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I
THE UNNERSITY OF MICHIGAN -DEARBORN UBRAHY
Donated by the
Grand Raplds Pubhc Lzbrary
The May G Qmgley
Collectwn
of Ch1ldren’s L1terature
December 2001
The Umversm 0fM1ch1gan Dearborn
Mardlglan Llbrary


Treasures in the Depths
reefs against which many a treasure laden ship
had foundered.
Here the Cahills met Mr. Currier and his
daughters, a whole family devoted to amateur
treasure hunting. Together they began an adven-
ture that challenged every ounce of their daring,
skill and bravery—an adventure that pitted them
not only against the terrors of the depths, but
also against the avaricious crew of the speedy,
black-hulled Wrangler that began to stalk their
every move.
Here is a realistic adventure story of deep sea
diving, accurate to the last detail, and as exciting
as only a treasure hunt on the fringes of the
Caribbean can be.
l


TREASURES
IN THE
DEPTHS
~\~\~V%~P
by ROBERT UHL


if N w Yo I:


J
Copyright 1955 by
PRENTICE-HALL, INC.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book, or any portions thereof, in any form, ex-
cept for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Printed in the United States of America
' , § l{ ~¢"'
SE? 2 8 1955
I


Treasures in the Depths


CHAPTER 7

Excited voices rose from the end
of the Mathews dock. A dozen men peered anxiously down
at a small barge, on which two worried deckhands were
jerking at a heavy line trailing over the side. Now and then
someone on the dock shouted a word of advice or instruc-
tion, but the general tone was one of confusion, uncertainty
and growing horror. Chris and Larry Cahill stopped their
aimless strolling and broke off their earnest discussion of
their family’s future to ask a bystander what was happen-
mg.
“There’s a man down there—sixty feet down—a
diver—.”
“Something go wrong?”
“They can’t haul him up. The life line must be
snagged on something.”
Seventeen-year-old Larry looked at once at his
brother. Funny that they’d just been discussing diving!
Chris, only last week out of the Coast Guard, had been
service trained as a deep sea diver, and now that their fa-
ther’s death had left him more or less responsible for the


4—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-‘-‘---—------—-—-‘-—-—-Treasures

family, he found himself a little worried. Diving was the
only trade he knew. He could ship out on a freighter of
course, but Mrs. Cahill wouldn’t like that any more than
she’d like his making his living under water. Besides, they
all wanted to stick together if they possibly could-
Larry, twenty-year-old Peter, Chris, the eldest, and Mom.
They were clannish; they couldn’t be really happy
unless they were together. But all they possessed in the
world at the moment were their house, a little insurance
money, a small pick-up truck and an old work boat that
had been their father’s. And the desire to stay in Port
Hemlock, here on Puget Sound, where they’d lived all
their lives.
“Chris, you can help!” Larry exclaimed as the crowd
on the dock buzzed with excitement.
“I’m way ahead of you, boy!” Chris put his shoulder
to the crowd and started through, with Larry following
like a half-back behind his interference.
“I’m a diver,” Chris called down to the men on the
barge. “Can I help?”
“We need help,” came the excited answer. “Hurry
up. There’s a spare diving dress in the cabin.”
Chris jumped to the deck of the barge, with Larry
close behind. One of the men dragged out the diving dress
and equipment as Chris put crisp questions to the other.
“Who’s down there?”
“Sam Dougherty. We can’t haul him up—and the
phone’s out too.”
“Is he getting air?” Chris looked at the steadily puls-
ing compressor.
“Air’s okay.”
“Stop jerking that line,” Chris called to the other top-
side man as he buckled the weighted belt. “You’ll only
foul it worse.”
He rose and clumped clumsily to the diving plat-


in the Depths-‘ ------------------------------------------------------- ‘ -5

form, Larry trying to help him, only to be brushed aside
by Chris. One of the handlers lowered the huge copper
and brass helmet over Chris’ head and locked it in place.
Chris adjusted his air and exhaust valves, checked his
sheath knife, snapped a hack saw to his belt, grabbed the
shot or descending line, and dropped swiftly out of sight
into the murky water. Larry watched anxiously as the air
bubbles from his brother’s exhaust mingled with those
from the imprisoned diver, and shivered as he wondered
how it must feel to be trapped ten fathoms down.
Chris descended swiftly. As his eyes adjusted to the
dim gray light, he saw a weird tangle of enormous logs,
thousands of them, some ﬂat in the mud, some up-ended,
some swaying gently in the tide. It was a diver’s night-
mare. But there was no time to wonder about this sunken
jungle. He recognized the other diver who was jammed
against a huge hemlock, and signalled for slack.
Sam Dougherty was an old hand. He pointed down,
and Chris dropped beneath the tangle of logs and felt for
his lines. Apparently Sam had got snagged when he started
to rise, and in his effort to free himself, had dislodged sev-
eral logs which had fallen across the air line. Chris tried to
lift one of the waterlogged trees, then saw Dougherty sig-
nalling frantically. He adjusted his valve to increase buoy-
ancy and rose to the same level. Placing their helmets
together so that they touched, the two divers were able
to hear one another.
“Don’t move the logs,” Dougherty shouted. “That’s
how I got in trouble. Cut the line.”
“Okay. I’ll signal them to send down a new air line
and life line.” Chris did not have a telephone in his helmet.
In a short time, the new lines were lowered on a shackle
fastened to Chris’ descending line. Chris fastened the new
life line around the fouled diver’s waist, and signalled for
air on the new air hose. Soon a stream of bubbles was


6-—-—--—-‘—--‘‘‘-‘-‘-‘-~:-—-—-—‘‘--—-~-—‘~=Treasures

rushing out of the open end of the hose. Dougherty
grabbed the nearest free coupling of his fouled air supply
line, and closed his exhaust valve and his air control valve.
This left Dougherty only the air inside his dress to
breathe. With perfect teamwork, Chris immediately un-
coupled-the fouled air supply hose and let it dangle as he
coupled on the new one. Dougherty was now able to re-
open his valves. Chris cut Dougherty’s snagged life line,
and the diver was free.
The two divers moved back to the descending line,
and were hauled up to the decompression stage for their
ascent. Back on the barge, they relaxed as they were
helped out of their helmets and dress. The spectators on
the dock called down congratulations and questions, while
Larry watched his older brother, speechless with pride
and hero worship.
On the barge, conversation about the incident soon
ebbed. Dougherty slapped Chris on the back. “Thanks,
pal. Do the same for you, sometime.”
“Hope you never have to,” Chris answered. “But that
is one sweet mess down below. Where do all those logs
come from?”
“From the big rafts when the loggers ﬂoat them
down from the camps. Some of the logs—the hemlocks
especially—arc almost as heavy as water. The air spacés
ﬁll up with water, and a lot of them sink.”
“Must be a couple of hundred thousand feet of tim-
ber down there,” said Chris.
“More, most likely. They’ve been sinking for years.
Bad place. I went down for an anchor that came unshack-
led from a ship. Got a cable on it without trouble, but I
should have moved away from the tangle before I told
them to haul me up.”
There is something sobering in any descent, even a
brief dive like this one, and divers are generally quiet men


in the Deptbr ------------------------------------------------------- - -7

after they’ve been down. At ﬁrst Larry plied Chris with
excited questions, but when he got only monosyllabic an-
swers, he turned to daydreaming. Larry had decided what
his career was to be. He would become a deep sea diver.
He was off on an imaginary underwater treasure hunt
when Chris suddenly stopped.
“Larry! I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“I know how we can make some money. Lumber-
jacking. Only we’ll do it right here in the harbor. Under-
water. We’ll salvage those sunken logs!”


CHAPTER 2

Salvage the sunken logs. Larry’s
quick enthusiasm jumped at the idea, and he found it hard
to be patient until evening, when they could have a con-
ference with Mrs. Cahill and Peter. Then, at his mother’s
reaction, his heart sank.
“You know how I feel about deep sea diving, Chris.
It’s just too dangerous. Besides, what could you dive for
here in Port Hemlock?”
“For logs. Hemlock logs that sink right in the bay
from the lumber rafts. I saw them when I went down to-
day. They’re not deep, and there are thousands and thou-
sands of them. All I have to do is haul them out and deliver
them to the Imperial dock right here in town.”
“It sounds too easy, Chris. Nothing is that sitnple.
But I’ll wait till you’ve thought it through. I’d rather sell
the house and move to the city than stay on here, but—”
She smiled proudly at her three sons. Chris was the
kind of person any prospective employer would like, but
he had always had a dream of working for himself, of
building his own business. He was quietly capable, respon-
8


10-‘—~-‘---—‘‘---—-—--—~—--~—-~‘——-‘--‘-—-—--=Treasures

sunken ships with long-dead pirates still sprawled about a
rum puncheon—Spanish galleons—treasure chests waiting
to be stumbled upon—exquisite coral reefs populated with
rainbow-hued ﬁsh—wolf packs of sharks and barracuda
that must be fought off with knife and bare hands—mys-
terious dark caverns tenanted by the nightmarish octopus
or fearsome morays—vistas of unearthly beauty—and
always, everywhere, the spice of unknown dangers
that drain the last resources of human strength and
courage.
There is just enough truth in this picture to keep the
legends alive. Man has completely tamed his environment
on land; the trackless oceans are his highways; he is grad-
ually mastering the earth’s atmosphere. But he is still nib-
bling at the edges of the great area beneath the sea--an
area totalling 70 per cent of the ea.rth’s surface. The
sea hides immeasurable wealth, treasure that makes the
imagination swim. Over half the world’s minted gold and
silver lies there, without counting precious ore. The ex-
tent of oil and mineral wealth can scarcely be guessed,
while subsurface plant and animal life will inevitably
prove of tremendous value in a crowded world whose
population is still multiplying and whose known resources
are dwindling at a terrifying rate.
But the diver himself—the man to whom these won-
ders are an everyday experience—shows no external evi-
dence of adventurousness. The diver who is a ready talker
or who encourages acquaintanceship is apt to be a rarity,
for the man who descends under the sea is conditioned by
his own peculiar world, the weird, dimly lighted depths
which are as unlike the earth as the planet Saturn.
Larry and Peter, still excited by Chris’ almost poetic
(for him) description of deep sea diving, spent the night in
dreams of wildest adventure. Chris’ thoughts were more
prosaic, but they kept him awake as long. They could


in the Depths- ----------------------------------------------------- — -ll

form a salvage corporation. Peter and Larry were smart
enough to handle the topside work; Mrs. Cahill could take
care of papers and records; he could dive. There should
be a second diver, though. Sam Dougherty’s close call that
very day proved that it would be too dangerous to dive
alone. A second diver below—or ready to go down if
needed—should reduce the risk of serious accident. Chris
wondered if Sam Dougherty would be willing to work
with him on shares. Mentally, Chris computed the cost of
the equipment he would need, and the changes necessary
in the Chinook, his father’s work boat, to make it ade-
quate. Most of all, Chris wondered where he could borrow
the considerable sum of money he would need to make his
dream a reality. He had little to offer in the way of secur-
ity, except a lifelong reputation in the town for honesty
and industry. How much would a bank loan on a reputa-
tion? Chris didn’t know, but he meant to ﬁnd out. Better
still, to offer some more businesslike collateral along with
the reputation—if only he could get it.


CHAPTER 3

Next morning, Peter and Larry
were subjected to an inspection by Chris as rigid as any
they’d ever endured as youngsters. After much debate,
Chris had decided that they should make the projected call
on the lumber company oﬂicials as a group, since the oth-
ers would be as deeply involved as he. Chris wanted Mrs.
Cahill to come, too, but she declined. She still had doubts
about her consent to Chris’ scheme.
The boys had their ﬁrst lesson in big business when a
secretary told them that they couldn’t see Mr. Norton,
the branch manager. He was too busy, and anyway, the
big boss, Mr. Anderson, was momentarily expected.
Everyone would be tied up as long as Mr. Anderson was
in town.
Convinced that his scheme was practical and proﬁt-
able for all concerned, his plans all laid, Chris couldn’t en-
dure delay.
“All right, then,” he told the secretary, “if everyone
is so busy worrying about Mr. Anderson, I’ll see Mr.
Anderson himself.”
12


Treasures in the Depths ----------------------------------------- - -13

Oh, you can’t do that,” said the secretary, visibly
shocked. “Mr. Anderson is a very big man.” Then, as an
oﬂicious young man came out of an inner oﬂice and strode
importantly past the desk, the secretary said: “Mr.
Creighton, these young men wanted to see Mr. Norton
and when I told them he was too busy, they said they
would see Mr. Anderson!” To the Cahills, the secretary
explained: “Mr. Creighton is Mr. Norton’s chief assistant.”
“You want to see Mr. Anderson?” demanded the
chief assistant incredulously. “You can’t see Mr. Anderson.
He’s a big man, a very big man. He’s the President.”
Chris’ mouth became grim, and his chin jutted. Any
man that big ought to be diminished a little.
“Look,” he said. “I’m not trying to be unreasonable.
If I can’t see Mr. Anderson or Mr. Norton right now,
when can I see them? I’ll wait. Surely your whole business
doesn’t close down just because the president of the com-
pany pays a visit. I’ll bet he wouldn’t like it if it did.”
There came a sudden interruption from behind the
group. “That’s the smartest remark I’ve heard today,” said
one of several men who had just entered. “My name is
Anderson, and if ycu’ve got business with me or with Mr.
Norton that’s important, go right ahead. But please don’t
waste our time if it’s not important, because the young
lady is quite right. We are busy.”
“How many feet of timber do your raft booms drop
to the bottom of the Sound every day, Mr. Norton?”
asked Chris.
“Thousands of feet. It’s a chronic problem. Why?”
“For every sunken log, you have to cut another tree
and ﬂoat it down the Sound?”
“That’s right.”
“Suppose I can haul those logs out of the Sound and
deliver them here at your dock. Interested?”
“Interested.”


14----—-—--—-----—------—--------—-—-Treasures

“How far will that interest go ﬁnancially?”
Mr. Norton looked inquiringly at Mr. Anderson. “It’s
up to you, Norton,” Anderson said.
“Can we be sure these people can do it?” asked
Creighton doubtfully. “They look pretty young, espe-
cially these two,” nodding toward Peter and Larry. “This
sounds like a tall order for three full-grown men. Do you
think teen-agers can solve a problem as stubborn as this?”
“My teen-agers are better qualiﬁed to create prob-
lems than to solve them,” remarked one of the men who
had come in with Anderson and Norton. “All I seem to
read or hear about these days the trouble caused by
teen-agers. Their behavior is a public disgrace.”
This was too much for Larry Cahill. “Why is it,” he
demanded, “whenever some kid gets in trouble, everyone
starts yelling that teen-agers are no good? I don’t see any
headlines that say, ‘Gang of thirtyish hoodlums hold up
store’; and the radio doesn’t say ‘Raid discloses middle-
agers’ dope ring.’ Do people complain when teen-agers
donate blood, or help put out forest ﬁres? Everybody tells
us to judge people as individuals, but they don’t judge kids
from twelve to twenty as individuals. We’re teen-agers,
and we’re no good!”
Larry stopped from sheer lack of breath. Chris and
Peter unconsciously moved closer to him, as if to repel
an attack. There was no attack. Instead, Mr. Anderson
boomed with approving laughter.
“You’re dead right, young man. And I like your
spirit.” Mr. Anderson didn’t look at all formidable right
now. “Answer the young man’s question, Norton,” he
concluded. “How much will you pay for the logs?”
Norton turned to Chris. “We’ll pay you sixty percent
of the original value of the logs.”
“Will you put that in a contract?” asked Chris.
“We’ll give you a contract saying that, and we’ll


i
‘ii


-'’.""" — M; ... NM
in the Depths‘ ----------------------------------------------------- ‘ -15
agree to take all the logs you can deliver, with one pro-
viso. The timber must be sound.”
On the strength of the contract with the Imperial Pulp
and Paper Company, the obvious earnestness of Chris, and
the excellent reputation of the Cahill family, the bank
gave them the ﬁnancing they needed. The Port Hemlock
Marine Salvage Corporation was in business.
In a wild ﬂurry of activity and excitement, Chris lo-
cated some diving gear from the War Assets Administra-
tion, bought an old diesel-powered steel crane barge, and
three compressors or air pumps. Sam Dougherty gladly
joined up as the second diver, and began to teach Peter and
Larry their topside duties.
The diver’s topside man or tender must keep his wits
about him. Sam gave Peter and Larry careful instruction.
Of course, the diver, either Chris or Sam himself, would
be in constant telephone communication with topside, but
most divers rely as much as possible on hand signals on the
line. Telephones can go out, but the hand line is almost
foolproof. They learned the simple signals:

Tender to Diver
1 pull: Are you all right? (or-“Stop”) if
diver is ascending or descending.
2 pulls: You are too far up; go back down
till I stop you.
~ 3 pulls: Stand by to come up.
4 pulls: Come up.
Diver to Tender
1 pull: I am all right.
2 pulls: Give me slack.
3 pulls: Take up slack.
4 pulls: Haul me up.
3 pulls, then 2: More air.


1 6-‘--‘—‘-‘--—-—-—-‘----—-‘-*-—-—-—-—-—---= Treasures

4 pulls, then 3: Less air.
5 pulls: Send me a line.
Emergency Signals—Diver to Tender
2-2-2 pulls: I am fouled. Send another diver.
3-3-3 pulls: I am fouled, but can clear myself.
4-4-4 pulls: Get me out of here!
Interpreting hand signals can be a tricky business,
Sam told them. All slack must be taken up until the tender
can feel the diver on the other end. Yet the lines must not
bc,so taut that they pull the diver away from his work or
even yank him off balance. The proper signal is a gentle
but distinct pull. All signals by either tender or diver are
repeated when received, to show that they are under-
stood. Failure to repeat a signal means that it is not under-
stood.
Sam warned the boys against yanking in too much
line when giving signal pulls; against leaving slack line
when the diver is descending. They would have to keep
track of the diver’s bubbles and keep the line taut enough
to get signals at all times. If the bubbles disappear for a
moment or two, or if they stay in one place instead of
moving about as the diver moves, he must be checked at
once to see if he is all right. The tender must be careful to
keep the engine exhaust to leeward of the compressor
intake, and to change the position of the compressor if
necessary because of wind shifts. Several divers have died
from inhalation of carbon monoxide poisoning, the result
of inexperienced or inattentive tenders who placed the
compressor intake too close to the engine exhaust. Power
boats had to be kept clear of the diving area, and, most im-
portant, they had to keep track of the time and depth of
the dive, so they could decompress the diver properly dur-
ing the ascent.


in the Depths ------------------------------------------------------ - -17

“A good tender ‘feels’ the diver at his work,” Sam
told them. “He develops an uncanny sense of what is go-
ing on under the surface. The tender should be able to tell
almost instantly when the diver is in trouble.”
Both boys nodded seriously, and Sam drove the point
home with an incident from his own experience. “We
were diving for scrap steel on a wrecked vessel. This was
during the war, when steel was short. A clamshell bucket
would bite into the heap of scrap and hoist a load to the
surface. The bucket wasn’t working right, and I went over
to investigate. In shifting around, my hose and line got
tangled with the bucket’s block. When the winch began
to haul it up, I felt my air hose go taut. My life line was all
twisted in the cable.” Sam paused a moment and stared at
the horizon as the horror of that moment came back to
him.
“Sixty feet to the surface, and the water like blue
ink!” Sam ﬁnally continued. “I had no phone, the air sup-
ply could hardly sustain me, and I couldn’t signal with
the fouled line. If my tender had chosen to raise the
bucket, the air line would have snapped, and that would
have been the end of Sam Dougherty.” He paused again.
“What happened? How’d you get out?” demanded
Larry.
“I had a good tender. Without quite knowing why,
he had a feeling he ought to ease the tension on the clam
shell. He did, and I was able to unknit my tangled lines.”
Sam looked keenly into the eyes of Peter and Larry Cahill.
“That’s the kind of tender Chris and I want you boys to
be.”
In a matter of weeks, diving operations were under-
way. The whole bottom of the Bay was covered with
logs, and recovering them was almost ridiculously easy-
too easy, Mrs. Cahill felt.


CHAPTER 4

Initial salvage operations were
begun right in the Bay, for speed and convenience. The
water was shallow—most of it not over seventy to ninety
feet (or twelve to ﬁfteen fathoms, as the Cahill boys spoke
of it as their nautical vocabulary increased).
Chris did most of the diving, with Sam Dougherty su-
pervising topside operations. The logs were three to four
feet in diameter, and around forty feet long. Chris would
grope along on the murky bottom till he found a couple
of particularly big logs, and then shackle them together,
continuing till he had twenty-eight logs, which was a ca-
pacity load for the Crane barge. Then he would ascend,
and the crew would go to work hauling them up. After
each dive, Larry would query Chris about conditions on
the bottom, and ask when he would be allowed to make a
trial dive. Larry was gradually building up a consider-
able knowledge of diving—secondhand information, of
course, but he knew that sooner or later, Chris would feel
more like talking than he did right after a dive. And that
sooner or later, Chris would let him go down too.
18


