Dirty Jobs: Dangerous & Strange Jobs 100 Years Ago (Illustrated). Cleveland Moffett
"Once I had my helmet twisted off."
PORTRAIT OF A DIVER. DRAWN FROM LIFE.
"What, below?"
He nodded.
"How can a diver live with his helmet off?"
"He can't, usually. 'T was just luck they got me up in time. They say my face was black as a coal." And he had no more to tell of this adventure.
With few exceptions, divers take their career in exactly this phlegmatic, matter-of-fact way. I fancy a man of vivid imagination would break under the strain of such a life. Yet often divers will go into great details about some little incident, as when Bean described the hoisting of a certain boiler sunk outside of Sandy Hook. It had been on a tug-boat of such a name, it was so many feet long and wide, and other things about the tide and the steam-derrick, and what the captain said, the point being that this boiler had acted as an enormous trap for the blackfish, of which they had found some hundreds of big ones splashing about inside, unable to escape.
So our talk ran on, and all the time I was thinking how I would like to see these things for myself. And it came to pass, as the subject kept its hold on me, that I did see them. Indeed, I spent a whole summer month—and found zest in it beyond ordinary summer pleasurings—in observing the practical operations of diving and wrecking as they go on in the waters about New York. I discovered other wrecking companies, notably one on West Street, and from the head man here learned many things. He took me out on a pier one day, where one of his crews was rescuing thirty thousand dollars' worth of copper buried under the North River. Every few minutes, with a chunk-chunk of the engine and a rattle of chains, the dredge would bring up a fistful of mud (an iron fist, holding a ton or so) and slap it down on the deck, where a strong hose-stream would wash out little canvas bags of copper ore, each worth a ten-dollar bill in the market.
"This will show you," said the expert, "what a diver has to contend with at the bottom of a river. He often sinks four or five feet in the mud, just as those bags sink, and sometimes the mud suction holds him down so hard that three men pulling on the life-line can scarcely budge him. And when the mud lets go the diver comes out of it like a cork from a bottle. You can feel him flop over, clean tuckered out with kicking and working his arms. They let him lie there a minute or two to rest, and then pull him up. Why, vessels will sink ten or twelve feet in the mud, so that the diver has to take a hose down, and wash a tunnel out below the keel, to get a lifting-chain under."
"Wash a tunnel out?" I inquired.
"That's what they do. You know how you can bore a hole in a sand-bank, don't you, with a stream of water? Well, it's just the same with a mud-bank down below, only you need more pressure. Sometimes we use a stream of compressed air. The diver steers the hose just as a fireman steers the fire-hose, and once in a while gets knocked over by the force of it, just as a fireman does."
Tunneling mud-banks under water, with streams of water or streams of compressed air, struck me as decidedly a novelty. I was to hear of stranger things ere long.
My guide presently pointed out a splendidly built young man who was shoveling mud off the deck, not far from us.
"There," said he, "is a case that illustrates the worst of this business. That fellow is made to be a diver; he's intelligent, he's not afraid, and he can stand having the suit on; he's been down two or three times and done easy jobs of patching. If he'd keep straight for a year or two, he could earn his ten dollars a day with the best of them. But he won't keep straight. The poor fellow drinks. We can't depend on him. And here he is, shoveling mud for a dollar and a quarter a day, and no steady work at that."
Ten dollars a day seemed a handsome wage, and I asked if divers generally earn so much.
"Good ones do, and a diver's day is only four hours' long, or less when they go to great depths. And they draw a salary besides, and often receive handsome presents. You ought to see our chief diver, Bill Atkinson; he lives in a brownstone house." He paused a moment, and then added: "But I guess they earn all they get."
A few days later I made Mr. Atkinson's acquaintance on board the steam-pump Dunderberg, then busy raising a coal-barge sunk off Fourteenth Street in the East River.
Atkinson was down doing carpenter-work on holes stove in her, and I stood on deck beside the man "tending" him, and watched the bubbles boil up from the diver's breathing, and the signals on a rubber hose and a rope. It was less air or more air, by jerks on the hose. It was rags for a leak, or a heavier hammer, or a piece of batten so-and-so long, with nails ready driven at the corners—all were indicated by pulls on the life-line or the startling appearance of hands or fingers (Atkinson's), that would now and then reach above water and move impatiently. The wreck was only five or six feet under, and the diver's helmet showed like the back of a big turtle whenever he stood up straight on the sunken deck.
Suddenly there is a scurry of barefoot youths along the pier timbers. The diver is coming up. Now he lifts himself slowly under the crushing weight, one short step at a time up the ladder. No man at all is this, but a dripping three-eyed monster of rubber and brass, infinitely fascinating to wharf loungers. The "tender" twists off the face-glass, and Atkinson says something with a snap in it, and explains what he is trying to do at the forward hatch. Then he leans over the rail on his stomach and rests. Then he goes down again.
"He's the best-natured man I know, Bill is," remarked Captain Taylor, commander of the Dunderberg; "but all men get irritable under water. Why, I've had men who wouldn't swear for the world up in the air tell me they rip out cuss words something terrible down on the bottom. Just seems like they can't help it."
I noticed that the tender did not join in our talk, but stood with hands on his lines and eyes on the water, absorbed in his responsibility; he looked like an angler about to land a big fish. Neither did the men at the air-pump talk. This feeding breath to a diver is serious business.
"How long would he live, do you think," I asked, "if the pump should stop?"
"Mebbe a minute, mebbe two," said Captain Taylor. "I knew a Norwegian who was down in fifty feet of water when the hose busted. It busted on deck, where the tender heard it, and he started to lift, right away. It couldn't have been over a minute before they had him up, but he was so near dead the doctors worked three hours on him before he came around. That'll give you an idea of how far gone he was."
The captain told of other desperate chances faced by divers in his experience: of a hose and life-line fouled in a wreck; of an escape-valve frozen shut, in winter-time, by the diver's congealed breath; of a helmet smashed through by a load of pig-iron falling from its sling; of a diver dragged off a wreck by a drifting pontoon—such a record of thrilling escapes and tragedies as any wrecking-master could run over. One realized why insurance companies refuse to take risks on divers' lives, and why the diver's pay is large.
Before long Atkinson came up again, and announced that everything was ready, holes stopped and suction length in place. Two men helped undress him, while the others set the big eight-inch pipe to pumping out the wreck, and soon it was spurting a thick stream over her side like a fire-tower.
Presently the dinner-bell rang from a tiny cabin below, and I had the honor of breaking bread with the crew of the Dunderberg and two of the company's stanchest divers, Atkinson and Timmans, both small, thin men with wrinkled faces, both the heroes of many adventures. Here was indeed a chance to find out things!
One of my first questions turned upon the effect of diving on a man's hearing. Was it true, as I had read, that divers often have one or both of their ear-drums ruptured by the water-pressure?
Both men thought not; most divers of their acquaintance had good hearing.
"Diving often kills a man straight out," said Timmans; "but, aside from that, I don't think it injures his