or shortened at will, just like a telescope. The pipes terminate in a chamber with observation windows made of stout glass, and a man sitting here can observe the whole seabed round about, provided the water is clear, while the hydroscope is being slowly towed along on the surface.
The hydroscope has done some good work, and by its aid one wreck was raised in five hours after salvors who had been working on it for months had declared that the craft was lost for ever. It was this Italian invention that the Japanese used in clearing the sunken Russian fleet from the bottom of Port Arthur after the termination of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. A similar invention worked out by a Mr. Williamson has resulted in some extraordinary underwater cinema films being secured.
The War led to a big development in the use of compressed air for raising wrecks, divers sealing up all the apertures in the tops of the wrecks with concrete to imprison the compressed air, which was then pumped into the ship until enough water was expelled to enable her to float. The War also hatched a crop of cranky salvage ideas that gave some of the salvage experts one or two happy moments.
One such moment was just after the War, when an American walked into one of the British shipping departments and requested to be allowed to salve a ship in order to demonstrate the efficiency of his new method. The officer to whom the stranger went was courteous, listening attentively to the American’s demand, and inquiring at last which ship of the few hundreds sunk round our coasts he would like to demonstrate on.
“Any one!” said the American. “I don’t mind. The bigger the better. What about the Lusitania?”
“She’s rather deep,” it was suggested.
“That doesn’t matter. It makes no difference to me what the depth is,” came the easy reply.
The officer put a few questions, and then learned that the stranger designed to use a submarine, which was to fire torpedoes right through the Lusitania, each torpedo carrying with it a steel cable. These were to be picked up at the other side and taken to the surface, and then the wreck was to be dragged bodily out of the depths!
That scheme to salve a ship by first of all smashing a series of holes through her hull with torpedoes did not commend itself to the British expert. It was, indeed, quite impracticable.
None the less, there are people who still wonder if it will ever be possible to salve the Lusitania, which was torpedoed off the Irish coast on May 7, 1915. From time to time the matter keeps cropping up.
Those who are curious on the subject may be interested to know that the chances of raising the Lusitania are so small as to be almost negligible. The sheer weight of the sea quickly obliterates man’s handiwork, and the Lusitania probably ceased to be a ship years ago. It is extremely likely that the tremendous pressure to which she was subjected at the depth of 288 feet long ago crushed her flat. Proposals have been made to try to salve the valuable 30-ton safe from the strong-room of the liner, but personally I should not care to back such an enterprise.
The marvellous endurance of divers in going to great depths has been touched on in previous chapters, but perhaps the strangest task ever given to a diver was that of saving a cathedral. Some years ago, Winchester Cathedral was in such grave danger of collapsing that it became necessary to underpin the walls and strengthen the foundations. The whole cathedral stood upon a water-logged peat bog, the ancient builders upon reaching water having laid logs of beech to take their foundations. The modern architect, Mr. T. G. Jackson, and his engineering collaborator, Mr. Francis Fox, knew that to pump the water out would be practically to pump the cathedral to destruction, for the drift of the water was bound to carry the silt and gravel away from other portions of the building to where the pumps were working, and so bring about the collapse of the famous edifice.
After careful study of the difficulties, the engineer called in one of the crack divers of Siebe, Gorman & Company to carry out his plan. It was found that the beech logs put in by the ancient builders at water-level were resting on 6 feet of clay, which in turn covered a depth of just over 8 feet of peat, this in turn resting on a bed of gravel. To save the cathedral it was essential to excavate all the clay and peat down to the gravel, and replace it with concrete up to the foundations of the building.
The walls of the cathedral, properly supported, were treated in small sections of about 5 feet. The clay was dug out, then the diver entered the hole and, working in absolute darkness, removed the peat down to the level of the gravel. Bags of dry concrete were lowered to him and packed in tightly, a layer at a time, the diver splitting them open and spreading the contents evenly. In this way the hole was completely filled. The water soon turned the concrete into a rock-like mass, upon which the masons were able to build solidly right up to the foundations, from which the beech trees were carefully removed. Nothing like it was ever attempted before, so Winchester can boast that its cathedral is the only one in the world that has been given a solid foundation by a diver.
Just as the torpedoing of the Lusitania by the Germans stirred the whole world, so the sinking of the American flagship Maine in Havana harbour on February 18, 1898, stirred the people of the United States and led to the war with Spain. A giant explosion in the middle of the night carried the American battleship to the bottom with 266 officers and men, and it was asserted that the Spaniards had deliberately blown her up. The result was a war in which Spain lost Cuba and the Philippines.
Long years afterwards, in 1910, Congress voted a sum of £60,000 and the work of investigating the wrecked battleship was put in hand. Tackling their task in a most masterly manner, the engineers decided to enclose the whole wreck in one huge coffer-dam built of steel piles driven down through the mud until they were embedded 13 feet in the solid clay. As the wreck lay in 37 feet of water, with 20 feet of mud below that, the piles would emerge 5 feet above the surface of the sea, providing a wall too high for the water to wash over.
Knowing full well that they would find it difficult to create a plain circle of piles round the ship to withstand the pressure of the sea, the engineers decided to build what really amounted to a series of gigantic barrels, standing on end in the sea with their sides touching. These barrels, twenty-two in number, varied between 40 feet and 50 feet across. The staves of the barrels were formed by the steel piles which were made to interlock as they were driven in side by side, and where the barrels, or caissions, touched, further piles were driven to enclose the space and strengthen the junction.
For months the hammer-blows of the pile drivers resounded over the harbour, and at last the coffer-dam—a most marvellous piece of work—was finished and filled with dredged clay. Within a year the salvage operations were completed at a cost of £135,000. The experts watched with keen eyes as the pumps lowered the water within the coffer-dam and the wreck slowly emerged from the slime. There the battleship lay, a twisted mass of metal, and, before patching up the afterpart and taking it out on March 16, 1912, to bury in the broad Atlantic, the specialists held their inquest, striving to discover whether the explosion that sank her was caused from inside or outside.
Such a thing after a ship has been at the bottom for over twelve years is almost impossible to determine. It was said that the explosion came from outside, but the doubt will always exist that the Spanish American War may have been due to a grave error on the part of America, and that the Maine instead of being blown up by the Spaniards, was destroyed by the spontaneous combustion of the explosives in her magazines, just as French, Japanese and British warships have been destroyed in the same accidental manner.