20----—---------—-—-‘-—--‘-‘——-----—-—-—-Treasures
the push to see it through. You need to leam that little
thing called “know-how.” Chris had a long talk with the
inspector. He would have to learn to grade the logs un-
derwater—not just to locate them. It would slow him up
—how much so he couldn’t yet tell.
The teredo or shipworm has been a scourge to sea-
faring men since time immemorial. Ships’ bottoms are pro-
tected against it by poisonous bottom paint or by metal
sheathing. In unprotected wood the teredo larva settles
on the wood, scrapes a hole, and disappears below the sur-
face. The worm has a siphon which clings to the surface.
and it actually grows longer as it eats its way into the
wood ﬁber. When the siphons are withdrawn from the
small entrance burrow, the opening is blocked by a pair of
paddle-shaped plates of shell. These small white spots were
the signs Chris had to look for to determine whether or
not a log was worth salvaging.
The next evening, as the Cahill boys were walking
home, Chris stopped without explanation in front of a
house with an M.D. sign outside. “Be a good idea to have
you checked over,” he said to Larry, who looked at his
brother as if he were crazy.
“What for?” he demanded. “I haven’t been sick a day
since I had the measles four years ago.”
Complaining humorously, Larry let himself be led
into the doctor’s oﬁice, while Peter, who knew what it
was all about, continued home.
“You’re the healthiest looking patients I’ve seen in a
year,” the doctor greeted them, looking at their bronzed
faces. “What can I do for you?”
“This young fellow thinks he’d like to explore the
bottom of the bay in diving dress,” said Chris. “Would
you check him over, especially his ears, heart and lungs?”
Larry passed his physical examination with honors.
At last he was going to dive! He was already schooled in


in the Depths ------------------------------------------------------ ‘ -21


such fundamentals as operating the air supply and exhaust
valves and other instruments, some of which are located in
the helmet and worked with the diver’s chin. As ordered
by Chris, Larry had a light breakfast, and he told Chris he
had had a good night’s sleep, which was a slight exagger-
ation. He had been too excited to sleep.
First, he got into a suit of woolen underwear, and
donned a pair of heavy wool socks. These were not only
for warmth, but also to prevent chaﬁng from the stiff div-
ing dress (Larry had long since learned that it is always
called a diving “dress,” never “suit”).. Next he was helped
into the diving dress, made of a layer of India rubber be-
tween layers of heavy twill. Chris laced the backs of his
legs to prevent air pressure from ballooning them out and
upsetting him. Larry was then seated on a stool, and his
copper-and-lead-soled shoes were put on. These weighed
17 15 pounds each. Next came the helmet cushion, followed
by the breastplate. Carefully, to avoid tearing, Chris
pulled up the rubber collar and placed it over the project-
ing studs—Larry raising his arms to make it easier, like a
young child being dressed by his mother. Washers went
over the studs, breastplate straps were put in place, and
screwed tight with wing nuts. A wide belt, weighted with
eighty-three pounds of lead slugs, was strapped around
his waist. Then he stood up and bent forward while the
crotch strap was adjusted to keep the helmet from ﬂoating
off his head.
While Chris was helping Larry get dressed, Sam
Dougherty had been checking the diving helmet, testing
the valves and telephone, and coupling up the necessary
length of air supply hose. Larry was now wearing 136
pounds, and he needed help as he staggered to the edge of
the barge and descended the ladder a few rungs to the
diving stage. A safety line was snapped on, to prevent an
accident such as once befeH an absent-minded commercial


in the Depths=-------—----—----~—-—-‘-------23

bination of the hiss of air entering his helmet and the roar
as it escaped through the valve. In his nostrils was the
smell of rubber and metal polish. The compressed air had
a stale taste, like the air from an automobile tire. His ﬁrst
sensation was the pressure of the water driving the air
from the lower to the upper part of his dress, forcing the
dress against his body. Larry watched to see the water
close over the faceplate. There it was, a thin green line!
He released the breath he hadn’t realized he had been hold-
ing all this time. His ears felt clogged. He swallowed, and
his ears opened up with a POP. All he could see was the
column of air bubbles trailing up from the exhaust valve.
The ﬁrst few minutes on the way down, Larry found
himself breathing too hard. Gradually he got used to the
pressure. He wondered if Peter and the others topside tend-
ing his line had their minds and hearts on their job. This was
no time for them to be stargazing. They were mighty im-
porﬁmt guys to Larry right then.
With his leg around the descending line, Larry tried
to keep his back to the tidal current, so that he would be
forced against his descending line and not away from it.
His ears started to hurt, so he stopped his descent and
“popped” his ears by pressing his nose against the wall of
the helmet to close his nostrils, and making a strong effort
to exhale. The pain disappeared as pressure inside his ears
was equalized. Then he was at the bottom. Holding on to
his descending line for a moment, he looked around him
curiously, but even in the bright light of his underwater
torch, he couldn’t see well. Everything looked hazy. This
was a fairly deep dive, for indoctrination, not for work.
Gradually, Larry found his senses becoming dulled. His
throat was dry from swallowing to open his ears, and he
felt queer, as if he had taken a narcotic. The simplest task
became strenuous, as he discovered when he located a log
and tried to move it. He remembered that he must com-


in the Depths ------------------------------------------------------ — -25

He moved over to his descending line and asked to come
up. It seemed an endless trip.
With one leg hooked around the descending line, and
his hand on the regulating exhaust valve, he started up
at a rate of twenty-ﬁve feet a minute. A weighted diving
stage had been fastened to his descending line with a slid-
ing shackle. Chris’ voice over the telephone warned him
when he was coming close to it. There it was. Larry
inﬂated his dress slightly to increase buoyancy and lighten
himself, mounted the stage, and sat down. He phoned
Chris: “On the stage,” so they could start timing the ﬁrst
stop in his decompression.
As he rose and the pressure dropped, moisture con-
densed and fogged the faceplate. Suddenly he felt him-
self begin to ﬂoat above the stage, and hurriedly he ad-
justed the exhaust valve, which must be changed to allow
for the reduced pressure. At long last the stage came to
the surface and he stepped off to the ladder, climbing till
he was only waist-deep in the water. Chris snapped on
the safety line and then he and Sam helped Larry, who was
now feeling the weight of the 190 pounds of equipment
he was carrying, to clamber aboard. The helmet was re-
moved and Larry grinned with self-conscious pride as
he realized it wasn’t so bad after all, though he found
that he did have a headache and felt a little edgy despite
his sense of triumph. Larry could understand now why
Chris seldom felt talkative after a dive.
Sam Dougherty clapped Larry heartily on the shoul-
der, and remarked to Chris, “Guess you won’t be needing
me any longer, now you’ve got Larry here all broken in.”
He said it with a smile but there was an undercurrent of
seriousness in Sam’s tone that made both Chris and Peter
look at him soberly.
“Getting restless, Sam?” asked Chris.
Sam looked a little sheepish. “You know me, Chris.


26=---‘-------‘—‘--‘-‘-‘-‘—---‘-‘-‘-—----Treasures

The original rolling stone. I can only stick to one job so
long. This one looks like a long haul for short proﬁt.”
“Anything deﬁnite in mind?”
“Well, yes,” answered Sam. “Got an inquiry the other
day from a.n old friend. They’re looking for divers at
Casablanca.”
“What’s doing there?”
“British transport sunk during the war. Had the pay-
roll for the whole expeditionary force. Good job. Thirty-
ﬁve dollars a day plus all expenses, plus a buck extra for
every foot you do down below sixty feet.” Sam paused a
moment. “They need more divers, Chris.”
“No thanks,” said Chris.
“Thirty-ﬁve bucks a day—no maybes, no worries,”
coaxed Sam.
“And no future,” Chris interrupted him. “Nothing
you can sink your ﬁst into and hold on to. It’s not the
money. It’s being on my own . . . my own boss . . .
taking my risks . . . taking my proﬁts . . .”
“And your losses,” reminded Sam.
“That’s right,” answered Chris. “That’s part of the
deal. But it’s worth the gamble. VVhen you’ve got a busi-
ness, your own business, you can grow. You’re not stuck
under water. You can get up . . . on dry land. I’m stick-
ing with this, Sam, as long as I’m able to. I’m going to see
it through.”
Larry and Peter, who had listened aghast to this de-
bate, breathed sighs of relief. A lot of other dreams would
burst if Chris gave up his.
“Can you stick by us a while longer till I get things
rolling a little?” Chris asked.
“Of course, Chris, of course,” said Sam, his face red
with embarrassment. “I didn’t mean I’d desert you when
you’re in a pickle. We can train Larry for relief diver right
on the job, and Peter is already a good topside man.”


CHAPTER 5

For a time, things went
smoothly. Chris was becoming more and more accurate
in grading logs on the bottom of the Bay. Gradually, they
were extending their operations out toward the Sound.
Chris let Larry make a couple of dives in the Bay, but for-
bade him to go down in the swift currents and colder,
deeper waters of Puget Sound. Peter had become fairly
expert at topside management, and Sam Dougherty stayed
loyally at work, though often there was a faraway look
in his eyes that told the brothers Sam’s restlessness had not
subsided. When they tallied up accounts at the end of the
month, Mrs. Cahill armounced that the Port Hemlock
Marine Salvage Company had paid all current bills, and
had a bank balance of $902.33.
“That two dollar and thirty three cents is your bonus,
Mother,” said Chris. “Go blow it in on a fur coat or some-
thing. Live a little.”
They all laughed, but they all, without mentioning it,
remembered that the bank loan was still to be paid when
Z8


30----—----—-~—-—-----—-—-‘--—-‘‘‘‘‘-‘-—-Treasures

to a shark’s tail. This form of playfulness, Chris reassured
his mother, he had never gone in for. The biggest shark
they had seen was a ﬁve footer, and a punch in the snout
had sent him about his business. They weren’t like the
giant tiger sharks of the South Seas. He demanded to know
if she had ever heard of an attack on a human by a shark
in Puget Sound.
How about the octopus? The cold malignancy of its
small, oval, slanting eyes and the snake-like movement of
its tentacles give it an appearance of devilishness which
belies its timid nature. Divers agree that it is seldom dan-
gerous to a man in a diving dress if he keeps his wits about
him. Stand still, and a curious tentacle will usually be with-
drawn. Never will it jet toward a diver or any other crea-
ture that might do it harm. Chris told them that the only
attack he knew about was on a diver who came across a
“small” octopus feeding on snails. The diver let ﬂy a vi-
cious kick, whereupon the octopus unwound into a four-
teen foot specimen who naturally tried to take the diver
into camp, though with the help of another diver and top-
side personnel, he was able to escape without diﬂiculty.
“In this case,” said Chris, “you must admit that the octo-
pus had provocation.”
It would be an exaggeration to say that Mrs. Cahill’s
fears were entirely quieted by Chris’ speech on marine
zoology, but it was true that she had never heard of any
serious trouble with either sharks or octopuses in or
around Port Hemlock.
The proposal that the infant business’ small cash re-
serve should be used to send Larry to the Sparling School
of Deep Sea Diving, in Wilmington, California, brought
fresh distress to Mrs. Cahill. Chris had become used to
treating Larry and Peter as responsible adults, and they
had both lived up to this treatment. But Mrs. Cahill had a
longer perspective. Always worried about Peter’s precar-
.~


in the Depths~-—-—-‘-‘-—-‘-‘-‘-‘-—-—----—------‘-31

ious health, she remembered vividly Larry’s harum scarum
days, which, in truth, were not entirely behind him. She
thought he was too young and irresponsible for a calling
as inherently dangerous as deep sea diving. But, as Chris
pointed out, they couldn’t expect to hold Sam Dougherty
indeﬁnitely; Larry was already making some dives; the
Sparling School had a record of over 30,000 man hours
of diving without a single accident, and, as far as could be
determined, none of the thousand graduates of the school
had ever -been seriously injured while diving. With proper
training, which the school could supply; with good equip-
ment and common sense, for which Chris would make
himself responsible, diving can be done safely. And, Chris
told his mother, never before in history have divers been
in such demand, or paid so highly. As a ﬁnal argument,
Chris reminded her that, sooner or later, Larry would
have to serve a hitch in the Armed Services. His training
at the Sparling School would probably provide him with
grade, pay, privileges and opportunity to learn much
greater than he could hope for otherwise.
The decision was made. Larry was to go to the Spar-
ling School, and since a new term was about to start, he
was to leave at once.


CHAPTER 6

It was with mixed emotions that
Larry left for Wilmington. The prospect of attending the
famous Sparling School, the only civilian school of deep
sea diving in the world, was exciting. It was an adventure
to travel alone so far from home—farther than he had
ever been. But he felt a sense of guilt at leaving Chris and
the Port Hemlock enterprise while affairs were still in
such a precarious state; and he hated to see the ﬁrst hard-
won proﬁt from their joint efforts spent entirely on him.
On this score, Chris reassured him that his expenses at
school represented a re-investment of proﬁts by their busi-
ness in expectation of a greater return at a later date—a
policy that every business, great or small, must follow if
it is to grow.
Larry ﬁngered the envelope containing his medical
report, and hoped that he would pass. Diving is one of the
most rigorous occupations in the world. You need great
physical strength and endurance. You can’t be more than
12 per cent overweight. Fatty tissue absorbs more of the dan-
gerous nitrogen from the compressed air than muscle or
32


Treasures in the Depths ---------------------------------------- ‘ -33

sinew. You must be at least ﬁve feet four inches tall, and
not more than six feet four inches, or the apparatus, which
comes in standard sizes, will not ﬁt you. A quiet, unex-
citable person is less likely to develop compressed air ill-
ness than the nervous type. When you’re excited, you use
up twice as much air. Quick, accurate judgment and ini-
tiative and above average intelligence are essential.
Vision defects which are correctable are no problem,
although you should wear contact lenses instead of regu-
lar eyeglasses. Any evidence of pulmonary disease makes
diving unwise, because high 3l'.l'l'l0SphCriC pressure has an
irritant effect on the lungs. Middle ear disease is disquali-
fying, because this prevents rapid equalization of pressure.
Any chronic disorder of the respiratory system unﬁts a
man for diving. The decompression tables are based upon
normal functioning of the heart and lungs. A big chest
expansion helps, as it gives you more lung power.
Mechanical aptitude is very important, since com-
mercial diving is really nothing but underwater mechanics.
Educational background requirements are not formal, but
the candidate should know elementary physics (pressures,
displacement, buoyancy, laws of gases, etc.) and must have
or acquire familiarity with welding and pneumatic tools.
Wilmington, the home of the Sparling School, is a
mariner’s town, and its friendliness made Larry feel at
home. He reported to the main school building on Wil-
mington Boulevard, an impressively modern structure
with a dummy clothed in full diving dress standing in the
window. Larry was one of thirty young men enrolling
for the sixteen weeks course. His only misgiving came
when he handed over the $600 tuition check. That $600
was more than just money to Chris and Peter and himself.
It was a pledge to future independence, and Larry pledged
himself to make the most of his opportunity.
They were all a clean-cut bunch of boys, and while


34---—-‘--------‘-‘-‘—‘-----‘--—---=Treasures

most came from maritime communities scattered along
the Atlantic, Paciﬁc and Gulf Coasts, a few were from the
Great Lakes area, and there were a half dozen or so from
foreign countries. Larry took an instinctive liking for one
lad, a small, wiry, dark-haired boy about eighteen, with a
ready smile and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. His name
was Kevin Morton, he told Larry; he was from Chicago,
and his father and older brother were Lake pilots. Conver-
sation was general among the student-divers as they
waited, with one burly chap with a loud, harsh voice dom-
inating the group. He let it be known constantly and in
detail that he had already had some underwater experi-
ence. Noticing that Kevin and some of the others in the
group were a bit scornful about this man, whose name was
Max Gsovski, Larry decided that he would keep quiet about
his own limited experience.
The ﬁrst meeting with the instructors was inspiring,
more because of the background of these men than be-
cause of anything they said. Lt. Cross, the Director of the
School, had a history which any man would envy. Bor
n
in the state of Washington, he teamed up at ﬁfteen with a
group of barnstorming pilots, with dreams of becoming
a wingwalker. Later he spent a summer hunting and ﬁsh-
ing with an Indian tribe, followed by a spell of wild horse
breaking. Wanting to see the world, his next step was the
Navy. In 1934 he made his ﬁrst dive, beginning a career
which has included work on the great sunken liner N or-
mandie, a dive to a depth of 240 feet in Lake Tahoe at an
elevation of over one mile; an underwater metal-cutting
job in Canada in four feet of water under three feet of
ice; inspection of Roosevelt Dam, eighty feet underwater
inside a 150 foot tunnel. He had been Flag Secretary to
the Commander of the Salvage Unit at Bikini during the
Atom Bomb tests.
Lt. Cross had a hard look—not hard-boiled, but


in the Depths—-------—‘‘‘‘-—‘-‘-‘:-—-----‘-‘-‘-‘--~35

tough and enduring. His smile was pleasant and came eas-
ily, but it was a tight, controlled smile, like all his expres-
sions and motions. One got the impression that here was a
man who was completely master of himself and of any
circumstance in which he might place himself.
Lt. Cross’ welcoming talk was brief and to-the-point,
without verbose preliminaries. He told the new men of
the pressure test and the elimination dive, which deter-
mines whether or not they are physically and psychologi-
cally suited for a diving career. He warned them that
some of them would surely fail one or both of those tests
and that only about half of most classes successfully passed
the course. Larry was not the only member of the class
whose face grew serious at this warning.
The other members of the School’s staff were almost
as inspiring as Cross himself. Lt. Mihalowski was the old-
est and most experienced. He had been a diver for almost
twenty-ﬁve years, had helped in the development of mod-
ern decompression tables and oxy-helium diving. He had
been diving instructor at the U. S. Naval Academy, at the
Navy Salvage School; was Salvage Ofﬁcer at Pearl Har-
bor, Okinawa and Yokosuka; and like Lt. Cross, had par-
ticipated in “Operations Crossroads.” Larry noticed with
a thrill that Lt. Mihalowski wore in his lapel the miniature
ribbon of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the result of
his work in helping to rescue thirty-three men from the
ill-fated submarine Squalus, sunk in 240 feet of water.
Then there was Mr. Hamby, who specialized in sal-
vage and construction diving and had been a diver since
1938 and a Master Diver since 1944; Mr. Adam, a graduate
engineer from the University of Wisconsin, who among
other subjects taught explosives and rigging; and Mr. Mol-
nar, youngest of the group, son of a famous commercial
diver, a former Navy diver and honor graduate from the
advanced course at the Sparling School. An exceptionally


in the 1)epthS---_-_-.-.-_-.--_~_-_-.--.~.-.-.--.--—-.--s7
The plump lad who had sat next to Kevin was in some
distress. He complained of a thick, cold, “lumpish” feeling
and considerable pain in his right shoulder and was placed
back in the chamber with one of the instructors for addi-
tional decompression. He left school that day.
The School lost no time in debunking popular super-
stitions about the dangers of diving, because it was essen-
tial that the students should learn not to fear things that
were unlikely to threaten their safety, yet to recognize
and know how to confront the dangers that are real.
The genuine romance of the diver’s calling has seldom
been translated into print without distortion. Whenever a
man places himself in an unnatural environment, certain
inherent hazards are present. None of the ﬂights of the
ﬁction writer could exaggerate the dangers of diving, but
the ﬂesh-and-blood diver faces problems more serious
than the sharks, morays and octopuses that writers love to
dwell upon.
As far as can be determined from available medical
records, no authentic case is recorded of serious injury
to a diver in American waters by shark, octopus, or moray
eel. No doubt deaths have happened, but they must be
rare or they’d show up in the records. The Army’s “frog
men” in World War II came in frequent contact with
sharks, barracuda, eels, rays and octopuses, but there were
no serious tussles with any of them. However, many ma-
rine creatures will ﬁght if cornered, and due respect must
be given for their ability to inﬂict damage—usually by
tearing the dress. Even snapping turtles can make trouble
this way. But while they can cause bad scares and mild
injury, casualties by animate enemies are so unlikely as
to be lightly dismissed by most divers. They regard these
creatures of fonnidable reputation as everyday passers-by
in the deep. Even such perils as the “bends,” the “squeeze,”


3 8-------—-—-—-—-—---—----------‘-‘--~Treamres

or poisoning from oxygen or carbon dioxide are being
eliminated by thorough training and supervision.
The one implacable enemy of the diver, they learned,
more dangerous than all the vicious creatures in all the
oceans, is the staggering weight of the water in which he
works. Modern equipment enables the diver to match the
strength of this enemy, but it is always there waiting. He
cannot conquer it, cannot eliminate it. He invades Nep-
rune’s territory under an armed and uneasy truce.
For every thirty-three feet you descend under water,
another atmosphere of pressure is added on your body—
roughly equivalent to 14.7 tons. Air must be fed to the
diver at thirty-ﬁve to ﬁfty pounds pressure above that of
the water in which he is working to counteract this pres-
sure and provide proper ventilation of the helmet. If the air
supply should be cut off, the tremendous pressure of the
water would collapse the suit and ram the diver into his
copper helmet like a hydraulic press. This is called a
“squeeze,” and it is a terrible death. The body is com-
pletely mashed, and loses all semblance of humanity. Flesh
may be stripped from the bones, and tissue even extruded
into the air line. Divers say of a bad squeeze: “Only thing
left to do is to bury the helmet.”
The sheer horror of the squeeze has caused it to be
magniﬁed in the minds of outsiders. Slight cases occur
whenever the air pressure in the diver’s helmet is allowed
to fall below the pressure of the surrounding water. This
can happen not only from failure of the air supply or a
rupture of the air hose, but also from the diver falling
a considerable distance. In the past ﬁfteen years, since the
development of the helmet safety check valve, there have
been no serious cases of squeeze. The check valve auto-
matically closes when the air ﬂow is cut off, and the ex-
haust valve does likewise, leaving the diver with such air


in the Deptbs-------_-_-----~-------------39

as the suit contains. If he is working in shallow water, he
then has about ten minutes to reach the surface before
succumbing to the carbon dioxide of his own exhalations.
In deeper water, the time is much shorter—only about
one minute at 280 feet even with a well-ventilated helmet.
Another hazard of diving which has largely been
conquered is caisson disease, commonly known as the
“bends.” At high pressure, the nitrogen in the air dissolves
in the blood stream and collects in the joints and the blood
vessels. When the air pressure is reduced, the nitrogen is
released, but a sudden release would have the same effect
as opening a soda bottle. The nitrogen forms bubbles
which rise and press on nerves, or block veins, causing
severe contraction of the muscles, bleeding from nose and
mouth, convulsions, and occasionally paralysis or death.
Gradual surfacing, which gives the body a chance to de-
compress naturally, removes any danger of the “bends.”
In the past ﬁve years there have been approximately
twenty-ﬁve cases of “bends” in the Southern California
area. All were successfully treated with no permanent ill
eﬂects to the diver.
If in an emergency a diver must surface in a hurry,
he is stripped by his helpers of his dress and rushed to a
decompression chamber. There the pressure is quickly
built up according to the time and depth at which the
diver has been working, then gradually reduced. This
hazard, however, can be practically eliminated by using
an artiﬁcial atmosphere made up of helium and oxygen
instead of nitrogen and oxygen. Helium is only half as
soluble as nitrogen, and it diffuses (that is, leaves the
blood stream) at twice the rate, so the danger of large bub-
bles in the arteries is practically eliminated. Unfortunately,
use of helium-oxygen is expensive, although not nearly
so much so as a few years ago. It is not needed in depths


40=--A-‘‘-‘-‘-—---A-‘—~-—-‘-‘‘‘-—-—-—----—-Trearures

under eighty feet, where most commercial diving is done,
but it opens new possibilities for deep offshore oil drilling
and salvage of sunken ships and cargo.
The use of helium also reduces the danger of oxygen
poisoning. The dissolving of the nitrogen in the concen-
trated air leaves an excessive amount of oxygen. At 250
feet, the oxygen pressure in the air is the same as breath-
ing pure oxygen at 1.8 atmosphere gage. Safe tolerance on
air at this depth is only about forty-ﬁve minutes. The
longest decompression table for 250 feet is ﬁfty minutes
and requires 299 minutes for ascent. In its milder form,
an oxygen jag is like intoxication, but since it -,fogs the
diver’s mind, it can lead to mistakes that may cause a fa-
tality. The diver can make only one major mistake, and
he gets no second chance. Severe cases of oxygen poison-
ing have effects similar to pneumonia. Helium carries away
body heat rapidly, so that a diver working on helium must
wear electrically heated underwear. But he can work
many times longer at great depth, and work more effec-
tively, than on compressed air. This is a tremendous ad-
vantage, for only the time at work counts, and normally a
man can make only one deep dive in twenty-four hours.
It takes that much time for all of the nitrogen to pass out
of his system.
It is possible for a diver’s air control valve to freeze,
especially when submerged in very cold water. Cooling
of the air causes moisture to condense and form droplets
on anything it touches. Furthermore, the air comes to the
diver’s air control valve at high pressure and then pressure
is reduced, with a resulting expansion and cooling of the
air. Condensation is deposited on the sides of the air con-
trol valve, and if it freezes, it builds up, layer by layer,
until the valve is blocked by a plug of ice.
A more common accident, and one which has claimed
several lives, is fouling—wrapping of the life line and air-


in the Depths ------------------------------------------------------ ~ -41
hose around an object, either by incautious movement by
the diver, action of currents, or movement of the object
on which he is working. Failure of the air supply results
in suffocation. Or the opposite can happen. If the air ex-
haust valve fails, the air pumped from above can bloat
the dress until the diver dangles in the water like a four-
pointed starﬁsh, limbs outstretched, and is unable to use
the life and death gadgets in the helmet. His only hope
then is that he will balloon quickly to the surface, where
his predicament will be revealed to his tenders, before the
dress bursts.
Currents present a major hazard in some waters. Cur-
rents are the winds of the sea bottom. Sometimes barely
perceptible, at other times and places, they may be irre-
sistibly strong, sweeping before them loose objects like
divers or even huge ships. The students were warned to
tread carefully when these “breezes” are blowing hard.


CHAPTER 7

After ﬁve days of preliminary
instruction came the ﬁrst tank-dive . . . the “elimination”
dive. This was more a psychological test than anything
else. The students were dressed in full deep sea equipment,
descended in the training tank, and performed a number
of evaluation tests designed to determine their reaction to
speciﬁc orders. A couple of students who showed extreme
excitement and talkativeness were advised to take up some
other line of work. A diver’s life will often depend upon
calm thinking and sound decisions, and an emotional per-
son is too likely to make mistakes.
Thanks to their genuine interest, Larry and Kevin
passed this test without difficulty. Then began a long,
tough grind, most of it practical work, during which
Larry and the other students learned every phase of div-
ing technique in different types of conditions and waters.
They studied basic physics, learned how to prevent and
how to treat occupational diseases, practiced the funda-
mentals of boat operation. They had to become expert in
the use of scores of hand and power tools, acquire a suffi-
_?_. _- . .- --—~-==i-— '
42


Treasures in the Depths ----------------------------------------- — :43

cient knowledge of ship construction and repairs—in fact,
they became expert in a dozen trades besides diving. Since
the simplest jobs become diﬂicult under water, training
began with such elementary tasks as tieing knots and
building wooden boxes. Larry and Kevin both made the
classic mistake of putting down a piece of wood on the
bottom, forgetting that gravity doesn’t always work.
When they let go, the wood shot up to the surface like an
arrow. Most hated chore was mud-tunneling, but often
the only practical way to raise a sunken ship is to burrow
through the slime to place a cable under the ship’s bottom.
Gradually Larry became so thoroughly accustomed
to his new element that he could take his mind off the fact
that he was in diving dress. His reactions to the adjust-
ments of his air supply and exhaust became automatic.
Working in pitch dark, he was learning to concentrate on
the job to be done, get and keep a mental picture of every-
thing below, and then feel his way around like a blind man.
During the second semester, the students left the shel-
tered training tank to dive in open water, ﬁrst from the
barge and then from the school power boat. Descending
to 100-foot depths in murky water, with unseen objects
fouling their lines and mysterious arms clutching at their
legs was a marked change from the calm water of the
diving tank.
The barge was moved out into the ocean so they
could study jetting, air lift, the use of pontoons, under-
water rigging, and block and tackle and chain falls. They
learned how to locate and inspect a sunken vessel, and
what to do after the inspection. It was all practical work,
with deﬁnite assignments for each dive.
Larry wrote home faithfully. One letter read: “We
have our own forms of playfulness. One is to ‘go ﬁshing’
—with a hook and line, not a spear. This pastime has ad-
vantages over the conventional sport, since the ﬁsh are


4-4» ---------------------------------------------------------- — Treasures

there with you in plain view, and you are equally visible
to them. If a ﬁsh won’t come to the hook, you take the
hook to him. If he fails to bite, you can snag him. But un-
like the above-water angler, who hopes for the biggest
ﬁsh in those waters, we’ve got to content ourselves with a
small specimen. In his own element, the ﬁsh ﬁghts so effec-
tively that it’s extremely diﬂicult to take him off the hook
—almost impossible with a big ﬁsh. Only difficulty is that
the School doesn’t go for this kind of ﬁshing. Not sport-
ing. I guess they’re right. Another stunt we do is to break
up a small shellﬁsh and hold it out to the ﬁsh. Whole
schools will swarm in and eat from your hand provided
you make no sudden movements.
“The old hands here in Wilmington claim that a man
can be buckled into his diving dress, handed an apple, sub-
merge, and come up with the core in his hand. The trick
is for the diver to bend over so that his helmet points
down. He then turns the air pressure on full force, opens
the front window of his helmet, and calmly eats the apple.
The air rushing out against the water is supposed to keep
it from entering the helmet. After the apple is eaten, the
diver closes his faceplate, reduces the air pressure to nor-
mal, and goes topside with the apple core clutched in his
hand. The only trouble with this story is that while I have
heard half a dozen outside divers swear they have done
it, or knew men who had, I could never persuade anyone
to demonstrate it in my presence. And when I asked Lt.
Cross about it, he laughed and winked and asked me what
I thought. I told him I guessed that was one trick I’d skip.
“You’ll remember, Chris, that after my ﬁrst trip
down, I was disappointed at the darkness and gloom. I
thought when I got to Souther n California I’d ﬁnd a clean
sand bottom, clear water and lovely scenery. ’Tain’t so.
It’s more like strolling around in a bottle of ink.
“We do a lot of diving in pairs-—something like the
Tl __ -~_-1--—


in the Depths ------------------------------------------------------ ‘ -45

‘buddy system’ in the Army. We talk to one another with-
out telephones by getting a foot or less apart. It’s easiest
if you put your helmets or breastplates together, so the
vibration is transmitted from one helmet to the other.
When I ﬁrst went down with another diver, I kept think-
ing I was bumping into a post, but all the time it was the
other diver.
“I got awful wet today. I’d always heard that you
can scare off over-inquisitive ﬁsh by opening a wrist cuff
and ‘shooting’ a stream of air bubbles at the ﬁsh. I found
out that the released air cannot be ‘shot’; the bubbles rise
straight up just as they do from the exhaust valve. It’s the
sudden motion that frightens the ﬁsh, not the bubbles. All
I accomplished was to let some mighty cold water get
into the dress with me.”
In another letter, Larry wrote: “We had an exciting
experience today. I had come up from a deep dive—280
feet--and my helmet had just been removed. One of the
other students, Kevin Morton, was still down, ﬁnishing his
assignment with a jackhammer. He was talking over the
telephone, and his conversation was as normal as anyone
could expect at that depth. He said his faceplate had
steamed up, and he was going to wash it off so he could
ﬁnd a starﬁsh for his girl friend. The darned fool closed
his air control valve! Almost instantaneously his voice was
slurred and unintelligible. In less than thirty seconds he
was unconscious. The instructor clapped my helmet back
on and I went over, as they started to bring him slowly to
the surface. I met Kevin at 125 feet and opened his valves.
He didn’t regain consciousness for 5 1/2 minutes after proper
helmet ventilation was restored. We were then at about
65 feet. When he came to, believe it or not, he was still
talking about starﬁsh! He didn’t even know he had passed
out.
“You sure have to be a mechanic to pass this course!


46----‘---—-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘---—---‘‘‘‘‘-‘-—-——~—~—~Treasures

At ﬁrst, I had a hard time using any tool under water-
even a hammer. The ﬁrst time I tried to take a timber to
the bottom, I had an awful time. Every law of balance and
gravity is reversed. The timber seemed to come alive, and
with a mighty nasty disposition.
“Putting ﬁve slabs of wood together to form a box,
all cut to ﬁt, sounds easy. But it’s black as Hades down
there. It takes minutes to drive a nail. The wooden pieces
cooperate by trying to leap out of your grasp. You start
by kneeling on the bottom board, starting the nails in each
of the side pieces, and go at it with an oversized hammer
you carry in your belt. As soon as I reached for the ham-
mer, one of the sides got away from me, but I caught it
just in time. The force of the hammer blow is taken up by
the water, and the sledge is wilder than Mom tacking
down the hall rug. Some of the guys took thirty minutes
to put their boxes together. It didn’t take me quite that
long, but I didn’t set any speed records, either. I don’t
know if I should tell you the dumbest thing I did when I
got to the bottom. I didn’t seem to have enough hands. So
I did just what I’d do on a carpenter job at home. I tried
to put the nails in my mouth!
“Well I’m past that kid stuff now! I’m using three
kinds of torches—an oxy-hydrogen cutting torch, an elec-
tric arc welder, and an oxy-electric cutting torch. Then
there’s a cement gun for grouting work; tools for pipe
bonding, rivet expanding and removing, jet nozzles for
mud-tunneling (that’s an ugly job!) and lots more. No of-
fense, Chris, but underwater logging seems awfully sim-
ple to me now.
“By the way, I told Lt. Cross about our Port Hemlock
operation, and he was very much interested. He says that
there are other divers doing the same thing in the Coeur
d’Alene Lake area. But don’t start worrying about compe-


in the Depths ------------------------------------------------------ ‘ -47
k Ti’

tition yet, Chris. Lt. Cross says there’s twenty to thirty
years work for ten to ﬁfteen divers in that area alone!
“I’ve picked up all sorts of odd information. Did you
know that the history of diving goes back to ancient
times? Or that Cleopatra played a trick on Mark Antony
once when he was ﬁshing, and had a diver put dead ﬁsh
on his hook? That gives me an idea. I’m going to have fun
with the Port Hemlock ﬁshermen when I get home. I’m
going to hook ﬁsh on some guys’ lines, and take ’em off
certain other guys’ hooks!
“Grand as all this is, folks, I can’t wait to get back to
see you all and work with you again. I should be a real
help now. Mom, stop worrying about me. The food is ﬁne
(though not as good as yours). I haven’t caught cold yet;
and I’m not carousing around nights in the big city. Divers
don’t go in much for that stulf—though Lt. Cross told us
about a diver he knew when he was working on the N 01'-
mandie. This diver went out on New Year’s Eve, acquired
a ﬁne hangover, and missed out completely on his night’s
sleep. When he went down next day, he carefully adjusted
his air balance to perfect buoyancy, then fell sound asleep
for three hours, mattressed by the North River. Unfortu-
nately, he snored, and his commanding oﬂicer heard him
over the telephone. That was the end of his diving career.
“So long, folks. Three more weeks and I’ll be home.
Tell that to the bank if they start pressing you on the loan,
Chris.”


CHAPTER 8

In Port Hemlock, a light north-
west breeze dotted the Bay with ripples. Heat waves
danced over the white sand of the dunes, and above the
pine-clad hills to westward cumulus clouds were piling up
to the zenith. At nightfall, the wind gave a dying gasp,
leaving the surface of the Bay smooth as oiled water. Soon
a blue-black darkness settled; the water took on a slaty
gray tone. Yet still there was nothing to indicate that this
was more than a summer thunderstorm.
The weather men knew better. Transpaciﬁc airline pi-
lots studied their weather maps anxiously, and altered their
ﬂight plans. Shipmasters whose vessels were close to the
coast debated a change in course and speed. Storm warn-
ings hung listlessly from Coast Guard masts. The radio
and television carried the alarms—but only for those who
could see or hear them.
Chris could not. Trying to ignore the perspiration
dripping down his face, and his sweating hands, he per-
sisted in his efforts to repair a leaking exhaust valve on a
secondhand deep sea diving helmet. Chris was working
48


Treasures in the Depths ---------------------------------------- ~ -49

against time, ignoring the clock. He had not read a paper
or listened to a radio for days.
Long before dawn the wind blew in from the south-
west, a bit south of the very entrance to Port Hemlock.
The high tide, made higher by the low barometric pres-
sure, was swelled further by the direction of the strength-
ening wind which heaped the sea inshore. The surf beat on
the beach, while out in the middle of Puget Sound there
was a lot more water than usual, most of it standing up on
end.
The rising treble of the storm wind broke through
Chris Cahill’s concentration on his task. Men who earn
their livelihood in, on or under the water have a sixth
sense about the weather. Even before he got outdoors,
Chris knew that this was no ordinary storm. And he had a
special reason for anxiety. Anchored near the entrance to
the Bay, in open water, was his rickety old diving barge.
It would have to be moved. Even as he turned toward the
telephone, its bell rang. It was Sam Dougherty, a fellow
diver who was working for him as much for gratitude as
for expectation of proﬁt.
“Get moving, Chris,” was Sam’s quick message. “I’ll
meet you at the dock.”
The two divers brushed aside warnings from the
other boatmen who were clustered at the dock doubling
their mooring lines or gazing anxiously out at their an-
chored craft from the lee of the watchman’s shed. Heavy
seas breaking against the pier had set even that heavy
structure to vibrating; and the boats and lighters made
fast along it ground against one another and against the
pilings.
Chris started the diesel engine in the work boat and
let it warm up while Sam singled up the mooring lines.
Chris set the engine in gear to relieve the strain on the bow
line, which one of the bystanders released and tossed on


5 0=-_-'-----—---—-—--‘‘‘-‘:-------=---‘-Treasures

the deck. Sam hurriedly cleared the decks of loose gear
and line, to be sure nothing was washed overboard to foul
the propeller.
The inappropriately named Chinook struggled val-
iantly against the pounding seas, tossing spray high in the
air while solid water engulfed the bows and crashed
against the windshield. Chinook had a displacement hull,
and her propeller was deep enough to keep from breaking
the surface—for the moment at least. A fast, shallow, plan-
ing hull would have been helpless against those moving
walls of water.
Chris, at the wheel, had diﬂiculty seeing through the
streaming windshield. Periodically Sam popped his head
from behind the shelter cabin to check the course and
nearness to the wallowing barge. Blinded by the hard-
driven spume, he had to duck back to clear his eyes.
They could see astern, and the sight was one to shake
their courage. Some of the small boats anchored by defec-
tive moorings in the bay were swept away quickly. Others
held till the high tide caused them to pick up their mush-
room anchors and drag toward the eastern end of the Bay
where lay in wait a bridge used by the lumber trains, low
enough to shear off cabin trunks like a guillotine and to
lop off the rigging of the boats swept against it. Soon it
was so jammed with wreckage that no victim of the
storm could get through. Before the Chinook had fought
her way alongside the barge, the Bay was swept clean or
nearly so.
“Take the wheel, Sam, and see if you can hold us
broadside to the barge,” said Chris. “l’m going to jump.”
“Don’t try it, Chris,” pleaded Sam, thoroughly
frightened at the way the barge bucked and wallowed in
the crashing seas. ‘
“We can do it. Gun the engine when she heels toward
N


52= ------------------------------------------------------------ - Treasures

would be too heavy for them to pick up from the Chi-
nook. Drenched in solid water every time the barge
dipped her bows, and in hard driven spray when she rose,
Chris buoyed the end of the hawser, dropped it overside,
and was paying it out with almost superhuman strength
when there was a heavy crash. The huge cargo boom had
come adrift from its nest, and was swinging on its goose-
neck pivot on the derrick mast. That boom was almost
as big in girth as a man. One touch from it would crush
anything in its path. The guy lines kept its swing just
clear of Chris’ position, but if the barge’s motion snapped
the boom lashings, it would be only a matter of moments
before the guy lines carried away.
Sam began edging in with the Chinook the moment
the boom came adrift, and Chris could only hope the haw-
ser wouldn’t foul as it paid out. He knocked the anchor
chains loose from the pawls with a heavy sledge, crawling
on the deck to stay clear of the swinging boom. Then, as
the Chinook came abreast, Chris clutched the light line he
had made fast to the eye of the hawser, and made a ﬂying
leap. He fell in a huddled bundle on the Chinook’s after-
deck.
When he had collected himself, he belayed the end of
the line, and crawled into the shelter cabin.
“Thought you were a goner then, boy,” yelled Sam.
“What do we do now? We can’t maneuver the barge, even
if we could pick up the hawser.”
“We have to try, Sam,” answered Chris. “Here goes.”
The Chinook almost went over as Sam put about.
Chris hauled at the light line, but his strength was nearly
gone. Barge and boat were racing downwind when Sam,
seeing Chris’ exhaustion, recklessly let go the wheel,
caught Chris by the shoulder, and thrust him into the
cabin. Chris grasped the wheel just in time to prevent a


in the DepthS—--‘-‘-‘‘‘—~‘-‘-‘‘-‘-‘—‘-‘-‘‘~‘-‘-‘-‘--‘----53
yaw. The two craft slowly separated as Sam hauled on the
line, brought the hawser eye to the counter, and with
one last surge of strength got it aboard and over the tow-
ing bitts.
The only hope of saving the barge was to edge it to-
ward a small point of land that jutted from the shoreline
inside the Bay, cut it loose, and let it beach itself in the rel-
atively calmer waters. But it didn’t look ‘as if the Chinook
herself would survive long enough to reach the point. As
the relentless combers swept up astem, the Chinook tried
to rise to them. Then the weight of the towing cable and
heavy barge would snub her, and the sea would wash
aboard. Even with every deck opening sealed, she was
taking in water fast. Chris threw in the clutch on the en-
gine-driven bilge pump, and Sam began to operate the
emergency hand pump.
After desperate minutes the Chinook’s pounding
heavy duty engine succeeded in dragging the barge
around to a slight angle to the seas. The barge rolled even
more wildly now. Then, as both men instinctively held
their breaths, the port guys on the barge’s cargo boom let
go. The boom swung far back to port as the vessel rolled,
then over with irresistible force against the starboard guys.
They parted as if they were strings.
The boom, swinging pendulum fashion against the lev-
erage of the tall derrick, increased the roll of the barge.
Each bulwark in turn dipped under. Then, as Chris and
Sam waited for her to recover, there was a long moment
of near stability. The barge was not rolling back. The
cargo boom was now far out over the water, and the
whole starboard side of the deck began to submerge.
“She’s going over,” yelled Sam in sudden panic.
“She’ll drag us down. The axe! Where’s the axe?”
“In the locker. Quick, cut that line!”


54==‘‘-‘-‘--‘-v-‘-‘--—---‘----=Treasures in the Depths

Sam swung wildly at the taut hawser, missed, hit it
and cut one strand, cut another, then saw the third strand
part from the strain.
The barge lay for a moment on its side, then was
gone in a swirl of water and air bubbles which were in-
stantly blown away.
“It’s gone,” said Sam, almost unbelievingly.
“Sunk,” answered Chris. “Everything we have—the
whole works—sunk with it. Our business is back where it
started, on the bottom of Puget Sound!”
By early morning, the storm had subsided. On the
still-swirling, foam-ﬂecked surface the signs of wreckage
—oil, ﬂotsam, equipment—churned in the commotion of
the water. Only symbols of the ﬂeet were left, often still
tied to the vessel below: life rings, hatch covers, skiffs,
rafts, ﬂag poles.
A lesser man would have been beaten. But the suc-
cessful ﬁght to save the Chinook, which had made the
point in the nick of time, with only minor damage, had
revived the courage and determination which had caused
Chris to embark on his risky enterprise. He would need
help, of course, but he wasn’t going to lose for lack of try-
mg.


CHAPTER 9

Before the wreckage of the big
storm that sank the Cahills’ crane barge had scattered,
Larry was on his way home. Port Hemlock was too un-
important a town to be mentioned in the regular press,
but the marine newspapers had more complete details.
“A marine salvage barge sunk at Port Hemlock” could
mean only their barge—there was no other salvage barge
in the town.
Lt. Cross was away, and would be gone for several
days, and Larry could not wait. He wrote a brief message
of explanation, packed his belongings, and set out for the
bus terminal, determined to help in the family crisis. He
was bitterly disappointed at having to leave the school
only three weeks from his graduation, and he regretted
his inability to take leave properly from Lt. Cross, who
had shown such a friendly personal interest in him and in
the Cahills’ enterprise. But such things, he thought, were
unimportant compared to Chris’ situation. All the way up
to the Sound he worried about whether Chris would be
able to resume operations. So much planning and effort
55'


5 6---‘-—-‘--—-------------------‘---Treasures

had gone into the timber salvage project that it was heart-
breaking to think that everything might be lost.
Peter and his mother were glad to see Larry back. Not
so Chris. “We invested a lot of money so you could learn
to be a rounded diver, with all the latest techniques,”
Chris said. “Now you miss the last stages of your training,
when you would have learned those techniques. I know
your motives were good, but it was the wrong decision,
Larry.”
“Look at it this way,” Larry argued, “I have learned
mud-tunneling and jetting and using pontoons. Sure,
there’s still a lot I don’t know. I’m not being cocky. But
Sam Dougherty was getting ready to quit even before I
went to school. How’s he feel now?”
“We can’t hold him much longer,” admitted Chris.
“Can you afford to hire another diver?”
“I can’t afford to, but I’d have managed somehow.”
“How?” asked Larry. “You told me yourself you’d
only worked on one mud-tunneling job in the Coast
Guard, and that was with a whole crew of divers. You
say our only hope is to raise the barge right away. Every
minute and every dollar is important. I can go back to the
school later and ﬁnish up. I’m sure Lt. Cross will under-
stand.”
Chris grinned and clapped Larry across the shoulder.
“I suppose I’d have done the same thing myself. And I
hope you really did learn something about mud-tunneling,
because I expect that’s the way we’ll have to work.”
There was something else that came ﬁrst, however.
Their bank loan would be due before their most optimistic
chance of raising the barge and delivering the timber to
the Imperial Pulp and Paper Company. Chris, Peter and
Larry went to see the banker, Mr. Evans.
Mr. Evans listened attentively to their troubles,
scratched his nose a bit, then said:


in the Depths—-‘-‘—‘-‘—-—-‘-‘=‘----‘-‘‘-‘-‘-—-‘-‘--‘-—-—-—-5 7

How much of an extension will you need, Mr.
Cahill?”
“One month,” Chris said.
“Will that be time enough for you to get rolling
again?”
“I want a month. If I’m not rolling by then, I’ll be
ready to call it quits.”
“One month,” said the banker. “Let’s see—that will
be till May 10th. Okay. The bank will go along with you.
And . . . good luck!”
Encouraged by this preliminary success, the three
brothers went to see Mr. Norton at Imperial Pulp and Pa-
per. He had some bad news for them—something they
hadn’t ﬁgured on. He told it to them straight.
“There’s another outﬁt moving in, Chris. They’ve ap-
proached us for a contract.”
“Well, I guess we can’t stop that,” said Chris. “We
have no patent on the idea. It’s a good idea, and it stands
to reason that someone else would take a crack at it. Do
they get the contract?”
“They haven’t got it yet,” replied Mr. Norton.
“Why not?”
“Well,” smiled Mr. Norton, “I’m kind of rooting for
your side, Chris.”
“We appreciate that, Mr. Norton.”
“But just remember, I’m not the man who makes all
the decisions around here. I can hold out, but not indeﬁ-
nitely.”
“How much longer?” asked Chris.
“Maybe a month.”
“Until May 10th?”
“just about that long. But no longer,” said Mr. Nor-
(OH.
“May 10th—we make a delivery of sound timber on
or before that date, or-” Chris paused.


5 8=---‘--‘-—-----—-‘-‘-~‘-—-‘-—-‘-=-‘-‘-‘‘‘‘‘-Treasures

“Or what?”
“Or expect a postcard from me. I’ll be off to Casa-
blanca.”
Peter and Larry added their thanks to Chris’. “One
thing I don’t understand, Mr. Norton,” said Larry. “I’ve
always heard that big business was pretty tough, yet
here’s Imperial Pulp and Paper going out of its way to help
a little outﬁt like ours.”
Mr. Norton looked pleased. “A lot of people have
wrong ideas about big companies, Larry,” he said. “Big
business needs little business. It couldn’t exist without it.
The average big corporadon helps create and support far
more small outﬁts than it hurts. Big businesses can do cer-
tain things better or more economically than small ones.
You’ll ﬁnd the big companies anxious to give you every
sensible chance, just as we have, and just as the bank did
when it extended your loan. But we can’t be silly about it,
either. If your business isn’t going to work out, the sooner
you ﬁnd out and tur n to something else, the better it will
be for all of you. But I think you can do it.”
The Cahills said goodbye to Sam with real regret.
They couldn’t blame him. He had worked hard and loy-
ally long after he had really wanted to move on, and his
lack of faith now was in itself an adequate reason. There
would be no room for doubts or pessimism if they were
going to get that barge up in time. They couldn’t afford
to hire professional help on the job, but Mrs. Cahill man-
aged to scrape up enough cash to hire a couple of old
barges, some pontoons and cables, and jet equipment.
The ﬁrst job was to locate the wreck. Chris and
Larry laid out a regular search pattern. This was done in
circular patterns using a distance line running from the
weighted descending line, so that the diver would know
how much of the bottom he had covered. Larry went
down ﬁrst, took his distance line over to the leeward side


in the Depit>-»-_------_-_-----i---_--------59
of the descending line as far as he was able to see. With the
distance line coiled in one hand and held tight in the
other, he swept around in a large circle. When he got
back to the place where he had started, he let out some
more of the distance line, and then made another, wider
circle, this time moving in the opposite direction to avoid
twisting his air hose and life line around the descending
line.

Larry and Chris had to move the Chinook three
times, but then they found the barge, and to their delight
discovered that she hadn’t capsized completely. When she
went over on her side, the water had poured into her deck
openings, but as she sank she had righted herself, and was
resting on her bottom, though at an angle. Then they
made a fearful discovery. The sea bottom was deep, soft
mud, and while the bow was almost buried in it, the stern
was resting shakily on a solid rock outcrop. They had ex-
pected to face the unpleasant chore of burrowing a tunnel
to get lifting cables under her, but they hadn’t expected
soft mud under an insecurely balanced hulk. And there
was a ﬁerce current on the bottom except at the change
of tides.
While the rented compressors were stuttering a
working pressure into the reservoir, Chris and Larry ar-
gued over the division of work. Finally, they tossed for
sides. Larry won the seaward side, which meant, as the
barge was tilted, that he would have the easy job of in-
specting the port, or uppermost side. Chris would tackle
the starboard side, where the deckhouses, guy lines and
other gear and equipment had to be clambered over, with
danger of fouled lines or a torn dress. However, Larry
would have to drive most of the tunnel.
Larry was determined that he would uphold his end
of the assignment. He checked the stern. Sure enough, it
was resting precariously on rock, but there did not seem


60=---=—-----—--------—-‘-—-—---‘‘‘------Treasures

to be any damage to the steel hull. He moved forward,
downhill, into the deepening water until he was abreast
the forward deckhouse. A thin stream of bubbles came
from some air lock in the barge, and from that spot for-
ward the hull was sunk deep into the mud. There wasn’t
the slightest chance of passing a messenger wire under the
hull without a tunnel.
Larry and Chris surfaced to talk things over.
“The water looked dark and soupy as I worked down
the side,” said Larry. “I wonder why.”
Chris looked disturbed. “That shouldn’t be,” he said.
“This is slack tide. There’s no current to stir things up
down there-and no wind up here, though it looks as if a
bit of a blow is coming up. See the heavy clouds over on
the horizon? Say, do you suppose the barge is still set-
tling? Did you feel any vibration, or hear any noise?”
“No,” said Larry. “Suppose I go down again and
check?”
“I’ll go,” said Chris.
“No, it’s on my side,” said Larry. “If we keep chang-
ing sides, we’ll be arguing over who is to do each opera-
tion. Let’s stick to our agreement. Anything on the port
side is mine; the starboard side is yours. You’ve got the
worst of the bargain—with all those obstructions on deck
to foul you. It’ll only take me a few minutes.”
Larry went down the shot line again. He moved aft
on the hulk, and this time he stopped his exhaust valve for
a moment to hear better. At ﬁrst there was nothing. Then
there came a creaking, grinding sound from aft, where the
steel plates rested on the rock. At the same time, he be-
came aware of a prolonged vibration through the hull.
The bow of the barge unquestionably was gradually sink-
ing deeper into the mud, and, as the angle of the hull in-
creased, probably sliding off the rock. Chris phoned him


62----—----—---—-—-—----—-—-—-—-----~——-Treasures

far away, to hold the Chinook. He couldn’t use his air
hose or life line, of course—he had only about one and a
half times the depth of the water in hose, so it would rise
almost straight up, and the ﬁrst heavy swell against the
full displacement of the boat—over ten tons—would snap
his lines. He couldn’t ﬁnd a new line in time if one were
dropped from the Chinook, since he had lost the drop line
and wasn’t directly under the boat. He looked again at the
cloud of mud where the anchor was dragging. One ﬂuke
showed brieﬂy—it was backwards! The anchor chain had
fouled around the ﬂukes and stock, and the anchor was
being dragged backwards. He groped toward it, waited
till it pulled slowly past so that it wouldn’t catch his dress.
Then he stooped, caught one ﬂuke, and ﬂipped it. That
cleared one tur n of the chain. He tried again, moving with
the anchor as it slowly dragged on the bottom. It was hard
to see just how the anchor was fouled because of the
mud. He phoned Chris: “The anchor’s fouled. If you can
give me a little slack, I think I can clear it.”
“Stay clear,” ordered Chris. “You’ll get fouled your-
self. Besides we’ve only got about thirty feet of chain
left.”
“I’m behind the anchor,” replied Larry. “If you can
pay out the chain so it stops moving, I think I can ﬂip it.
I’ll keep clear.”
“You’ll have to work fast,” said Chris. “Here goes.”
The anchor stopped dragging as the chain was slowly
paid out, but the cloud of mud dissipated slowly. Chris
stooped down and peered at the anchor. There was a sin-
gle turn of the chain over the curved ﬂukes, near the
shank. He tried to lift the anchor, but it was too heavy.
Desperately he pulled against the weight of the chain to
slip it over the upright ﬂuke. It was almost clear when he
felt the strain increase, and Chris phoned: “That’s all
we’ve got. We’re down to the bitter end.”


CHAPTER 70

. Peter had organized the equip-
ment like a veteran. He had the high-pressure water
pumps set up, a big four-stage compressor ready, and two
120 foot lengths of reinforced rubber hose, six inches in
diameter, with an air connection at one end. One hose was
slung over each side of the sunken barge, and Chris and
Larry made the ends fast to the wreck.
Two ﬁre hoses were let down on either side of the
hulk, each branch pipe anchored with a heavy weight.
The air feeds were coupled to the free ends of the big rub-
ber hoses, to force in air and create a suction that would
dredge up lumps of mud as big as a man’s head and belch
them out of the upper end secured to the top of the
barge. Coiled in the mud where Larry had decided to
drive the tunnel was ten fathoms of one-inch wire which
he would take under the barge to Chris. This would later
be used to haul the heavy lifting cables in place.
Chris and Larry sat on the Chinook’s deck, with hel-
mets, boots and weights removed, and talked things over.
Larry’s side of the barge was buried about four feet into
65


66------------------------------Tieam.

the mud, while Chris’ side was eight or more feet deep.
Chris would clear away obstructions on the deck, secure
the boom, then make a deep trench. Larry would drive the
tunnel through from the seaward side till it met the hole
Chris would have ready. Larry would have to travel about
twenty-ﬁve feet under the wreck. '
Larry was fussing with his exhaust valve, which had
been letting a trickle of cold water back into the helmet,
though he had said nothing to Chris about the leak.
“Take it easy, Larry,” said Chris as Peter and one of
the Miller boys began helping them to get ready. “Re-
member to make your walls slope outward. Mud’s always
dangerous.”
“Right,” answered Larry. “And you keep your lines
clear—and make that hole deep enough!”
Peter laced Larry’s boots tightly, so the mud wouldn’t
pull them off. They rehearsed their signals again; then
Peter put on the weights, screwed on the helmet and
locked it, and turned on the air.
Peter checked the phones and asked, “Are you sure
that valve is okay?”
“Don’t worry,” said Larry. “It only lets in a few
drops. A little uncomfortable after a while, but it’s not
serious.”
Larry stopped at the end of his down line and checked
the exact location of the hoses and dredger. Then he
dropped into the murk and groped toward them. Feeling
along the barge’s side, he located the rivet line which was
to guide him down and under the steel hull. Without that
line, he would lose all sense of direction. Then he called
Peter, and told him to get the dredger going.
There was a thunderous rumbling superimposed on
the roar of the exhaust valve as the air was forced into the
rubber pipe and out toward the surface. Even six feet
away the suction was apparent. As the dredge drew up the


in the Depths-—-—‘-—-—-~—-—-—~—-‘‘‘-‘-~-——-‘-—---—--67

light surface silt, the water cleared momentarily, then
clouded as mud settled from the upper end. They were
not attempting to move the dredged mud any great dis-
tance. Once it was sucked up and clear of the trench or
the tunnel, it was allowed to disperse and settle to the bot-
tom.
Larry’s ﬁrst task was to dig a deep trench running fore
and aft alongside the barge. The bottom of an underwa-
ter tunnel must start deep and rise gradually toward the
far end, so that the diver can keep his exhaust valve higher
than the rest of his suit. If it gets lower, the air will rush
to the area of least water pressure, which is the highest
point, and the diver could be spread-eagled in an inﬂated
dress.
Larry dug a large, slope-sided pit down to the level
at which he could safely begin tunneling. With one water
hose wedged next to and parallel to the barge’s side, to
prevent a build-up beneath the barge, he straddled the
second hose and called for the jet.
The jet hose writhed suddenly. First came a rush of
air bubbles, then a solid jet of water whose back pressure
nearly tore the hose from Larry’s clutching hands. A jet
hose is hard to handle because the nozzle is pushed back-
ward by the force of the water, just as a powerful gun re-
coils against the shooter’s shoulder. This backward thrust
can be eased by special compensating holes in the nozzle.
Part of the jet stream is thrust backwards through these
holes, tending to equalize the force of the jet. The Cahills
were operating on too tight a budget to get a special noz-
zle, but they had drilled several holes which helped coun-
teract the thrust. It was strenuous work, just the same.
Crouched deep in the mud, Larry directed the jet in
an arc with a gradually increasing radius, forcing the loos-
ened mud in the direction of the suction dredge which
gulped it up. The jet stirred up great clouds of black mud,


68---—-—-—--—--‘---‘—----~-—-‘------‘--Treasures

which combined with the mud spewing forth from the
upper end of the suction dredge and then gradually dis-
persed and settled in the water. It had seemed dark before,
but now every vestige of light was cut off.
Staying within arm’s length of the wreck’s bottom,
to keep from losing direction, Larry worked back and
forth through clinging, waist-deep mud, battling the jet
hose, which seemed like a wild thing, while he gradually
widened and deepened the eighteen foot trench. As time
went on he had to take frequent rests, lying pillowed in
the mud.
When the trench was ﬁnished, he surfaced for a light
lunch and a break.
Chris had been clearing the decks of the barge, but
he expected to be able to start digging his own trench
after their midday break and have it ﬁnished in good
time. He would then start tunneling from his end. After
an hour they both descended again.
Larry’s dredge line had been left running while he
was topside, even though his jet was turned off. He found
the bottom of the trench relatively ﬁrm. It was deep
enough now to start tunneling . . . the wreck’s bottom
being just above his eye level as he stood in the trench.
This was the beginning of the critical phase . . . driving
directly under the hulk.
For a few minutes Larry couldn’t quite bring himself
to start the tunnel, even though he knew the chance of
the barge coming down on him was one in a thousand.
Perhaps he should make the trench bigger, before starting
the tunnel? But that was only a stall, and he knew it. He
dragged the mouth of the dredge down to the center of
the trench, where it would suck up the mud as he
washed it loose. A light line made fast to the spare hose
which was to be left at the mouth of the tunnel was knot-


in the Depit.~---_-----------A------------~69
ted for every yard, so he could tell how far he had gone.
Then, holding his breath, he told Peter to start the jet.
Larry knelt and forced the jet into the wall of mud.
Then, twisting and turning it, he pried loose great chunks
and gobs of mud and washed them back to where the
dredge could suck them in. At each change of position he
would reach up to the rivet line, where the steel plates of
the bottom were riveted to a frame inside, to conﬁrm his
position. Then he had to lie ﬂat on his stomach across the
pulsating hose, forcing the jet ahead of him, and pulling
the clods of mud he washed loose back past his body. He
could tunnel only for a couple of feet; then he had to
stop, back out of the narrow cut, and drag in the hungry
dredge to draw out the loose mud which had accumulated.
Each time he backed out for the dredge, he was able
to stand up a moment . . . a welcome change, and a
necessary one, too, because it permitted the water that
had trickled into the helmet through the leaky exhaust
valve to drain down into his dress. Lying almost motion-
less in the tunnel, he was rapidly growing cold, but his
knotted line ﬁnally told him that he was at mid-point, and
he felt a surge of conﬁdence that the ordeal would soon
be over.
The crisis, when it came, was not sudden. Only grad-
ually did Larry realize that he was in trouble. Now that
he was on the home stretch, he had been using the jet for
a longer period than usual. Lying there across the hose, he
could feel the mud he had washed loose pushing against
his sides. Then he realized that there was pressure against
his back as well. That was wrong.
He buzzed Peter to shut off the jet. As the hose went
limp, Larry pressed his hands against the mud wall and
tried to worm his way back. Nothing happened. His legs
were hard to move; the pressure all over was slowly


in the Depths-----—---~—-—-—------‘-—------71

able to drain down into the diving dress, the trickle of
water from the leaky exhaust valve was forming a pool
right under his chin. He could feel the cold swirling of it
against his cheek as he pressed the buzzer with his chin. It
would take a long time for that trickle to ﬁll his dress, but
it would in time, and he might be down there a long
while. His voice was shaky as he told Peter about it. “The
phone mouthpiece will be ﬂooded in a few minutes, but
the buzzer and earphone will be clear for a while. I won’t
be able to talk, but I can hear, and I’ll buzz once for ‘yes’
and twice for ‘no.’ Tell Chris not to waste any time.”
After what seemed an endless wait, Peter’s trembling
voice sounded in Larry’s ear. “How long do you think
you can hold out?”
“How should I know?” demanded Larry hysterically.
Then, more calmly, “Half an hour, maybe. Is Chris on his
way yet?” Larry could visualize his older brother drop-
ping everything and charging to his rescue, and felt a lit-
tle better. The next, hesitating message from Peter struck
him numb.
- “Chris tried to come up too fast when I told him you
were caught,” said Peter. “He fouled his lines somehow,
but he says he’ll be clear any minute, and to hold on.”
“Hold on!” screamed Larry. “What else can I do? I’m
helpless. Tell Chris to come. Tell him to come.” Suddenly
he realized that the water in his helmet was already up
to his mouthpiece. “Can you hear me, Peter?” There was
no answer. He pressed the buzzer, and Peter came on, ask-
ing him if he could do anything. “Can you hear me?” he
repeated, but the words did not get through.
For a long period, Larry lay there, his ﬁsts clenched,
sobbing helplessly. Peter kept talking reassuringly, but
Larry had stopped listening. If only he had let Chris drive
the tunnel. If only Sam Dougherty had not run out on
them. If only he had stayed at school. This was a crazy


72~—-—-----‘-----‘-—--‘-—--~-—-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘‘‘-‘-=Treasures
business, anyway, dragging logs out of Puget Sound. His
mother was right. She’d always been afraid something like
this would happen. His mother! He began to cry and
moan. But this spell ran out, and he recovered a little. He
began to count, very slowly . . . but he’d get to the for-
ties and forget whether or not he had skipped the thirties.
He prayed. He had been as religious as most boys . . .
he knew dozens of prayers by heart . . . but none of
them came to him now. He talked directly to the Al-
mighty. He didn’t say: “Save me and I’ll be a better boy,”
or “I’ll go to church every day.” He said only, “Get me
out of this, God. God, please get me out of this. Please,
Please.” He felt a little more calm.
The water was so deep now in his helmet that he had
to twist his head to one side to breathe. As his exhausted
emotions quieted, he realized that Peter was reiterating
over and over the same question to him on the earphone.
“Shall I step up the pressure, Larry? Will that help keep
out the water?”
Suddenly he felt a twinge of pity for Peter. In his
inexperience, Peter wouldn’t know what was the correct
thing to do. He must be in an agony of indecision. Think-
ing of Peter instead of himself did more than anything yet
to restore Larry to rational thought. Greater pressure
might help hold back the water. But it would also inﬂate
the diving dress . . . make it harder for Chris to wash
him free. Not an easy decision. He buzzed twice. No.
Maybe as a last resort, but not now.
Peter came on again. “Larry! Chris has surfaced!
He’ll be down in a minute.”
Time dragged on. Larry’s head and shoulders ached
so intolerably with the effort of holding his mouth clear
that he would let his face hang in the water every few
minutes, then raise it again to breathe. There was a loud
clicking in the earphones. They were changing the plugs.
.._.,_..


in the Deptbs—-—---------‘-----—-—--—-—----~—-7 3

Chris’ strong, steady voice ﬁlled the prison of his helmet,
“I’m coming, Larry. Don’t give up.” Good old Chris. No
time wasted on words. Chris would have him out.
But nothing seemed to be happening. Then, suddenly,
came a blow on the lead soles of his boots, followed by a
battering and buffering as the ninety pound pressure jet
played around his legs, his torso, his shoulders. The jet
hit his helmet, and there was a spout of water from that
infernal exhaust valve. The jet stopped. Larry felt Chris
hitch his air and life lines around his ankles. He pushed
against the mud with his imprisoned hands, and moved
back an inch. Slowly he slid out of the new tunnel Chris
had dug.
Larry didn’t even realize he had reached the trench till
he felt Chris freeing his lines. Chris helped him to his feet,
and as Larry clung to him, the water in his helmet poured
down inside his dress until it was up to his chest. Larry was
only partly conscious as Chris put the down line in his
hand. Chris inﬂated his own dress to the danger point to
provide extra buoyancy for Larry’s ﬂooded rig.
As Larry struggled up the ladder on the Chinook,
with Peter and the Miller boys hauling him from above,
the water inside his dress dropped to waist level. Andy
Miller held his shoulders, and Peter removed his helmet.
Larry looked dazed. He tried to smile, but his jaw mus-
cles twitched. He walked unsteadily across the deck to the
shelter cabin, where he lay down on a berth. Peter
swathed him in blankets.
Chris kept the others quiet, while Peter heated some
soup. After Larry had downed it, he felt a little stronger.
Then he talked. He had a moment or two of near-hysteria,
but conquered it. Gradually his nerves quieted; his narra-
tive slowed; and then in mid-sentence he was asleep.


CHAPTER 77

There was a strange constraint
among the brothers next day, when it came time to resume
operations. Oddly enough, Chris was readier to quit than
Larry. But Peter resolved the matter by the way he put it.
“lf the job’s too much for us, maybe we should hire some
outside divers.” Neither Chris nor Larry was prepared to
admit defeat to that extent.
“It was one of those odd combinations of bad
breaks,” admitted Chris. “There wasn’t a chance in a hun-
dred that the barge would slip just then; and not a chance
in a hundred that l’d pick that same moment to get
fouled up. But both had to happen at once.”
“The worst of it is,” said Larry, “the barge is still
down there. We still haven’t gotten a tunnel under it, and
it’s one day less before the extension on our loan runs out.
Talking won’t raise that barge.”
So they went down again. Chris wanted to drive the
tunnel, but they compromised by taking turns. The hole
Chris had driven to rescue Larry was still open, and this
time the operation went exactly as it should.
@_
74


Treasures in the -Depths-— ---------------------------------------- - <75

With everything clicking, they got the cables under
the barge, the pontoons in place, and sealed all of the deck
openings in the hull. Air was pumped through hoses into
the hull and into the four pontoons, forcing out the water
with which they were ﬁlled. It was a tricky business, be-
cause any inequalities in lift could capsize the barge and
set them back in worse shape than when they started. The
deeply embedded barge was held not only by its weight,
but also by the suction underneath it. Jets were used again
to try to break the suction by getting water between the
bottom of ‘the barge and the muck. Neither Chris nor
Larry cared to do much more tunneling.
The time came for the raising. Their breaths held to
the point of pain, they waited and watched the bursting
bubbles, the froth of mud, and then . . . the barge broke
the surface and ﬂoated with its deck barely awash.
But what a mess! It looked as if it would take a
month just to scrape off the scum and slime. They had
just twelve days to fulﬁll their contract.
Standing knee deep in the muck, they went to work,
trying to reassure one another that it wasn’t so bad. They
started at the bow and worked aft, elbow deep in mud,
taking time out only occasionally to grin at one another’s
horrible appearance. First they used shovels; then power
hoses; then rags, brooms, scrapers. They didn’t work any
special hours—they worked them all, night and day.
They were all exhausted, Peter especially. Chris tried
to get Peter to break off, but he would not. Despite all
his hard topside work, he never completely lost the feel-
ing that Chris and Larry were carrying a bigger share of
the burden than he. In this ﬁlthy job of cleaning the barge
and restoring its equipment, Peter actually did more work
than any one of them, in spite of his lack of robustness.
The strain was telling . . . Peter was drawing on his last
reserves.


76- ------------------------------------------------------------ - Treasures

Events were timed for a Hollywood climax. There
was barely time after the crane barge was clean and in
operation to get a load of logs up and make their dead-
line. Chris and Larry got ready to go down.
They had ﬁgured that about twenty-eight logs
would make up their load. There wouldn’t be time for
more, anyway. Each diver thus had to attach seven cables,
two logs to a line. Larry passed up the ﬁrst few he lo-
cated. Two were rotten with teredos, three more were
puny. Then he hit a batch of beauties, all of them over
three feet across and solid as a rock. Peter called down
through the phone: “How you doing, Pappy?”
“Fine. Swell. How about you and the clock?” an-
swered Larry.
“Get going—ti1ne’s a-wasting.”
In a little over an hour, Larry had six cables attached,
with one more to go. Peter told him that Chris had ﬁn-
ished and was surfacing. Larry was whistling to himself
in his helmet, feeling that at last they were over the hump.
A ﬁve-foot sand shark swam up to give him the once over.
He slapped it on the snout and told it to ﬁnd another play-
mate—he was busy.
There was his last log—a whopper that must have
measured close to four feet across. It was one of a heap
of logs. As Larry moved toward it, he saw a pile of
empty shells and other debris, and, looking closely, the
snake-like arm of an octopus.
Larry had seen plenty of octopuses—they were an
old story. Most were small, and they had scuttled back to
their hiding places. But Larry wanted that last log, octopus
or no octopus. The devil-ﬁsh would undoubtedly have
preferred to keep away from Larry, but when Larry
twisted the cable around the beam of the log—disturbing
the octopus’ very nest, it decided that was too much. It
swarmed over the diver.


in the Depths-------—--‘--‘‘‘-‘-~--—----------~77

Larry wasn’t much alarmed. Peter called him, “What’s
the matter, Larry? What’s tugging on your line?”
“Octopus,” said Larry.
“Come on up,” ordered Peter, who had heard Chris
and Larry talk of seeing octopuses, but had never encoun-
tered one himself.
“In a minute,” said Larry. “This is my last log. Okay.
Now haul me up, and get set on deck. I’m bringing com-
pany.”
The octopus was not a particularly big one. Larry
was in no special danger, and knew it. But when Peter
saw Larry with the ugly creature clinging to him like a
monstrous spider sprawled over its victim, he grabbed an
axe and attacked it so savagely that Chris had to take the
axe from him by force, lest he injure Larry too.
They all laughed at the incident, but Peter’s laughter
was weak. Peter looked sick, and Chris ordered him be-
low to his bunk. They got the logs aboard, and headed
for the Imperial Pulp and Paper docks. Mr. Norton saw
them from his oﬂice window, and came out to greet them.
It was a great moment—everyone jubilant—triumphant-
except Peter. Peter was really sick.


CHAPTER 72

With equipment restored, Chris
and Larry were able to deliver several loads to Imperial
Pulp and Paper. Initially, they selected the most favorable
locations, where they knew the choicest logs were to be
found close together, and where the haul to the company
docks was shortest. They were skimming the cream. Op-
erations gradually became slower as they began to work
the bottom more intensively, and to move farther from
their base.
They were all concerned about Peter, who was not
responding to medical treatment as rapidly as he should.
Larry therefore was rebellious when Chris began propos-
ing more and more insistently that he return to the
Sparling School and complete his training in advanced un-
derwater techniques.
“Work will slow down to a crawl if I go,” he pro-
tested. “With Peter laid up and me in school, only one
diver on the bottom and the Miller boys, who are still
pretty green, on top, you aren’t going to bring in much
money.”
78


80-—---—-—-‘—‘-‘-‘-‘-------------—~—~——---—-Treasures
lumberjacking will be over. We can keep on diving. We
may even be able to have our own company and work for
ourselves instead of for wages. But who knows what kind
of diving we’ll be doing? That’s why you’ve got to learn
as much as possible.” Chris paused a moment, then said,
“I’ll tell you a secret, Larry. I’ve been tempted to go
down to the Sparling School myself and take a refresher
course. That’s impossible now, and anyway, I can learn
some of the new angles on this business from you after
you’ve ﬁnished.”
The idea that he could ever teach his idolized older
brother anything struck Larry as ludicrous, but he could
see the force of Chris’ reasoning. He would go.
Another family conference was held that night. Al-
ways close-knit, the Cahills had become even more closely
tied to one another during their joint logging enterprise.
There was no question of letting Peter go off by himself.
They would sell out, and they’d all go together. There
weren’t even many regrets. They hadn’t been licked by
the job. They’d proved they could do it. And they even
had some small capital.
The big problem was, where should they go to ﬁnd
a place suitable for Peter’s recovery, that would at the
same time offer a chance for Chris and Larry to use their
diving skills? They reviewed the opportunities. There
were many for unattached men. Calls for divers were
coming from all parts of the world, and a diver who
wanted to see the odd corners of the globe would have no
diﬂiculty doing so on an expense account. Living condi-
tions under these circumstances are not ideal. Divers on
extended operations usually live on ships, boats and barges
which offer few comforts. However, in addition to good
earnings, the profession offers to the man who wants it
freedom from ordinary workday routine, and satisﬁes the
masculine quest for adventure and the unusual. Never


in the DepthS-.-.-.-.-.-.-_-_-.-_---_--_-_-_-_-.-_-_-.-.-.-.s1

before in history had divers been so much in demand as
in the early Post-War years, or paid so highly.
Lloyds of London has a record of all sunken ships
lying in 100 fathoms or less—that is, theoretically prac-
ticable for salvage. There are well over a thousand of
them sunk as a result of the past war, as well as those lost
through war and natural hazards for ages back. Bridge
construction and maintenance; underwater pipe lines;
demolition; recovery of lost articles; police work, includ-
ing recovery of bodies, murder weapons, narcotics, and
other evidence; building and inspecting dams; sponge and
abalone ﬁshing; harvesting agar; ship repair to avoid dry-
docking; recovering of sunken treasure—these are some
of the tasks which insure the diver against unemployment.
Many divers work for large companies, but theirs is a
trade which permits a man to go into business for himself
if he desires, from “mining” gold at the mouths of Alaskan
streams to gathering agar—a deep-sea alfalfa which has
many uses and brings as much as $85 a ton. In good
weather, a diver can gather a ton a day, though it’s not all
proﬁt, since he must maintain a boat and crew. -
Even on wages, a diver does very well indeed, though
of course pay varies according to locality. Rates range
from $30 per day for a diver without equipment working
in shallow water, to $200 to $300 per day for a diver
using his own equipment and working in deep water. As
in other highly paid professions, the best trained and most
experienced men get the most money and the best jobs.
Lt. Cross of the Sparling School has received as much
at $625 per day for placing 2% tons of demolition ex-
plosive in a wreck in ﬁve days. On another job, involving
a dive of 240 feet in icy water into a jagged plane wreck,
he received $460 per day with all equipment, tender and
expenses paid as well. Yet another time, he was paid $4,100
for thirteen days of particularly deep and hazardous div-


in the pepitS-7-.-----.-_---_------.--------~ss

at ten billion barrels, or one-third of the present known
reserve.
The Cahills reviewed all of these possibilities, and
ﬁnally settled on Florida. The climate would be ideal for
Peter; there was sponge ﬁshing, though that was a hard
ﬁeld for strangers to break into; there were many tor-
pedoed ships in the Gulf and West Indies region. There
were, as Larry pointed out with sparkling eyes, more
sunken treasure ships in that area than anywhere else on
earth. And Chris was acquainted with the area from his
Coast Guard service.
“You didn’t happen to run into any treasure ships
when you were in the Caribbean, did you, Chris?” asked
Larry.
“Not even one,” laughed Chris.
“No pirate maps, even? No mysterious sunken hulks
you stumbled on?” Larry was joking, but Chris had a sur-
prise for him.
“I did ﬁnd one wreck that nobody else in Puerto Rico
seemed to know existed,” said Chris. “Ran across it when
we were helping the Air Force recover some practice tor-
pedoes.”
“Honestly?” demanded Larry. “You’re not making
this up?”
“No,” said Chris. “I really did ﬁnd one. The skipper
marked it on his chart, and we tried to ﬁnd some record
of it back in San Juan, but there didn’t seem to be any.
In the Mona Passage, it was; between Mona Isle and His-
paniola.”
“Hispaniola!” Larry yelped. “That was the name of
Jim Hawkins’ ship, in Trearure Island!” He was really
excited now.
“Don’t blow your top, Larry,” Chris laughed. “This
was no Spanish galleon. The water is deep there, and all I
saw was the truck of her mast and an outline of her shape.


r
CHAPTER 73

The transition from the Puget
Sound country, which lies about as far to the northwest
as you can go in the United States, to the Florida Keys,
which is as far to the southeast as you can go, was an
exciting but not entirely comfortable experience for the
Cahill family.
The Cahills wanted to locate at least semi-permanent
quarters. With the Florida resort season just starting,
housing was impossible to ﬁnd except at prohibitive rates
—even at this distance from the main resorts. They stayed
temporarily in a motel, but were uncomfortable among
the people they met.
The turning point came unexpectedly, rising out of
an incident at a nearby restaurant to which the Cahills
had gone one sultry evening. There was a bar at the en-
trance—a feature which did not recommend the place
to Mrs. Cahill, but it was the only inexpensive restaurant
near their lodgings. She was encouraged, too, when an
elderly but vigorous gentleman accompanied by two girls,
apparently his daughters, took a table near them. He was
85


86-------_-'--‘—-‘--7--—---------—--‘-‘-‘-Treasures

a handsome man, wearing casual clothes with an air that
gave them distinction. One look at the girls made all three
Cahill boys sit up straighter in their chairs, smooth back
their hair, and become very careful of their table manners.
A noisy group of young men in the bar began by
their antics to disturb the diners across the hallway. With
a start Larry recognized Max Gsovski among them. He
looked Larry straight in the eye, without a glimmering of
recognition. Larry was satisﬁed. He would have felt em-
barrassed and ashamed if Max had spoken to him in the
presence of those two pretty girls.
The group in the bar were making a great show of
being tough. They were not unaware of the two girls in
the dining room, and were obviously trying to impress
them. The remarks began to become louder and rougher
and aimed more directly at the girls. Their father ﬂushed,
pushed back his chair, and started to rise. The Cahill boys
were up ﬁrst.
“Perhaps it would be better if we handled this,” said
Chris respectfully. Chris was completely calm. He seldom
had to endure physical attack or even threats. Looking at
Chris’ bulging muscles, heavy chest and shoulders, and
determined chin, most men were content to thank heaven
for having made him good-natured.
The boys entered the bar, and Chris turned on the
four men. “You’re going to cut this out right now—with
no more conversation.”
The proprietor, who had been cowed by the four
toughs, now plucked up courage when the Cahills inter-
vened, and advanced with a rolling pin in his fat ﬁst. He
didn’t look particularly formidable, but the crew of cooks
and dishwashers he had mustered in the kitchen did. “I
called the police on you,” he shouted excitedly. “You
better get out fast.” They did—not quietly, not without
threats, but not slowly either. The proprietor took Chris’
M
—i


88=-‘--—-—---‘--‘-‘--‘-‘—~‘-"‘—~-—--"‘-—-=Treasures

Chris alone had retained his energy and determi-
nation. His hope now was to ﬁnd a boat in which the Ca-
hills could live, yet which would also be usable for shal-
low water diving. This was a tall order, for a good diving
boat has certain features not easy to ﬁnd.
In this respect, Mr. Currier was a tremendous help.
He knew every boatyard on the Coast, and a high pro-
portion of the available craft. Chris was scrupulous in
accepting the advice and recommendations of Mr. Cur-
rier, because he recognized the man’s great knowledge
of the subject, and his astonishingly exact appreciation of
the qualities necessary in a boat to be used by a diver.
After a week of futile search, Mr. Currier received a
letter from a friend in Fort Lauderdale, describing a boat
that seemed ideal. Chris hired a station wagon, and the
Cahills and Curriers drove up together to examine it. The
boat ﬁt their speciﬁcations perfectly. It was a Chesapeake
Bay “bugeye,” a shoal draft schooner at least ﬁfty years
old, but apparently still sound. Her history made her even
more desirable. She was named the Hannah P. Pettin-
gale, a name which amused Mrs. Cahill and shocked Larry,
who immediately began to think up more appropriate
names. The Pettingale had been built as an oyster boat,
but had been later purchased and used by the Maryland
police to catch oyster pirates—proof that she was fast and
able. She looked piratical herself, with her bold sheer,
clipper bow, sharp stern, and two tall raking masts. About
sixty feet over-all, she had ample beam—seventeen feet-—
for stability; low topsides, which would make it easy to
rig diving ladders and stages; heavy scantlings which
would support the weight of a compressor and other
heavy equipment needed for diving; broad uncluttered
decks for the many activities of the divers and topside
men. She still had one of her cargo holds, providing ample
M


in the Depths—--—--‘----—----—-----—------—-—-=89
storage room; and the extreme rake of her masts which
gave her the look of a privateer would make it easy to rig
booms for hoisting heavy weights.
While Chris was examining the Pettingale’s qualiﬁ-
cations as a practical diving boat, Mrs. Cahill and the Cur-
rier girls were studying the living accommodations. They
were not quite so ideal. There was a small cuddy aft, with
a chart table and two narrow berths, a main saloon with
dining table and settees, four small cabins, a galley and a
head. As far as space went, it was adequate, but it was
rough and dirty, and littered with odds and ends of equip-
ment, tools and the refuse of ships’ carpentry. However,
Mrs. Cahill was just the person to conquer a mess of that
kind.
The Pettingale was owned by a syndicate of four
men who had planned to sail her around the world. They
had moved her to Florida, rebuilt her heavy hull, sheathed
her bottom with copper, but had run out of money be-
fore they could complete reﬁtting of her sails, rigging, or
auxiliary engine. The four men were now bickering
among themselves and the Pettingale was put up for sale.
Chris would have bought her on the spot in a burst of
unusual enthusiasm, but Mr. Currier insisted on a pro-
fessional survey. “A boat as old as this is liable to have
dry rot in her somewhere, and dry rot is like cancer. That
copper sheathing on her bottom is ﬁne for tropical water,
but we’d better have some of it off to be sure the teredos
haven’t been in her before they put it on.”
“We know about the teredos, don’t we, Chris,” re-
marked Larry, thinking of their Port Hemlock experience.
The marine surveyor gave his grudging approval of
the hull, though he was frankly scornful of the spars and
rigging.
“Masts might stay up if you renew all the standing


90- ---------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures in the Depths

rigging,” he grumbled, “but them spars and sails and run-
ning rigging is worthless. Better check the sheaves in all
the blocks, too.”
The price was not low. “They say money isn’t worth
as much nowadays,” Chris remarked ruefully, “but it
doesn’t seem to have gone altogether out of style around
here.” But she was so ideally suited to their requirements
that Chris, after some long bargaining and a slight con-
cession on the price, ﬁnally nodded his head. “We’ll take
her.”
“You’ve got a real boat, Chris,” Mr. Currier told
him. Larry was almost jumping with delight. “When can
we move aboard?” he demanded.
“I’d suggest you bring her down to Key Largo and
ﬁt out there,” said Mr. Currier. “You can berth near me,
and I know just the man to help you on the rigging. It’ll
cost a lot less than having the work done in a shipyard.”
“When can we bring her down?” Larry wanted to
know.
Chris looked doubtfully at the rusty shrouds and
stays, and the dirty gray canvas of her sails. “Think we
could move her the way she is now?” he asked Mr. Cur-
ner.
“I think so, if the engine will run, and you pick your
weather. Matter of fact, this would have been a good day
—the wind’s fair. If you want to stay here and come
down tomorrow, I’ll drive Mrs. Cahill back to Key Largo
and return the car.”
“What do you say, Mother?” asked Chris.
“I’m agreeable,” Mrs. Cahill answered. “Only I’m
going along on the maiden voyage, if Mr. Currier will
return the car.” . -1
So it was arranged. . .


CHAPTER 74

Getting the Hannah P. Pettin-
gale ready to sail proved anything but easy. In their
enthusiasm for her good qualities, the brothers had un-
consciously minimized the deplorable state of all elements
of motive power, alow and aloft. While Mrs. Cahill was
trying to bring enough order out of the chaos below for
them to sleep aboard that night, Chris tackled the greasy
giant that ﬁlled the engine room. Larry and Peter tried
to make sense of her running and standing rigging.
The principal handicap for Larry and Peter was ig-
norance. They were both experts at handling power
boats; they knew something of marine engines and what
made them tick; but their experience in sailing craft was
limited to the small sloops they had fooled around with
on Puget Sound. The maze of heavy rigging on the Pettin-
gale dismayed them both.
There was no chance of getting away the next day;
too many essential tasks were uncompleted. This proved
fortunate, for Mr. Currier arrived in the morning to see
them leave, and decided to stay over and make the trip
91


9 . ~- -----—-‘——-—--—---------—--—--‘-‘-‘-vTreasures

1

with them. His encyclopedic knowledge of sailing and
rigging was to prove a godsend.
By the following morning, Chris had the engine run-
ning at a fairly respectable cadence, though it would still
give an occasional hop and skip when he opened the
throttle. They decided to cast off. Their departure was
quiet and uneventful, except when they parted a stern
line, tore off a fender, uprooted a few feet of rubstrake,
and narrowly missed ramming a spanking new yacht
which only a Texas billionaire could afford. All because
of a stalled engine at the most critical moment. It seemed
an ill omen for the trip, but things went smoothly for the
ﬁrst few hours.
As the Pettingale moved majestically through a draw-
bridge while dozens of motorists gaped or impatiently
honked, the bridge tender favored them with a sour
glance. “H-A-N-N-A-H P. P-E-T-T-I-N-G-A-L-E”
he painstakingly spelled out in a loud and disapproving
voice, “Holy Cow, what a name for a boat!” He stared
accusingly at Larry, who was stationed at the ship’s wheel
and, until then, feeling like John Paul Jones.
This name business had to be settled. “Chris, how
about Iolly Roger?” Larry demanded.
“Who’s he?” Mrs. Cahill wanted to know.
“ ‘jolly Roger’ was what the buccaneers used to call
their ﬂag--the skull and crossbones,” Peter explained.-
“The name sounds innocent enough, but let’s leave
out the skeletons,” said Mrs. Cahill.
“Larry’s still daydreaming about the pirate treasure,”
said Chris. “But I don’t mind the name if Mother and
Peter agree.”
“It’s appropriate enough for this area,” volunteered
Mr. Currier. “Don’t be so cynical about treasure ships,
Chris. These are the real treasure waters, oﬂ the Keys, in


(English and C
|
Complete deep sea diving dress. From top clockwise: helmet, helmet
cushion, diver’s telephone, combination life line and telephone cable
(coiled), diver’s glove with wrist strap, weighted belt with harness,
heavy lead shoes, woolen socks, 'wo0len underwear, knife and case,
glove. To right of glove is air control valve. Beside diving dress is 3 ft.
whip to connect control valve to helmet; above glove is air hose and
air compressor. In center, diving dress.
v
|
108
-*1


A log raft b€l72Q' toued down-
uver znto a harbor.
(The Lmnbrrman)

.>.”!._ .9.» L. 1% ’

The Chinook, a typical heavy duty power boat of the Puget Sound
t17'€ll.
-T‘ _ W~


Chris going down to inspect the


(English and Cross)
Larry hits the bottom on his ﬁrst
‘ dive.
_ _ T1 —7 — -

sunken barge, as Sam tends the
lines.
(EMOII ch and Cros
€_..


(English and Cross)
Lieut. Cross inspecting and instr
ucting students
be _ I . . . . .
fore toezr ﬁrst (elznzznatzon) dive
(English mid Cross)
Lieut. E. R. Cross of the
Sparling School of Deep Sea
Diving.
(English and Cross)
The Sparling School’s training tank. An instructor checks
the students’ ‘
performances and grades them.


?
1


i


.,
IQAIOLII
The \Vrangler, a C0’lI'U€'I‘I€d crash boat.
.
, . _ .. . ,,, .~

\~\§- <9'~
(.ll[urincrs' illuscunz, .\'ctt'[*0rt .\'c7.xt, I11.)
The Jolly Roger under full sail. The heavy construction, shoal draft and
stability of this bugeye make her ideal for diving.
P.~ ‘ - *


W
77
Larry “bio as up at
llona Island


(English and Cross)


(bnglish and Lross)
Larry, about to submerge
with a l.70l’lI7’lIIC"l', adjusts his
air intake.


94»‘‘‘‘-‘—---‘--‘-—--‘-‘-—‘‘-‘‘‘-‘-‘-‘—‘-‘-‘-‘‘‘--‘-—-Treasures

gold and silver bars and coin, has lain since 1799 between
the islands of Vlieland and Terschelling, off the coast of
Holland.
Great wealth still lies in the harbor of Vigo, Spain,
as a result of an attack by a British ﬂeet in 1702 on seven-
teen treasure ships laden with gold and silver in coins and
great ingots. Due to the War of the Spanish Succession,
this treasure had been allowed to accumulate in Porto
Bello and Cartagena during three years. According to Mr.
Currier, modern estimates set the value at $150,000,000.
Thirteen galleons went to the bottom. A good deal of
gold and silver has been recovered, but even more remains
in the clutches of the sea. Jules Verne, in his Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, describes an imaginary
salvage of the gold of Vigo Bay by his hero, Captain
Nemo. Most of the precious metal is still there.
In 1798, a British sloop of war, the Braak was
caught in a sudden squall in Old Kiln Roads, off Cape
Henlopen, Delaware. There happened one of those sud-
den tragedies that darkened the days of sail. The Braak
capsized and sank in ninety feet of water, carrying with
her a fortune in gold captured from ﬁve rich galleons-
estimated at ten million dollars.
A more recent treasure lies in the SS Merida, sunk
in a collision in 1911 off Cape Charles, Va. The Merida
carried in her purser’s safes bullion, specie and jewels
worth almost ﬁve million dollars belonging to the Mexi-
can tyrant Porﬁrio Diaz, who was ﬂeeing from the revo-
lutionary forces of Madero. The Merida was actually
located in two hundred feet of water by a Danish diver
named Fred Nielsen, who identiﬁed her positively. The
discovery was followed by a terriﬁc storm, which must
have shifted the wreck, and it has never been found
again.
1 -


in the Depths-‘-‘-‘‘‘-‘-------—--‘‘--—---—--—-—-~95
The list went on and on, for Mr. Currier was dealing
with his life’s enthusiasm. “There’s the torpedoed British
vessel Elizabeth'ville,” he told them, “with a cargo of dia-
monds waiting off the coast of Africa. And the Oslander,
which was sunk by an iceberg off Taku Inlet in Alaska,
with ﬁve million in Klondike gold.”
Fort Knox, he told them, is a small boy’s piggy bank
compared to Davy Jones’ hoard. Experts say that there
are 260 billion dollars in treasure strewn along the coasts
of the North and South American continents.
He told them how, in 1951, an alert yachtsman
spotted ancient, coral encrusted cannon in shallow water
off the coast of Florida. Underwater inspection disclosed
the remains of three vessels, estimated to have come to
grief in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. You
can imagine what happened next. Many relics, including
the ancient cannon, have been recovered. “Treasure?”
Mr. Currier blinked. “Quién sabe?”
He related how, in the early spring of 1949, William
Cottrell, a retired ﬁsherman, picked up a golden doubloon
on the beach at Highlands, N.J. More coins were found
—a total of twenty-four, probably tossed on the beach
in a dredging operation, or swept from a disintegrating
wreck. Not long ago an American sailor discovered a
skeleton half buried on the beach of Grand Canyon in
the Bahamas, with a dagger in its back. Nearby natives
for years have been picking up occasional gold pieces on
this stretch of sand. “There must be a treasure ship some-
where off this beach,” said Mr. Currier. “How’d you like
to go look for it?”
Chris, who was the only one of the Cahills not com-
pletely enchanted by this discourse, laughed. “I’ve heard
rumors about an American deep sea diver who has his
own private galleon. Rather than salvage the complete

i


96=‘‘--‘-‘-?-‘------‘---—-—-‘-—‘‘‘‘‘‘-‘-‘‘‘-Treasures


treasure and lose nearly all of it in conﬁscatory taxes, he
brings up only enough gold each year for his needs,
which, however, are not modest.”
Mr. Currier nodded sagely. “lt’s perfectly possible.
And many new treasures have been added to the list
during the past war. The U.S. Army dumped 81/2 million
dollars in silver coin into the sea off Corregidor, to keep
it from the Japanese. Some has been salvaged, but a for-
tune still lies on the bottom. A Central European govern-
ment threw several million dollars into the Black Sea to
keep it from the greedy clutches of the Nazis. At last
reports it is still there. What are we waiting for?”
Chris smiled. “l’m waiting for a chance to make an
honest living. If any treasure comes my way, I’ll be per-
fectly happy to pick it up. But I know better than to go
looking for it.”
Mr. Currier regarded Chris steadily. “I’ll tell you
something no one knows but Mona and Linda. I know
where there’s a wrecked frigate. It’s not a matter of phony
maps or deathbed secrets told by supposed survivors.
I’ve stood inside her, and I’ve recovered quite a few relics
from her.”
Larry was so engrossed he almost ran the Iolly Roger
into a passing boat. Even Chris lost his cynicism.
“You really mean it?” he demanded.
“It’s absolutely true,” said Mr. Currier. “Of course,
there’s no treasure—.” Four hearts fell with a thump. Mr.
Currier looked embarrassed.
“I didn’t mean to lead you on and then disillusion
you,” he said. “There may once have been treasure in the
wreck, but if there was, it was recovered by someone—
probably survivors of the wreck. We were out ﬁshing,
the girls and I, trolling for mutton snappers. Mona was
at the wheel, and Linda and I were ﬁshing. I was watch-
ing the bright-colored little ﬁsh swimming among the


in the Depths ------------------------------------------------------- - 97
sea ferns and the clumps of lettuce coral when the reef
ended and the bottom fell away. As my eyes got adjusted
to the greater depths, I suddenly saw what looked like
huge logs, about ﬁve or six fathoms down, all crusted with
coral and waving sea fern. They were scattered roughly
in two rows, and I counted forty of them. I knew they
were ancient ship’s cannon!”
Mr. Currier’s eyes were bright as he savored again
the thrill of that magic moment. “What puzzled me at
ﬁrst,” he continued, “was that I’d ﬁshed that same reef
many times—it was a favorite place of mine, because not
many boats go there, and sometimes I like to be alone.
I knew I’d been in the same spot before, and that those
cannon weren’t visible. You know how coral is—all
curved and convoluted. The straight lines of those cannon
couldn’t be missed. Then I remembered that we’d had
a terrible storm from the southeast since the last time I
had ﬁshed that reef. The seas must have roiled up the
sand, and bottom currents carried it away. The cannon
were there all the time. That’s why I’m so sure that, if
there ever was any treasure, it was recovered around the
time of the wreck.
“Well, the girls and I were fairly bursting with our
secret, but we’ve managed to keep it. We all took up skin
diving. At ﬁrst we just looked for gold bar or coins, but
when we became sure that there wasn’t a real treasure,
we started collecting other souvenirs and got a good price
for them. I have some of them on the Princessa, including
a couple of swords, some buttons, and a few coins—one
of them an onza—you know, those funny looking eight-
sided Spanish coins. I’ll show them to you. VVhat I’d like
to do now is to raise some of the cannon.”
Larry let out his breath. “Gosh, what a wonderful
break to ﬁnd it, even if there wasn’t any treasure,” he
said.


—‘>——- “I*. — '~


in the Depths ------------------------------------------------------- - -99

Mona,’ after the island, because I had so many happy
memories of it, barren though it is. That’s where I really
began my interest in treasure seeking. I don’t know how
many days I’ve spent on Mona Island looking for treasure.
I suppose you know that the pirate, William Jennings,
buried the loot from scores of Spanish ships on Mona
Island? Some of it is believed to have been raised by an
expedition in 1939. Why, Puerto Rico was attacked many
times by pirates in the old days. St. Thomas, which was
the major pirate rendezvous, is only a few miles from
Puerto Rico. Captain Kidd sailed from St. Thomas on his
last voyage North, just before he was taken and hanged.
But getting back to the present, I have lots of connections
in Puerto Rico and Havana and the Dominican Republic.
Suppose I try to identify the ship? You can’t give me a
more accurate description, or even guess how old she
might be?”
“As best I can remember, she was about 1500 tons;
not very big. The angle of her funnel, and the lines of the
bridge and superstructure were deﬁnitely old-fashioned.
I’d guess she was built maybe seventy-ﬁve years ago. But
that’s only a wild guess.”
“She could have been sunk during the Spanish-
American War,” said Mr. Currier. “But no, there’d be a
record if she were sunk by naval action. Suppose I look
into it? I’d really like to. You’ve guessed by now that
treasure hunting is the great passion of my life.”
“You know, Mr. Currier,” said Chris with a laugh,
“I was puzzled about how you knew so accurately what
the requirements were for a good boat for diving. You’ve
explained it yourself. You’re a diver, too.”
_ “Not really, Chris. The girls and I do some shallow
water skin diving, with aqua lungs, but I’ve never been
down deep, nor ever been in regulation diving dress.”
By this time, the Iolly Roger had proceeded south-


100 -------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures in the Depths
wards through Biscayne Bay, leaving Miami astern, swal-
lowed in a shimmering haze. Peter lay prone in the
waist, squinting idly through a scupper at the cool, trans-
lucent world below. Larry was back at the wheel after a
short relief, while Chris and Mr. Currier pored over
charts. They passed Featherbed Bank and the beginning
of the Florida Keys.
In brilliant moonlight, they crossed into Florida Bay,
a shallow island-dotted part of the Gulf of Mexico, and
with a fair breeze and a following sea, charged down on
their destination.
With sails neatly furled and the engine purring qui-
etly at half speed, they ghosted up the canal and docked
just below the Princessa. Mona and Linda Currier ran
down to catch the lines, calling compliments on the salty
appearance of the Iolly Roger, and laughing over the
name still painted on her trailboards, Hannah P. Pettingale.

-‘ ‘~


<1’
/7
re
.
CHAPTER 75

Reﬁtting the Iolly Roger be-
gan at once. The Cahills’ capital was dwindling fast, and
Chris was .a;n_rioju,s ,-to reyisre sahgiage business. They
were not» fooiisl.i-‘er:1oi1glr to"t1:y:2to' do everything them-
selves, as;it ;wQuld have taltenitf-.¢,m7”1ontl§s. The char-
acters ti1'ey..go't'Tto..l1elp tlmem-we‘1’e'=a weird .lot, but they
had to take what they could get. Larry was reminded
again of Treasure Island, and the crew of pirates so inno-
cently recruited by Squire Trelawney for the Hispaniola.
The ship’s carpenter they hired was the oddest of
the lot. He had an extraordinary face, much too small
for his immense skull. His hair was as coarse as rope yarn,
and grew not only on his head, but on and in his ears,
formed a thick stubble over his chin and neck, and
blended into a fur mat on his chest. Out of this circle of
hair peered a face the size of a child’s, with small, half-
closed, almost Oriental eyes, a ﬂattened pug-nose, and a
misshapen mouth which he kept half-open, revealing the
absence of four front teeth. The body which supported
this queer head and face was exceptionally strong. His
L.) ~
101


1 0 2 ---~—-—----=-—--------—-—-—--—-----Treasures

long arms dangled far down his legs, and his back, with-
out having a hump, was round as a shell. He must have
measured a yard and a half from shoulder to shoulder.
He told them he was called “Chips,” and, when Chris
asked for his last name, said, “ ‘Chips’ will do. I’ll take
my pay in cash.” He was a good carpenter, his rates were
not high, and he did his work quietly, without intruding
on the Cahills. Yet they never felt quite comfortable when
Chips was aboard.
The rigger, Benjamin, was as different from Chips
as the antique-looking Iolly Roger was from the sleek,
modern Princessa. Benjamin was a talker. He would tackle
any subject that happened to be around, anything from
the aspect ratio of the Iolly Roger’s rig to the French
troubles in Morocco. Benjamin didn’t always know a
great deal about the subjects he would bring up, but no
one could accuse him of holding back an opinion on that
account. ._'_‘y-'; _; ::-
v J -_‘
He was'also an inveterate liar. This habit was upset-
ting to Chris;:b11t-'Mrs..C.ahill§offered a‘ charitable expla-
nation. Perhapsflike-some-men, she said,’ he told the truth
except when the truth was unpleasant. If he embroidered
his personal adventures, that might be only because his
real experiences were dull; he knew it, and he wanted to
make them more entertaining for his listeners’ sake. As
in other claims, Benjamin’s right to the title of rigger was
somewhat less than his performance would indicate, but
he could do an adequate job if closely supervised.
Smitty, the last of the trio, was a derelict who
claimed to have once been a blacksmith, and later a lock-
smith. He was small, almost delicate, with an old, sly,
withered face. A more unlikely looking person to work
with metals would be hard to imagine; but the gammon
and hance irons he made for the Iolly Roger (all of whose
ﬁtting were non-standard and had to be specially made)


in the 1)eptaS-_--_-_-_--_-_--_-_-_-_--_--_-_-_--_-.-_-.-g1oz

were almost works of art. He made a masthead band, a
clew iron and a jack iron which were strong without un-
necessary weight, ﬁt exactly, and were ﬁnished so neatly
that even Mr. Currier’s critical eye could ﬁnd no ﬂaw.
Smitty was no talker, especially about himself, but he
seemed to be anxious to ingratiate himself with the Ca-
hills. Without request, he made a complete set of keys for
all the cabin doors, none of which had been provided with
a key. Mrs. Cahill thanked him, but was not won over.
As she remarked to Chris, “I have nothing against the man
but his face, which he can’t help, though it wouldn’t hurt
him to try.”
Larry was completely enraptured with the Iolly
Roger. Her tall raking masts, handsome sheer, and long
low sides were the very embodiment of his conception
of a privateer or pirate. “There’s piracy aplenty in the
history of the bugeye,” Mr. Currier said to him, “and
shanghaiing and violent death, too. But the pirate’s booty
was illegal oysters, not precious jewels or golden ingots.
Death came most often from a fouled dredge line, or
maybe the handles of a run-away winch, not from cut-
lass or bullet. Some of the hard-case skippers of the bug-
eyes, in the days when Baltimore was a big immigrant
port, used to lure new immigrants aboard, work them
and beat them and turn them ashore unpaid at the season’s
end, depending on their victim’s ignorance of the language
and customs to keep them from appealing to the police.”
“How did they ever get the name ‘bugeye’?” Larry
wanted to know.
“There are all sorts of theories on that,” said Mr.
Currier. “Some people believe the name came from the
hawse holes cut in the knight-head, up in the bows, which
are supposed to look like a bug’s eyes. I think it may be
a local corruption of the Scotch word ‘Buckie,’ which
means ‘oyster shell.’ All of the bugeyes were originally
L "


I 04»‘—‘—‘—‘—‘_-""‘-—"—‘—‘—‘—‘‘‘—‘_-"""‘—‘‘‘--‘_-""‘; T73 dS‘ll1'€S

oyster dredges. There’s a boat with a similar sheerline used
in Scotland and called a ‘Buckie.’ ”
The great strength, low sides, shoal draft and
weatherliness of the bugeye which made her ideal for oy-
ster dredging were equally desirable for diving. The bot-
tom was made up of nine logs, which originally must have
been at least eighteen inches square. The keel was ﬁfty
feet long. These bottom timbers were shaped and hol-
lowed with axe and adze, leaving them a foot thick at the
stem and stern posts, and six inches thick along the keel.
The topsides were of heavy strakes on white oak frames.
The whole structure was incomparably strong, even
to the interior of the one remaining cargo hold. Mr. Cur-
rier explained that bugeyes had to be heavy, because the
sharp edges of the oysters dumped aboard would chew a
lightly built craft to pieces.
The Iolly Roger had the traditional rig proportions
of her type—proportions passed down by eye and hand
rather than by mathematics, and preserved in builders’
models rather than in blueprints. The mainmast was the
same length as the deck; the foremast was the deck length
plus ten feet, both masts raked or slanted back two inches
to the foot. The outboard length of the graceful bowsprit
equalled the beam, and the inboard end was the length
of the “bury” of the foremast—the part below deck. All
of these proportions were part of long tradition, and had
hardly changed since the Civil War.
The Iolly Roger carried six sails when under full
canvas. Starting from aft, they were the leg-of-mutton
mainsail, foresail, and a main staysail which ran from
the mainmast head to a point halfway between the deck
and the foremast head; then the fore-staysail, an inner jib
and an outer jib or jib topsail. The “long-head” under
the bowsprit ended in a beautifully carved ﬁgurehead of
an eagle, and the trailboards on either side were decorated
1


in the Depths=-‘-‘-‘---------"‘-‘--‘-‘---—--‘---l05
with elaborate scroll-work. She carried a hefty power
dory on stern davits, and a light dinghy on the cargo
hatch.
Larry enquired of Mr. Currier about the extreme
rake or backward tilt of the masts. “Raking masts make
jibing easier than plumb or straight masts,” Mr. Currier
explained, “and you can drop the sails when you’re run-
ning off the wind. The rake makes it easier to use the
halyard tackles for hoisting nets or cargo—or salvaged
treasure,” he added with a grin. “Besides, you get more
deck-room aboard with raked masts, because the spars
and rigging are kept away from the midship area. The
foremast is stepped well up in the bows, and the center
of effort of the sail is redressed by raking the spar aft. If
the mainmast were straight, it would strike right through
the main cabin, which isn’t too roomy at best. By raking
it, the cabin is kept clear, and the center of effort is
brought aft to preserve a balanced sail plan.”
This utilitarian explanation of the romantically an-
gled masts added rather than detracted from Larry’s love
for the Iolly Roger, and he could certainly see the ad-
vantages when they used the boat for diving.
Both Larry and Chris tried to get odd diving jobs
to help meet expenses until the reﬁt was ﬁnished, and
they could go into business again. Larry’s ﬁrst tropical
dive was made off a nearby Key, where there was a mu-
seum of sunken treasure and relics recovered from the
bottom, and an underwater marine garden frequented by
tourists who would ride over the gardens in glass-bot-
tomed boats. Mr. Currier had sold some relics to the
owner of the museum, and arranged for Larry to substi-
tute for the regular diver on his day off.
Larry felt a little uncomfortable about being an
underwater showman, fumbling around purposelessly on
the bottom in order to give tourists a thrill, but he soon

L


in the Depits--_-_--.-.-.-.---------------1or

coral and has jaws like a crocodile, is a good reason for
not poking around in dark crevasses with bare hands. It
is attracted by white, which is why tropical divers so
often blacken their hands. The twenty-ﬁve foot manta
ray, the giant squid and other sea life of unsavory repu-
tation get a big play in movies and ﬁction, but you almost
never read an authentic news story of attacks on humans.
As a matter of fact, a human being is a pretty sizeable cus-
tomer himself when he’s below the surface; and the most
dangerous moments are when the diver is getting in and
out of the water, when he is comparatively helpless.
Sharks usually turn tail and run when a diver ad-
vances toward them. This goes for the renowned killer
sharks—the tiger, hammerhead, white shark and mako
—as well as the gentler varieties like the nurse shark,
shovel nose and sand shark. Big ﬁsh are more likely to
attack when the diver ﬂees from them, but most attacks
are made by the rare rogue sharks, especially of species
like the white shark, which have gone as much as 20 feet
long.
“How do you tell all the different species of sharks
apart?” Larry asked Mr. Currier.
“It’s not easy,” was the answer. “Take the white
shark for example. He’s dangerous. But he looks very
much like the blue dog shark or the mako, which are less
dangerous. The main difference is in the teeth. The blue
dog and the mako have slim, catlike teeth, while the white
shark has a large array of double—edged, triangular teeth.”
“That’s ﬁne!” said Larry. “That’s just dandy! You
tell them apart by the TEETH! Next time I see one down
below, I’ll just wander over and provoke him till he opens
his mouth. If he has teeth like a cat, I win, and I can
punch him in the nose and chase him away. If the dental
inspection shows those handsome triangular teeth you
talk about, I lose, and he takes away my head or whatever
L


108 ------------------------------------------------------------ - Treasures

part of me looks appetizing. This is sure a handy piece of
information to have!”
“VVhy not feed the sharks in advance with garbage
or something,” wondered Peter. “That would blunt their
appetites, like eating between meals. Reduce the tempta-
tion to snap up a tough morsel like Chris or Larry. The
way they stuff circus lions with food before the lion-
tamer goes in the cage.”
“That would really ﬁx things,” said Mr. Currier. “A
shark never stops being hungry. Dumping garbage over-
board, ﬁshing with a baited hook, or even throwing over
a shiny tin can is like ringing a dinner bell for them. But
the truth is you’ll be bothered more by the less fatal pests;
like the stinging jellyﬁsh, sting rays, scorpionﬁsh, sea
urchins, or, particularly, the Portuguese man-of-war. Re-
member that their tentacles can be ﬁfteen or more feet
down from the body, and the sting hurts like blazes. Stay
clear of them!”
“I will,” promised Larry.
Chris was worried at the difﬁculty he was encounter-
ing in trying to set up a marine salvage business. He was
turning over to his trio of semi-beachcomber ship work-
ers many jobs which he and Larry and Peter could have
done themselves, but he felt that they couldn’t afford in-
deﬁnitely living off their limited capital. They discovered
that most coastal localities had got along without com-
mercial divers for a long time, and it was quite a task for
the Cahills to convince people that many jobs could be
done more quickly, more cheaply, and better by having
a diver. The Florida Keys had no lack of skin divers of
various types, most of them amateur, and most of them
devoted primarily to spear ﬁshing or treasure hunting.
But they often undertook easy salvage jobs at cut rates,
making it hard for anyone to establish a regular business.
Chris covered a lot of ground by rented car, for he
L


in the 1)epibs-_---.-.-.-_---.--_--_--_--_-_-_-_---109

had discovered that mail offers did not produce jobs. His
friendliness and obvious sincerity gradually wore down
some of the wary and reticent old timers, most of whom
looked askance at strangers and divers as “more of them
durn fool treasure hunters.” They began to offer Chris
information on the location of this or that piece of equip-
ment lost “in the big storm of thirty-seven” or some other
memorable disaster. Chris kept a record of these, for fu-
ture use, but he needed immediate jobs of a less specu-
lative nature.
There were some big salvage companies in the area,
too, and Chris found that making friends among them
paid dividends. There were many jobs with which the
bigger companies wouldn’t bother, which were easy for
the Cahills: recovering outboard motors, locating lost
moorings or clearing fouled anchors, raising small boats,
clearing propellers. On some, like hull inspection and pier
work, where the diver does not have to bend over or lie
down, they could dive with just a helmet.
In this method, the helmet is lowered in an upright
position and submerged until the exhaust valve is under
water. The pump is started, the exhaust valve tested for
leaks, a descending line and weight and a diving ladder
placed in position. The diver goes down the ladder and
ducks his head under the water and into the helmet, at
the same time putting his left arm through the loop of the
air hose, and his right through a loop of the line. He holds
down the breastplate with his left hand and the descend-
ing line with the right hand.
This method of diving is inherently dangerous at any
considerable depth, since it’s hard to maintain equilibrium
because of the great weight of the helmet and the buoy-
ancy of the torso and legs. The air rushing into the hel-
met will keep the water level low enough for breathing,
but there is danger of a diver in trouble losing his helmet,
L


112 --------------------------------------- ~ -Treasures in the Depths

South tomorrow in the Princessa, and you boys could
look the job over. Then when the reﬁt of the Iolly Roger
is ﬁnished, we’ll be all ready. What do you say?”
Before anyone could answer, there was a stumbling
sound on the deck outside the companionway, followed
by muﬂled curses. Mr. Currier was on deck in a ﬂash, fol-
lowed by the Cahills. It was their misbegotten crew of
ship repairers: Chips, Benjamin and Smitty. They looked
sheepish and confused and slightly guilty, but Benjamin
recovered quickly. “Just stopped aft for our pay, Cap’n,”
he told Chris. “All through for today, and a good day’s
work is done. We’ll have her shipshape in no time at all, no
time at all!”
Chris paid them, and they all watched them as they
departed at an unusually rapid gait. “Do you suppose they
were eavesdropping?” he asked Mr. Currier.
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” was the reply. “I’d really
be alarmed if there were treasure on my frigate. But it
wouldn’t do to have word of the Dona Isabella noised
about. There are so many treasure-hunters around here
that you’ve got to be secretive, or ﬁnd yourself with half
a dozen boats following you every time you cast off. I
wouldn’t trust that crew around a treasure, but they
haven’t money enough, and probably not sense enough,
to trail us to the frigate. Certainly not for a few bronze
cannon.”
- ~ ~.


CHAPTER 76

The Prineessa cast off shortly
after dawn the next day, with Larry and Chris and the
Curriers aboard. A rebellious Peter had been left behind
with Mrs. Cahill. Chris had been feeling a bit uneasy about
his three workmen since the night before, and felt that
someone besides Mrs. Cahill should be aboard the Iolly
Roger to keep an eye on them.
Mona Currier was at the wheel, anxious to show off
the Prinoessa’s paces to Chris--and, incidentally, to dem-
onstrate her own boat-handling ability. After they had
cleared the passage, Mr. Currier gave Mona a Northerly
course. “I thought the frigate lay to the South,” remarked
Larry.
“Did I say that yesterday?” asked Mr. Currier, look-
ing concerned. “That was -foolish of me. The wreck does
lie to the South, but I never go directly to it. I don’t
want to be followed. We’ll head north, then west, pre-
tending to be ﬁshing. Then we’ll gradually ease south, and
speed up whenever we seem to have the water to our-
selves.”
L
113


1 14 ----------------------------------------------------------- - —Treasures

They set out the tackle, and dropped the outrigger to
ﬁsh. They trolled a little faster than was right for good
ﬁshing, but not so fast as to arouse the suspicions of any
of the half dozen other boats moving on the unquiet blue
sea. There was a ﬂurry of excitement when Mona got
a strike, expertly landed a ﬁve pound barracuda and
blushed at Chris’ unstinting praise. Then Chris himself
landed a kingﬁsh, to praise from Mona which seemed to
Larry more appropriate for a record-breaking marlin
than a twelve pound kingﬁsh. He climbed the Princessa’s
short, heavy mast, ducked into one of the twin lookout
rings, and looked out over the shoal water. A little later,
while Mr. Currier pored over his charts at the wheel, and
took many course bearings at points on shore, Linda
joined Larry at the masthead.
“Don’t want to intrude, but I’ve got to con the boat
over the shoals,” she told Larry.
“You’re never intruding, even if you could on your
own boat. I’ve never really seen these coral shoals before.
Beautiful, aren’t they?” Larry looked over the pastel
tinted shoal patches in the deep blue of the sea.
“Beautiful—and deadly,” said Linda seriously. “Those
coral heads could rip the bottom right out of us, even
though We’re double planked.”
Mr. Currier was leaning out from his pilot’s seat and
scanning the ocean for boats. Trafl-ic had thinned out as
they had moved South. Now there were only a couple of
boats in sight: a sports ﬁsherman on the horizon, almost
rolling her outriggers under, bound off shore; and a black
craft that looked like a commercial ﬁsherman converted
from an Air Force crash boat.
This was Larry’s ﬁrst experience of piloting by eye
among coral shoals. He discovered that it was not as sim-
ple as he had imagined. With the sun high and behind
them, and the surface rippled by a gentle breeze, the deep
_l _


in the Depths~A-‘-‘--‘--‘—-~—---‘-‘-~-‘--‘~—-‘---115

water looked dark blue from aloft, lightening in color as
it shoaled. The edges of the reefs or isolated coral heads
showed a brownish tinge, and over the broad reefs them-
selves the water was a glorious green. All this was easy.
But when the wind disappeared, and especially when the
sun became obscured by a big bank of cumulus clouds, all
he could see was the reﬂection of the sky and clouds star-
ing back at him.
Larry was full of sincere admiration for Linda’s assur-
ance as she called directions to her father. La Princessa
threaded into a charming anchorage at the head of a long,
narrow bay behind a pine-covered reef. They did not an-
chor, but proceeded toward what was apparently a small
underwater pass through the lagoon. A heavy swell was
setting in from the other side of the point, where the
shoreline of the Key changed direction. Their approach
had been sheltered by land. The reef was a stirring sight.
As each great roller began to feel the bottom, increasing
in height and getting thinner, it grew paler and paler in
color; then a ﬂash of white would appear as its long back,
and suddenly the whole mass of unstable water would
tumble over in a great cataract of pure white foam and
rush across the reef.
Cautiously Mr. Currier guided the Princessa inside the
reef. There was a dangerous shoal spot at one side of the
pass where the rollers increased in speed before breaking,
but Linda called the course in her clear young voice, and
they avoided it without difficulty. On the leeward side
of the reef, outside, they found .their deliberately unob-
trusive buoy—an inverted bottle made fast to a piece of
wreckage below.
“Golly, Mr. Currier,” breathed Larry as he descended
to the deck, “how’d you ever come to ﬁnd this spot any-
way?”
“That pool back there is a favorite anchorage of
L


in the Depths—-----—-—-—-----—---—---------~117

ical route between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.
They’ve been used ever since 1519, when Cortez ﬁrst
sailed from Havana to loot the riches of Mexico. In the in-
tervening years, hundreds of ships have been dashed to
pieces on the reefs along the Florida Keys.
“You’ve seen the chart, and how Marathon and Key
Vaca are right where the line of keys swings from a north-
south direction to an east-west. There’s a line of coral
reefs paralleling the keys. A ship feeling her way in from
the open ocean through the Straits could easily miscalcu-
late her position and ﬁnd herself in these dangerous wa-
ters. And the northeasterly winds that prevail in the area
would carry a square-rigger this way. Add the perils of
hurricane, pirates and privateers and men-of-war, and it’s
easy to see why so many vessels ended on the reefs.
“So much for the bright side of the picture, from the
point of view of the treasure-seeker, though not from that
of those old mariners. The other side of the coin is the
matter of contemporary salvage of treasure. If there were
survivors, they’d certainly try to recover treasure from
shoal water. They could do it, too. The old-timers knew
quite a lot about diving. In fact, the history of diving gear
goes back to the ancient Greeks.” Mr. Currier was riding
his hobby again.
“The earliest mention of diving is in Homer’s Iliad,
which was written 500 years before Christ. A character
named Patroclus compares the fall of Hector’s charioteer
to the action of a diver diving for oysters.”
“Do you mean to tell me they ate oysters then?”
asked Linda. There was a mischievous glint in her eye. She
loved her father dearly, but she also delighted in teasing
him. “I’ve heard that the bravest man in the world was the
ﬁrst man to eat a raw oyster.”
“Did they dive for anything besides oysters in the
olden times?” asked Chris, who was genuinely interested.
l


1 l8- ---------------------------------------------------------- - —Treasures

“Certainly,” said Mr. Currier. “In the past war, our
Navy used ‘frog men’ to clear underwater defenses at
Syracuse harbor, in Sicily. People thought that was ex-
tremely modern, but divers were used in that same spot
2,000 years ago, to destroy barriers put up to obstruct and
damage the Greek war galleys. Alexander the Great used
divers at the Siege of Tyre, too. In fact, that was one of
the ﬁrst underwater battles, with the Greek divers trying
to destroy the barriers as fast as they were erected.”
“I suppose they dove without equipment of any
kind, like the South Sea pearl divers,” said Chris.
“No, surprisingly enough, they had some devices for
drawing air from above water—something like modern
snorkels. Aristotle tells how great vases were submerged
with the mouth down to keep out water, so the diver
could stick his head inside to breathe. Of course, our
modern diving methods only date from 1830, when the
ﬁrst complete dress and helmet, with an air valve and a
pump, were invented by a man named Augustus Siebe.”
“How do you remember all this?” asked Larry, hon-
estly puzzled.
“It’s just an off-shoot of my foolish hobby, which is
sunken treasure,” said Mr. Currier. “It’s important to
know what treasures might have been salvaged long ago,
if you’re not going to waste your time. There was enough
knowledge and determination even in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries for known treasure in shallow waters
to be recovered, either with mechanical contrivances or
the cheaper method of using enslaved native divers. No,
Chris, only a few of the dozens of wrecks in shoal water
along this coast have produced treasure, because so much
of it was recovered at the time of the loss. Yet there is still
the treasure reported in tax returns, and if the govern-
ment is right, it amounted to 60 million last year from
Florida waters alone. I don’t know if l’m discouraging you
L


1 20-— ---------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

the Currier girls, but it was soon apparent that both Linda
and Mona were able to fend for themselves. Larry made a
hasty inspection of the pile of ballast rock and the cannon,
looked up at the Princessa’s clean hull above him, then lost
himself in contemplation of the spectacular ocean ﬂoor
suffused by a blue-green crystalline light.
In this boundless expanse, the surface of the water
was his sky. He felt cut off from his own personality—like
the ﬁrst man on a strange planet. There was a feeling of
tremendous power. He weighed so little that he could
climb a perpendicular coral wall with a ﬂip of his feet. He
could glide or ﬂoat suspended in the warmﬂuidity. All
action took on the effortless pace of a slow motion mov-
ing picture. It was a vital, beautiful world—yes, and fe-
rocious, too. Most of the plants were really animals—with
insatiable appetites for other tiny animals. He could not
without penalty touch or step on any soft, fuzzy or jelly-
like object, for most of them could sting.
Standing on a white bottom of ground coral and
sand, the reef stretched up and out before him, all alive
with waving plumes and seafans. Rounded brain coral and
sharp-spined urchins dotted the expanse. Then Linda Cur-
rier swam leisurely to him, grasped his arm, and motioned
to him to follow. She led him to a strange undersea ra-
vine, with cliffs and caves in whose crevasses grew coral
fans and trees. Tiny, rainbow-hued ﬁsh hovered about
them. Several black and gold angel ﬁsh swam conﬁdently
by, waving their ﬁns in slow and perfect rhythm. A huge
grouper, pinkish-brown, regarded them lackadaisically,
then moved contemptuously away. Linda showed Larry a
huge anchor, one ﬂuke buried deep in a pinnacle of coral,
the ring almost large enough to swim through.
As usual, it was Chris who reminded Larry that they
had another mission besides sight-seeing. He pointed to
L


122 ----------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

attacked. Their lures no sooner edged the school than all
four rod tips went down and the scream of the reels
against the drag told of the strength of the strikes. They
landed fourteen ﬁsh before they passed the school.
There were no more strikes, and as they neared their
base, they reeled in. The black ﬁshing boat was well off,
and as the sun went down, they saw her change course to
the north. “Perhaps they weren’t watching us after all,”
Chris remarked to Mr. Currier, who shook his head
doubtfully, then grinned. “I’m acting as worried as if
there really were a treasure down there,” he said. “Just
the same, I have a proprietary interest in that wreck, and
those old cannon do have a value.”
They maneuvered the Princessa into her berth behind
the Iolly Roger. Chris and Larry inspected the rigging of
the Iolly Roger to see what progress had been made dur-
ing their absence. There was none. They looked enquir-
ingly at Peter, who had come down to the quay to take a
line. He shook his head. “The men didn’t show up. Not
one of them. No word, either.”
“That settles it,” said Mr. Currier. “They were eaves-
dropping the other night. They heard about my frigate,
and probably about the Dona Isabella, too. They must
have blabbed it to whoever owns that black ﬁshing boat.
I can understand them getting excited over the Isabella,
with all my talk about bullion and wealthy Cuban refu-
gees, but why should they bother following us now? I
distinctly said that we were just going to raise cannon.”
“I’m afraid you didn’t mention the cannon in so many
words, Mr. Currier,” said Chris. “You just talked about
raising heavy weights.”
“In any case, Chris, I guess we’d better not wait for
the Iolly Roger to be reﬁtted. Let’s charter a barge and
tow it down to the wreck with the Princessa. I’m getting
stubborn about those cannon.”


CHAPTER 77

Mr. Currier was not content to
let the missing barge just disappear. He made inquiries,
and ﬁnally located the home port of the black ﬁshing boat.
While Chris and Peter studied the many problems in-
volved in getting the Iolly Roger ready for the long sail
to Puerto Rico and for the serious salvage attempt on the
Dona Isabella, Mr. Currier and Larry drove up to ﬁnd
out if the ﬁshermen had managed to recover the barge and
cannon. They would have salvage rights, of course, but
Mr. Currier could still regain the barge and its contents
by paying the salvage claim.
The ﬁshing boat was called the Wrangler, and she
was the dirtiest and most untidy craft Larry had ever seen.
Mr. Currier hailed her from the dock. The face that
popped out of the companionway was Max Gsovski’s.
Larry, who hadn’t seen Max since their encounter in
the restaurant six weeks before, managed a feeble “Hello,
Gsovski,” but was answered only by a glare. Gsovski
mounted the companionway, followed by Chips, Benja-
min and Smitty, the Cahills’ three former shipworkers.
127


128- ---------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

The last man to come on deck was apparently the Captain,
beyond question a man of strong, if unsavory character.
No, he hadn’t been able to save the barge, he told
them. She drifted off and sank, Lord knows where.
There was little Larry or Mr. Currier could do with-
out ﬁnding the barge, so they departed, feeling the un-
friendly stares on their backs as they crossed to their car.
“About how much do you suppose those cannon
were worth?” Larry asked Mr. Currier.
“Not a great deal, but not too little to steal, Larry.
Their value is mostly as curiosities or museum pieces.
They weren’t all bronze—the bronze cannon would
have scrap value. Probably $5,000 all told, including the
barge. I think those fellows saved them, but they might
as well be at the bottom of the Gulf Stream for all the
good they’ll do us.”
The reﬁtting of the Iolly Roger took on new drive
with the help of the skilled craftsmen Chris hired with
money advanced by Mr. Currier, though Mrs. Cahill in-
sisted that there should be no round-the-clock work. She
declared that she didn’t intend to set sail with an exhausted
crew. In the evenings, after work, all hands sat around the
waist of the ship, watching the tropical sunset through
the lacework of the palms, talking quietly of all possible
subjects, but mostly of ships and the men who sailed them,
of storms and pirates and treasure, of odd people one or
another of them had met and odd places they had been.
Mr. Currier was in his element, dispensing his encyclope-
dic knowledge with ease and wit.
One topic of never-failing interest was their destina-
tion, Mona Island, and its romantic history. Mr. Currier
told them of his own searches on the island for Captain
Jennings’ treasure, and of the Pirates’ Cavern which he
had ransacked so diligently as a boy. Mona Island is a small
dot on the chart, totalling perhaps ten thousand acres,


130 -------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures in the Depths

No, Jennings was one of the few who died peace-
fully in bed,” said Mr. Currier. “He reformed late in life,
and won the King’s Pardon. He died a rich man, but
then, he had been rich even before he took up pirating.”
“Seems likely he recovered his own treasure, just the
same,” said Chris.
“Perhaps,” agreed Mr. Currier. “But it’s said that
his contemporaries believed he had not lifted it, and
watched him so closely that he was never able to get
back to his treasure vault before his death. The theory is
that his fellows would be able to guess pretty accurately
whether or not he had possession of that much wealth.
Anyway, it is one of the most believed-in treasures in the
West Indies.”
“My own plans are settled,” announced Peter. “While
Chris and Larry are groping around among the sharks and
barracuda, I’ll just dig up Mr. Jennings’ little piggy bank.”
“Wait till you start counting the caves on Mona Is-
land,” laughed Mr. Currier, and Chris remarked: “While
Larry and I are groping around with the ﬁsh, you'll be up
on deck tending lines and watching the air pressure, or
I’ll know the reason why!”


1 32 = ------------------------------------------------------ - i-‘-‘Treasures

As the sun rose behind the palmettos, a light zephyr
came from the southwest. Chris killed the engine, and
there was no noise but the swish of the water from the
bows, a small seething sound under the tur n of the bilge,
an occasional creaking from one of the blocks. The Iolly
Roger was under way for Mayaguez in Puerto Rico, with
the old pirate haunt, Mona Isle, as port-of-call to pick up
treasure!
The impersonality of the sea turns the sailor back to
the warm personalities of his shipmates, and gives him an
abiding love for the ship that so gallantly carries him.
The friendship between the Cahills and the Curriers grew
deep and solid in this period. They came to understand
one another without speech, to make allowances where
necessary without feeling a sacriﬁce.
And they worked. Not in a frenzy, but calmly and
competently. The accomplishment of simple things was
intensely satisfying, as the ship rolled on under a clear
blue sky. Chris was busy overhauling the all-important
compressors or air pumps. They had two complete out-
ﬁts, each consisting of a gasoline pump to compress the
air, a pressure tank on deck to even out the air supply pul-
sations and act as an air reservoir in case of failure of the
pump, and an emergency air tank. Valves and gauges
were provided so that topside personnel could regulate
the pressure. They also had a small recompression cham-
ber, an item insisted upon by Chris, since their work
would be in deep water and would involve the tricky and
dangerous business of actual entrance into the wrecked
ship, from which a rapid ascent might become necessary.
Chris wanted to take no chances with the “bends.”
Mr. Currier worked at small jobs of rigging and ship-
ﬁtting. Mona and Linda and Mrs. Cahill became adept
with the sailor’s palm and needle, while Larry and Peter
dragged out the diving dress and overhauled it. All this


in the Depths=---—---—-—-‘‘‘--‘--‘-‘-‘-‘-‘‘‘---—-—---=133
was done under the spell of the blue tropic seas, the quiet
power of the sails, the swi-s-s-h of the waves, the ascend-
ing architecture of the clouds. Sometimes they would lift
their voices in song, but the real and constant background
music, of soft strings, great woodwinds and murderous
percussion, was the sea—the beautiful, brawling, merciless
sea.

One thing they all did on the trip, in cahn weather,
was to think. What about? Not about petty details of liv--
ing, not about the recurring world crises. They mused
most often about the sea and the men and ships that
sailed it. It was a rich subject. How did seafaring men ﬁrst
learn that copper and bronze and iron don’t mix in a ship’s
fastenings, that electrolysis will eat them away? What dire-
happening ﬁnally convinced the mates of early merchant
ships that heavy cargo must not all be stowed on the bot-
tom, that some of the weight must be spread aloft if the
ship is not to roll her masts out? Who ﬁrst discovered that
excessively heavy and tight stays and shrouds can weaken
—indeed, break a spar by compression? What genius in-
vented the bowline? How many ships burned before the-
awful mystery of spontaneous combustion was revealed?
They talked, of course, and a lot of the talk, natu-
rally, was about treasure.
“How about these magnetic or electronic gadgets
that show you where metal is?” asked Larry. “Don’t they
make treasure hunting a lot easier?”
“They certainly would—if they’d work,” said Mr.
Currier. “Mind you, I don’t say that some devices won’t
operate under certain conditions, but it’s not as easy as it
seems. l spent a lot of time and money experimenting
with an electronic metal locator that would work in sea
water. To tell you the truth, it was a complete ﬂop.”
“You can buy war surplus mine detectors pretty
cheaply, can’t you?” asked Chris.


134-— -------------------------------------- - -Treasures in the Depths

H 77
Yes, but they’re basically unsuitable, said Mr. Cur-
rier. “Magnetic ﬁelds, not electromagnetic waves, should
be used, with either low alternating frequencies or pulsed
direct current. In principle, it’s all very easy. But sea wa-
ter is a conductor as well as a metal object in it. The trou-
ble with detection instruments is that they are seldom
sensitive enough to detect the difference in conduction be-
tween the two. In shallow water, a glass bottomed view-
ing box is the best searching instrument. Another trick
I’ve seen worked is to pour a little olive oil on the water
on a calm day. If you do it right, you can see the bottom
a long way down. But the best way of all is to swim
around on the surface with a face mask, preferably one
with a snorkel.”
“Anyone who pours any of my olive oil on the wa-
ter will go on a diet of hard tack, or else get seawater
instead of oil in his salad,” said Mrs. Cahill grimly.
Slowly but inexorably the path carefully pricked out
on their charts approached their destination. And then
early one morning, coming on watch, Larry put his head
out of the ship’s companion, and saw ahead a high green
mound rising out of the sun-crimsoned waters. Mona Is-
land! To come thus into the lee of land after an open
water passage is to enjoy a thrill which ranks high among
life’s experiences. The landfall is the height of the sailor’s
accomplishment. It is the culmination of all his efforts,
preparation and work. The seaman’s entire reason for ex-
istence is his ability to make a landfall.
The pungent, rich and sweet aroma of the land after
the austere salt air is a heady potion. They all went a little
mad on the schooner, as they smelled the earth, with
ﬂowers, grass, trees and other ingredients blending into a
ﬂavor no sailor will ever forget. They came into the lee of
a small cove, and then there was that most pleasant of
sounds, the rattle of an anchor chain when you’ve
reached your harbor.
M


CHAPTER 79

They woke to the pelt of trop-
ical rain on the decks and the overhead. What of it? For
the ﬁrst time in many days, they enjoyed the luxury of
staying in their bunks until the last desire for sleep was
worn out. Mrs. Cahill and the girls built a fantastic break-
fast, since time was of no consequence and they weren’t
going anywhere. And how they savored it! Then when
the steady drum of the rain changed to a patter and later
just an occasional splash from the rigging, out came the hot
sun, steaming decks, the smell of drying.
Brieﬂy they debated the advisability of a turn ashore,
but although they were all hungry for the feel of land
and the chance to explore the jagged cliffs and romantic
coves of the island, both Mr. Currier and Chris agreed that
it would be wiser to make a quick search for the Dona
Isabella, and, if they located it, to proceed to Mayaguez
for the ﬁnal stages of their salvage preparation. To linger
at Mona now was to excite local curiosity, which they
were particularly anxious to avoid.
Chris and Larry mapped out the searching technique
135


136- ---------------------------------------------------------- - —Treasures
,0
they would use. Chris had the bearings of the wreck, ob-
tained by mail from friends in the Coast Guard stationed
at Puerto Rico. Once the Coast Guard has proof of a
previously unknown or unlocated wreck, no matter how
old, it goes down in the records. But such a bearing is nec-
essarily only an approximation when measured by the
slow pace and limited visability of a diver. An elaborate
search map and procedure must be worked out, to pre-
vent gaps in areas searched, or searching the same area
more than once.
Fortunately, the weather was calm after the morning
rainstorm, though the current was swift. They located
their spot as nearly as possible, and anchored the Iolly
Roger bow and stern. They searched ﬁrst with self-con-
tained rigs and foot ﬂippers, as they could cover the bot-
tom more rapidly that way. There was no sign of the
Dona Isabella in the shallower water close to the island.
The bottom shelved off sharply on the Hispaniola
side, and so they ascended, moved the schooner, and de-
scended again in regulation pressure diving dress. There
were a great many barracuda about, and several sharks,
including one enormous customer with implacable little
eyes. _
They searched all afternoon without success, using
the circular method at ﬁrst, and then changing because of
the heavy current to a back-and-forth pattern across the
tide as far as they could reach with their distance lines.
Larry was about ready to quit when Peter’s voice came
over the phone. “Chris thinks he sees something. He wants
you to come over.”
This was electric news. With Peter guiding him over
the telephone by the location of his and Chris’ current
borne air bubbles, Larry stumbled over the rough bottom
until he located Chris. When Larry joined him the broth-
ers put their helmets together so they could talk. “Be

L


in the Depths- ---------------------------------------------------- - ‘I37
careful the current doesn’t carry you over the cliff. Look
over while I hold your life line,” said Chris.
A sharp abyss fell away a few yards from where
the divers stood, and a strong current on the sea ﬂoor
streamed toward it like a river ﬂowing toward the crest
of a waterfall. Cautiously Larry worked his way to the
edge and peered down. At that depth, visibility was
limited, but through the ditn green light he could see the
top of a mast and a tall funnel. In his excitement, Larry
leaned dangerously over the cliff to try to make out the
hull, but a sharp tug by Chris on his life line brought him
back. Chris pointed up, and both divers worked their way
back to prepare for an ascent. They would have to move
the Iolly Roger closer to the wreck before seeking her
deck. This was going to be a very deep dive. They were
already at 90 feet. Assuming the masts to rise only one
hundred feet above the decks of the sunken steamer, they
would have to work at 200 feet, perhaps even more.
Strain from the excitement of their ﬁnd, added to the
normal fatigue of a dive, left both Chris and Larry quiet
and uncommunicative, to the annoyance of the others, but
their tense nerves gradually relaxed, and they began to
talk. “Those masts certainly look as if they had once been
rigged to carry auxiliary sail,” said Chris. “Wasn’t that un-
usual, as late as l898?”
“Then it must be the Dona Isabella,” spluttered Mr.
Currier. “It was quite common for small steamers to carry
sail in the late nineteenth century, though it was unusual
around the turn of the century. The Dona Isabella was
built in 1872, so she was twenty-six years old-when she
sank. She had steel masts, with fore and aft sails. This has
to be she!”
“Is there any other identiﬁcation we can make?”
asked Larry. “Any peculiarities in her superstructure?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Currier, who had made detailed in-


138 ----------------------------------------------------------- - -Treasures

quiries. “She had three decks above her main deck, a large
poop deck for immigrant passengers, and her funnel has
quite a rake, which was exceptional in those days. Most of
the funnels on the early ships were almost plumb—went
straight up and down. If this funnel is raked, then it’s the
Dona Isabella.”
“I couldn’t say whether it was raked or not,” said
Chris, shaking his head. “Could you, Larry?”
“I’m not sure,” said Larry. “I think maybe it was, but
it’s hard to tell from the angle we were looking at her.
We’ll have to go down again to be sure.”
On the following morning the Iolly Roger was
moved right over the wreck. Chris and Larry descended
again, the former to explore the area around the ship and
determine whether there were other cliffs or natural haz-
ards below. Larry went down his descending line, close to
the foremast of the steamer. Then his lead-soled boots hit
the deck of the ship. He was the ﬁrst man to tread those
decks in half a century!
Watching his lines and moving carefully, he stepped
slowly along the slippery deck, which was cluttered with
bent and broken boat davits, smashed rails and other de-
bris. This was a bad place for fouled lines. He was careful
to keep a secure hold on some part of the wreck when-
ever he could, so that the current wouldn’t drag him off
the vessel. He couldn’t hold onto objects over his head,
because he was diving without gloves, and raising his arms
too high would permit air to escape out of his cuffs, and
cause him to lose his positive buoyancy, with resultant
danger of falling. Edging his way over the engine room
ﬁddley, at the foot of the funnel, he measured with
mounting excitement the angle of the funnel with the
deck. There was no doubt. The funnel slanted back. He
reported his ﬁndings to Peter over the telephone.
“Take it easy, Larry,” cautioned Peter. “You sound
__;


in the Deptiss--_-.-_-.--_-.------------141
(6 >77 ' H
Are you crazy. demanded Chr1S. You know we
can’t make more than one dive in twenty-four hours to
that depth. Lt. Cross would take a paddle to you if he
knew you even suggested it. Neither one of us is going
down before the day after tomorrow. Let’s get the down
lines and stages up, and move off this spot before that
schooner comes abreast and sees we’ve been diving.”
Anchored in such depths, it took a long while to get
the stern anchor aboard, and they were still at the wind-
lass cranking up the bow anchor as the strange schooner
beat her way alongside. She ran up the colors of the Do-
minican Republic, as the Iolly Roger streamed the Stars
and Stripes. There was a brief exchange of staccato Span-
ish between Mr. Currier and one of the men on the
Dominican schooner.
“He wanted to know if we’re in trouble, anchored
here,” explained Mr. Currier. “I told him we were cruis-
ing yachtsmen out ﬁshing, and he suggested we move up
the passage to shoaler water. Too deep here for ﬁsh, he
says.”
“Not for the kind of ﬁshing we want to do,” said
Peter. “Where to now, Skipper?”
“Mayaguez. No use wasting a whole day here. I’m
satisﬁed it’s the Dona Isabella. If it isn’t, we might as well
have a look at it anyway, now we’re on the scene.”


CHAPTER 20

Larry’s excitement reached fe-
ver point as he set foot on the quay at Mayaguez. This
was his ﬁrst experience in a foreign atmosphere. The bus-
tling city was a series of contradictions; of impressive
modern structures mingled with pastel-tinted Spanish
casas; broad paved avenues with narrow cobblestoned
streets leading from them that reﬂected all the romance
of colonial Spain. .
Mr. Currier acted as guide and interpreter for the
Cahills, with eager interruptions from Linda and Mona,
who knew the city well. He had many tales of the past.
Only a few miles from Mayaguez; at Aquadilla, Christo-
pher Columbus had landed on his second voyage, in 1493.
As they admired the Cathedral, Mr. Currier told how the
pirate Kofresi, whose base was Mona Isle, one day had seen
a beautiful Spanish girl entering to attend mass. She was
the most lovely thing he had ever seen. A man of quick
and violent emotions, he had fallen madly in love with her
at sight. Barred by his reputation from a normal courtship,
he kidnaped the seﬁorita and ﬂed with her in his ship.
142


Treasures in the Depths----‘-—-~-—-‘r -------------------- - ‘143

They made ﬁrst for Mona, but since every vessel in the
harbor put to sea in pursuit, Kofresi left Mona and had his
crew deposit him and his lovely captive on a lonely island
off the Caribbean coast, Caja de Muerto. There they lived,
until the death of the maiden, whether by illness, by her
own hand, or by her abductor no one ever knew. The pi-
rate was captured and hanged, but insisted to his death
that it was an elopement and not an abduction, and that
the girl had died of natural causes.
“What does ‘Caja de Muerto’ mean?” asked Larry.
“Dead Man’s Chest,” answered Mr. Currier with a
grin. “That’s really its name. You’ve heard of it if you’ve
read Treasure Island.”
Mr. Currier arranged for local guards to stay on the
Iolly Roger, as‘ he planned to visit friends and relatives.
He wanted the girls to stay with him, but they insisted on
going to San Juan, the capital, with the Cahills.
The trip to San Juan by publico (public automo-
bile-a sort of inter-city taxi cab) was a delightful
experience. The weather was perfect. Of all the sun-
drenched Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico is most blessed
in climate. The sun is hot, but the Northeast trade winds
blow endlessly during the day, and the land breeze from
the mountains cools the night.
Next morning, Chris and Peter left the party at the
hotel to check at the hydrographic oﬂice, the Coast Guard
base, and then to see about obtaining explosives. Mona
Currier took Mrs. Cahill under her wing, while Larry and
Linda tramped the streets to see the sights.
Late that afternoon Linda and Larry walked back to-
ward their hotel through the Plaza, hounded by a swarm
of good-natured but persistent shoe-shine boys. Any rea-
sonably well-dressed person whose shoes are one degree
below brilliance will be trailed by a whole platoon until
he comes to rest on a bench to have this serious ﬂaw in


144 ----------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

his appearance corrected. Larry picked a blonde-headed
urchin with an impish, freckled face. The youngster told
Larry and Linda that his name was José Figueroa, al-
though his competitors called him Rubio or “Blondie.”
José went to work with a theatrical ﬂourish which was
truly Latin, while idle kids gathered to comment on and
criticize the job. Then Linda grabbed Larry’s arm.
“Look,” she said. “There’s that fellow who was so
fresh in the restaurant, the night we met.”
Larry looked up quickly. Sure enough, it was the
scowling visage of Max Gsovski. As he watched, Chips,
Benjamin, and Smitty appeared. They recognized Larry
with a start, and withdrew quickly into a cantina. Larry’s
heart sank.
Linda told José Figueroa in Spanish to forget Larry’s
shoes, pointed at the cantina, and gave him instructions in
rapid Spanish. José nodded, pocketed the coin Linda gave
him, and hurried to the corner, where he took up his sta-
tion outside the swinging doors. “I told him to follow
the four Continentals when they leave the cantina, and
then come to our hotel and tell us where they went,” she
told Larry.
The Cahills and the Currier girls dined at their hotel,
the Palacio. Before dinner was over, a message came up
from the desk. Linda went out and was back in a moment
with word from José. The four men had gone to a big
black motorboat moored at the inner harbor. There was
no room for doubt now. The Cahills had competitors in
the search for Dona Isabella’s bullion. And unpleasant
competitors at that.
It was now imperative that they start diving opera-
tions without further delay. They left early next morn-
ing, accompanied by an old Coast Guard friend of Chris’,
Chief Boatswain’s Mate Maddox, an enormous hearty man.
Like many seamen and divers, the Chief bragged mightily


in the Depths---------—-—--—-‘-—-—-—-—---—-—--—--147

come by unless there was word from him. Chris was not
yet ready to make an oflicial declaration of his purposes,
for he knew the electric way the word “treasure” spreads.
They reached Mona Island at sundown. In the brief
twilight of the tropics, the black ﬁligree of palm fronds
ashore swiftly receded into the night. They sat on deck,
watching the magic of these summer seas by moonlight,
the whole heavens spread for their view, a school of por-
poise scattering bright twinkles of phosphorescence in their
wakes, the incredible grace of the gulls, the nostalgia of
being anchored where pirates and conquistadores had pre-
ceded them. - -
I


CHAPTER 21

With the ﬁrst light of the new
day, they proceeded to the inconspicuous buoy they had
left over the Dona Isabella, and rigged up for diving.
There was no sign of the black-hulled Wrangler.
The shelf on which the Dona Isabella lay was slightly
over 230 feet below the surface—just below the level at
which the reef-building coral can live. These tiny marine
animals, whose skeletons have created so many reefs,
atolls and islands, must have clean sunlit water, for heavy
mud and sediment suffocate them. They are seldom found
at depths beyond 150 feet. The decks of the sunken ship
were about thirty feet higher. At the 200 foot level, Chris
and Larry had to take two hours in the ascent to decom-
press after working less than an hour on the ship’s deck.
They were working at a pressure of 90.8 pounds per
square inch, over six times the pressure at the surface.
With so little working time on the bottom, it was essential
that they inspect the wreck carefully and plan their work
to the last detail.
They speculated on how the Dona Isabella had come
148


Treasures in the Depths=-‘--‘-=‘‘‘-=---‘--‘--‘-—---=149

to grief, and guessed that she had run aground, but had
not been badly smashed; that the Captain had managed to
work her off at high water, but in the process had proba-
bly ripped a hole in her bottom, or strained the rivets so
that a whole plate or series of plates had given away, and
the ship sank like a stone.
The hull seemed undamaged amidships, and they
were hopeful that they would not have to blast a way into
the hull to ﬁnd the strongroom where the bullion, if any,
would have been locked up. Submarine blasts, even when
the explosive is placed high on the vessel, have a way of
blowing great holes in the sea bottom. Such a hole could
easily make the wreck heel far over instead of sitting at
only a slight list. The greater the angle of heel, the more
diﬂiculty in working inside. Improper placing of the
charges could even ruin chances of recovering any pos-
sible treasure. Jagged plates torn off by the explosives
would be the worst kind of hazard for the diver, who
would have to work through the bulkheads, cabins and
alleyways among growing mountains of debris.
In order to increase working time below, in view
of their haste to complete the job before the Wrangler
should appear, Larry and Chris dove in turn, each staying
on the bottom two hours, with the other starting down
as the ﬁrst began his slow ascent to decompress. In case of
emergency, the second diver was thus always ready to
help the ﬁrst, yet they got in four good man-hours of
work on the -bottom, which, with the ﬁnal decompression
time, meant that all underwater work would be completed
and both divers out of the water in less than seven hours.
Larry went down ﬁrst, to see if he could get inside
the ship and locate the strongroom. It proved easy. The
doors to the cabin opening on deck were unlikely to lead
to the strongroom, which was probably well inside the
ship. But Larry found one door, dogged down but not


I 5 0 -‘—‘—‘—~—~-‘—‘—‘—*‘‘—‘‘‘—‘-‘‘‘‘‘‘‘—‘—‘-—-"—‘—*‘‘-‘—"—-—‘---;T78 dSZl1'€S

locked fast, which he managed to hammer open with a
pinch bar from the sack of tools he had brought down
with him. It led through,a short passageway to what had
been the main saloon of the ship. It was intensely dark
inside, but he had an electric torch which shone ﬁtfully
through the water, which was clouded by the silt he had
stirred up. There was no indication which stateroom might
have been the purser’s office, so he started checking one
stateroom after another. The ﬁrst was empty. The second
door was jammed, but he forced it open with the pinch
bar. The deck was tilted up from where he stood at the
entrance, and opening the door made a strong swirl in
the water-ﬁlled cabin. Larry ﬂashed his torch around the
stateroom. There was a double berth opposite him. Some-
thing was moving on the lower berth! An octopus? In
such tight quarters, an octopus would be an ugly cus-
tomer, and they loved wrecks.
But no. How could an octopus get into that cabin,
which had been tightly closed for half a century? Larry
shone the light on the berth again. It was no octopus. It
was a man.
Larry staggered against the door, setting up another
swirl. The man, who had been lying on the berth, as if
he were taking a nap, instead of ﬂoating against the over-
head like a normal corpse, sat up on the berth, then rose
to the slanting deck, and walked half-crouching toward
Larry, waving his arms in the water, as if about to spring.
He kept coming at his immobilized victim, lank hair dis-
tended in the water, his terrible face half eaten away by
ﬁsh. Icy shivers ran down Larry’s back, his limbs were
paralyzed, he had the stale, cotton-dry taste of blood in
his mouth and the hot chug-chug of rivets in his brain.
Then the thing was on him, pushing him back. In an
explosion of horror and revulsion Larry thrust it away
and forced the door closed.


in the pepibs-_------------_-----—-—---1s1

Peter’s voice was droning over the telephone inside
his helmet, but he couldn’t answer. He was dizzy, and
could hardly stand. Peter was worried. His voice grew
sharper—for the handler always gets concerned when
his diver does not respond, particularly inside a wreck
where the air bubbles and the angle of the life line and air
hose give no clue to the diver’s activities. “Chris is on the
way,” Peter was saying. “Answer me, Larry! Please an-
swer! What’s wrong? Chris is coming!”
At the same time, Larry could feel Peter’s hand sig-
nals—two pulls, then one; two and one—telling him,
“Answer the telephone.” Then Peter switched to single
pulls, meaning, “Are you all right?”
Finally Peter’s desperate voice broke through Larry’s
stunned senses. His ﬁrst thought was to get out. He mum-
bled to Peter that he was coming up, and that Chris should
stay up. Then he stumbled out of the sunken ship to the
green gloom of the deck, which seemed bright after the
utter darkness inside the ship, except where his torch had
shone.
Larry calmed down during the slow ascent. He knew
it couldn’t be a ghost. There was no such thing as a ghost.
Yet it had been alive, had stared at him with that horrible
eaten-away face, had moved to attack him!
Chris descended and met him at sixty feet. He put his
helmet against Larry’s, so they could talk, and demanded,
“What happened?”
“There’s a ghost down there,” said Larry, feeling
foolish as he said it, now that the shock was wearing off.
“Anyway, it’s a dead man, and he’s moving on the deck-
plates, not ﬂoating against the overhead.”
“Where is he? I’ll go down,” said Chris. Larry an-
swered, “Wait a little bit and I’ll go with you. Gave me
an awful fright.”
“You go on up,” ordered Chris.


15 4 ----------------------------------------------------------- - -Treasures

mouth and ears, from stretching the capabilities of their
equipment. Under one hundred feet, I’d generally use a
self-contained rig, but for anything over that depth, I
want a regulation diving dress. Maybe I’m old-fashioned,
but I think I’ll live longer that way.”
Both of the girls wanted to dive to the wrecked ship,
but Chris wouldn’t permit it on grounds that it was too
late in the day. He could see that he was eventually going
to have to allow the girls to make at least one visit to the
wreck or have no peace, but he didn’t feel easy about it.
Besides, it really was too late to do it then.
The weather held ﬁne, and they went down to the
wreck again soon after sunrise. Chris made the ﬁrst dive,
and located the purser’s oﬂice and the huge steel door to
the strongroom. It would take explosives to open that
door. Larry insisted on going down to see it for himself,
though there was really no need. As he came back on the
deck of the sunken ship, Peter told him on the phone,
“Stand by. You’ve got company.”
Then another diver appeared, moving inexpertly
over the cluttered deck. Larry advanced and peered into
the faceplate. Linda Currier’s pretty face smiled back at
him.
“Where do you want to go?” he hollered.
“Show me the dead man’s stateroom, and the treasure
room,” she demanded.
Although Larry was hesitant about bringing Linda
inside the vessel, he and Chris had already cleared away
most of the hazardous wreckage which might foul their
lines, burning some of it free with their cutting torches,
which used a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. He led
Linda into the saloon, both their torches beaming brightly.
She looked in the tragic stateroom, then pulled at the
locked handles of the strongroom.
Larry had a sudden idea. The steward’s pantry open-
‘i~ _._i


in the Depths=-——---‘—‘-‘—-~—--‘-‘-‘-—‘‘-‘::--~15 5
ing off the main saloon had apparently been tightly sealed,
and at one end of it he and Chris had discovered an air
pocket. Divers often strike these air pockets on a ship.
Air that can’t escape to the surface is compressed into a
pocket on the high side of any compartment in which it
is trapped.
On a recent wreck, in more shallow water, a diver
can actually open his faceplate in such a pocket without
harm. However, the air in this pocket on the Dona Isabella
was almost completely void of oxygen. The slow decom-
position of organic material in the mud and silt deposited
through the years had used it up. One breath of air con-
taining no oxygen causes immediate unconsciousness, and
at 200 feet would result in death. But Larry had his oxy-
hydrogen cutting torch with him, with separate valves
for oxygen, hydrogen and compressed air. He turned the
oxygen valve and aimed the tool into the air pocket with-
out igniting it, thus revivifying the dead air with life-
sustaining oxygen. It was a shameless waste of the gas,
of which they had none too much aboard. Because of the
depth, they were using oxygen and helium instead of
compressed air to breathe on their longer dives, to avoid
the nitrogen narcosis which would otherwise affect their
clearness of thinking and sureness of action after a long
period at such a depth. On shorter dives they used the
compressed air. Larry was now so intrigued with his mis-
chievous idea that he didn’t even consider the waste of
oxygen.
'liarry led Linda into the pantry and up the slanting
deck until they came to a spot where the water came up
only to their corselets. Larry leaned forward until his hel-
met touched Linda’s. “Open my faceplate,” he told her.
“It’s all right.”
Linda knew how to do it. She had often helped Larry
into and out of his diving dress and helmet. Hesitantly she


I 5 6’‘~‘‘‘‘—‘—‘--‘_-"‘—‘_-"‘—‘—‘—‘—‘—‘‘‘—‘—‘‘‘—‘—‘‘‘‘‘‘‘v‘= Treasures

reached up, and unfastened the faceplate. Then Larry
opened hers.
Linda giggled. “Isn’t this silly?” she inquired.
“It’s going to get sillier yet,” whispered Larry. “Have
you got lipstick on?”
Linda pursed her mouth. “Of course I have. Can’t
you see?”
“All right, then,” said Larry. “Kiss me.”
“Oh, Mr. Cahill,” responded Linda. “This is so sud-
den!”
“No, I really mean it,” said Larry. “Kiss me good and
hard, so the lipstick will come off all over my face. We’ll
really give them a shock when we get back on the Iolly
Roger.”
Linda laughed. Obediently, she pressed her lips
against Larry’s cheeks, stopping between kisses to giggle.
“Now on the lips,” commanded Larry. Larry decided
this was the cleverest idea he had ever had.
When they got back on deck, the effect on Mr. Cur-
rier and Chris and Peter, on Mrs. Cahill, and especially on
Mona, was all the two could have desired. “What in the
world have you two been doing down there?” Mona de-
manded. “Chris, they’ve been spooning. Look at Larry’s
face! How could they possibl.y—I mean you said it’s 200
feet deep—I mean. . . .”
Peter, looking envious, was equally puzzled. “I know
your face was clean when I put your helmet on,” he said.
“What gives?”
“Met up with a mermaid,” answered Larry noncha-
lantly. Linda was laughing too hard for speech.
“How could a mermaid kiss you through your face-
plate?” Mrs. Cahill wanted to know.
“Oh, mermaids have ways,” Larry answered airily.
“And what ways!”
~~


in the Depths- --------------------------------------------------- — - 1 5 7

“Weren’t you jealous?” Mona asked Linda. Larry
answered for her.
“Jealous? I’ll say she was. Kept looking for a mer-
man. Couldn’t ﬁnd one. Would have taken up with a
wahoo if I hadn’t stopped her.”
Chris was as puzzled as the others until his eye caught
the cutting torch. His eyes twinkled with sudden com-
prehension. “Mona and I will make a proper investigation
of this business tomorrow, won’t we, Mona?”
“By golly,” said Mr. Currier, “if you and Mona go
down together tomorrow, either Mrs. Cahill or I will have
to go down to chaperone you.”


160 ----------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

translucent, and considered the problem. Should they
burn through the Dona IsabelIa’s deck with cutting
torches, or try to blast a hole? Mr. Currier suggested
using a torch to burn the strongroom door open, but
Larry explained the great danger, when using a torch in-
side a wreck, of having escaping gases from the torch
trapped below. These gases are highly explosive, and
they’d ﬁrst have to blow or otherwise open up any area
where torches were being used to allow the gases to rise
to the surface and escape in open air. On the other hand,
a good explosives man can cut steel like butter, though
there is always danger of damaging or scattering the ob-
jects to be salvaged, and steel plates torn by TNT are
extremely hazardous to work around.
The feeling of urgency which was spreading aboard
the Iolly Roger was justiﬁed the following morning. As
Larry was about to descend with the cutting torch, the
black hull of the Wrangler appeared on the horizon.
There was no point to stopping now, so Larry went down
anyway.
This was not going to be easy. Since cutting is essen-
tially a melting operation, there has to be space for the
melted slag to run out. Generally the diver cuts at a low
spot and works upward, letting the melted steel run down.
But at the spot which they had located and marked as
being directly over the strongroom, the deck of the Dona
Isabella was at only a slight angle from the horizontal.
The cutting torch is provided with an air sheath,
through which high-pressure air bleeds out and forms an
air bubble known as an “artiﬁcial atmosphere.” It is inside
this air bubble that the ﬂame of the cutting tip burns.
Larry got in position, tested the valves of the three
gases (compressed air, hydrogen, and oxygen) and tele-
phoned Peter to switch on the igniter. Then he touched
the igniter to the torch, and a bluish-green ﬂame ﬂared


166 ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ - ‘Treasures in the Depths

water. Seeing no further evidence of activity aboard the
Iolly Roger, the Wrangler withdrew a short distance. At
irregular intervals all through the night, she would stab
at the Iolly Roger with her searchlight, apparently anx-
ious to see if any more diving was to be done.
“Let them stay awake if they want,” said Chris. “I’m
going to sleep.” He stretched out on his mattress atop the
cargo hatch, and the others did the same. Sleep did not
come easily.


CHAPTER 23

They woke to a calm sea and
an empty horizon. VVhere was the Wrangler? Why had
she hung around most of the night, then disappeared be-
fore daylight? I-lad she really gone off, or was she hiding
behind Monita Island?
“There’s no use speculating about those fellows,”
said Chris. “I still don’t think they’ll make a move till we
actually salvage something, and they’ll be around watch-
ing to see when we start. We’ll fool them by not using
any of the lifting tackle till we can get word to Chief
Maddox.”
“All I want to do right now,” said Larry, spreading
out his diving dress, “is to get inside the Dona Isabella and
see what we’ve got, and I’m going to take a sack down
with me to hold some samples of the gold. Chris can wait
for the grab bucket if he wants. I want to dip my hands
into a treasure chest.”
Chris was outwardly calm, but inside he was as eager
as Larry to inspect the strongroom and see if the explo-
sives had worked properly; if it had blown a clear en-
167


168 ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ - ‘Treasures

trance into the room without scattering the contents.
After a quick inspection, he wanted to get back aboard
the Iolly Roger and send Peter off for the Coast Guard.
Both divers therefore hurried their preparations, and they
descended together, landing on the boat deck of the Dona
Isabella.
Cautiously they worked their way up to the scene
of the explosion. There was a mass of twisted rails, ven-
tilators and other light deck structures, but the main deck
plates were still intact. They had bulged slightly from
the explosion, but the Cahills were almost as far from
gaining entrance to the strongroom as ever. Larry
groaned in dejection, while Chris crouched to examine the
deck plates minutely. He couldn’t understand why they
had not been torn apart. The explosive charge had been
adequate, and had been properly placed in accordance
with the most up-to-date procedure for blasting a steel
structure.
Peter was querying Larry over the phone, and Mr.
Currier was as eagerly asking Chris for a report. “No
luck,” was the discouraging message they sent back. Larry
and Chris tipped their helmets together for a brief con-
versation, then decided to make their ascent. Peter called
Larry again. “The Wrangler’s back on the scene again,”
he said. A little later, as Larry was on the way up, Peter
reported again, “The Wrangler’s really coming up close
this time, for a good look at what's going on.”
Chris and Larry had been on the bottom only a short
time, which speeded up their ascent. They were both dis-
appointed but not discouraged, already thinking of new
blasting techniques, and both trying to suppress their
worries about the people topside, and what the Wrangler
was doing. Peter kept chatting with Larry for a time, as
was his practice. Then the phone was silent for so long
that Larry wondered what was happening. He buzzed


in the Depths‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘= ------------------------ - -169

Peter several times, and ﬁnally got an answer. “What’s
up?” asked Larry. “I missed your melodic voice.”
“I just had something to take care of,” said Peter.
“Nothing serious. How about coming up another notch?”
Larry felt himself rising another twenty-ﬁve feet.
The slow ascent was ﬁnally completed. Larry and
Chris were helped aboard the Iolly Roger and led to the
hatch cover to sit. Their helmets were unlocked and
lifted off. Larry turned his head, and looked into the face
of Max Gsovski.
His blood went to the boiling point in an instant, and
he rose in his clumsy diving dress. “What are you doing
aboard here?” he shouted at Gsovski.
“Easy, Cahill,” said Gsovski conﬁdently. “Just take
it easy and no one will get hurt.”
Larry looked around him. Gsovski, balancing a heavy
wooden cudgel in both hands, was standing close to a pale
but angry Peter. Chips, their ex-carpenter, hovered near
Mr. Currier, his huge hands open as if he were eager
to throttle him. Leaning against the starboard rail were
Smitty, Benjamin, and the same sinister man he and Mr.
Currier had talked to in Florida, after they had lost the
barge-load of cannon. The Wrangler was made fast along-
side.
“This is piracy, you know,” said Chris calmly, as he
dropped his weights and started to loosen his corselet.
The Wrangler’s Captain advanced a step. “Leave that
diving dress on, you. This isn’t piracy at all. I staked out
this wreck long ago. Had it buoyed. You guys are just
trying to crowd me out. Well, it won’t work. You can
take this old scow of yours and clear out.” '
It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Salvage men pull no
punches when they’re ﬁghting for the same ship. The
Captain turned to Gsovski: “Get back aboard the Wran-
gler and get into your diving dress,” he told him. “We


170- ---------------------------------------------------------- - -Treasures

can handle this crew with these two big guys still in their
strait jackets.”
Larry felt waves of hot rage sweep up inside him,
but he was helpless to resist while still laced and bolted
inside the cumbersome diving dress.
“Here you, Smitty,” continued the Captain, “you go
with Gsovski and help him.” Smitty started to say some-
thing, but the Captain roared, “Shut up and get going,”
giving Smitty a shove that was half a blow.
Smitty staggered with the force of the shove, strik-
ing his funny bone a sharp blow against a stanchion. His
face twisted in pain and anger, Smitty snarled at his Cap-
tain, “Don’t shove me,” and aimed a kick at the Captain’s
shins. The Captain shifted his weight like a professional
ﬁghter and drove a hard ﬁst to the point of Smitty’s jaw.
The blow fairly lifted Smitty’s light weight oﬁ the deck,
and he collapsed in a huddled heap, out cold.
Chris’ eye was roving in search of a weapon, and
Larry, Peter and Mr. Currier all moved forward, ﬁsts
clenched.
“Stand where you are,” shouted the Captain, pulling
his coat aside. The wicked butt of an automatic pistol
showed in a shoulder holster. There was no doubt from
the sharpness of the Captain’s voice, and the grim reckless
look on his hard face, that he meant to carry this business
to a ﬁnish.
“You, Benjamin,” he snarled. “Knock the shackles
out of those anchors—bow and stern.” Benjamin moved
off obediently.
“You’re going to have some explaining to do to .the
Coast Guard and the authorities ashore, Mister,” Chris
told him grimly. '
“Explanations? Ha!” The Captain was amused. “I
know what you’ve been up to, and I know you’ve kept
your mouth shut. There’s probably not a soul in the world


in the Depths ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ - -171

outside of us on these two ships who knows you’ve been
after treasure. Your word is no better than mine. I was
here ﬁrst. The Wrangler was tied up in San Juan before
you passed Cuba. You can’t go yelling ‘Cops’ now!” He
turned to Benjamin. “All ready?”
They heard the sharp clang of a hammer as Benjamin
knocked the shackles loose, and returned. The two boats,
locked together, began to swing with the current. “Now
the engine,” the Captain said to Chips, who grunted and
made for the companionway.
Mrs. Cahill and the two Currier girls were down
there. As Chris and Larry started forward again, the
Wrangler’s Captain said, “He won’t touch the women.”
“He’d better not,” said Chris.
Larry was beyond words, his mind racing with des-
perate ideas for recapturing the ship, all of them imprac-
tical. There was a succession of heavy blows from the
engine room, and Chris winced as he imagined Chips run-
ning amok in there, ruining the engine. But worse was to
come. Chips reappeared, sweating and looking pleased
with himself. He and Benjamin then drew sheath knives
and raced around the Iolly Roger, cutting the lanyards
on the schooner’s shrouds and stays, which were set up
in the old-fashioned way, with deadeyes; then slashing
halyards, topping lifts, sheets, every line used to hoist or
handle the sails.
When they were done, the Captain remarked to Chris,
“Bon voyage. This current’ll take you clear of Cape Rojo.
You don’t have to worry about grounding. By the time
you get rigged up again and get to shore, we’ll be on our
way with the treasure, if there’s any in that wreck below.
And thanks for opening her up for us. We were just wait-
ing for you to blast her.”
The Captain, Chips and Benjamin scrambled over the
rail on to the Wrangler and prepared to cast off.


172-‘ ---------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

They paid no attention to Smitty, who still lay uncon-
scious on the deck. “Here, take your playmate with you,”
Chris called, pointing at Smitty’s crumbled form. The
Wrangler’s Captain shook his head. “Keep him,” he said.
“We don’t need him, and I’m fed up with his whining and
fawning and then turning all of a sudden to bite like a
rat.”
The Wrangler’s engines started up, and she moved
slowly to the spot where the Iolly Roger had been
moored, dropping anchors fore and aft. The Iolly Roger
continued to drift down the Mona Passage while her
stunned crew looked at one another.
Linda Currier’s clear, unfrightened voice came from
the cabin. “Can you untie us now?” she called. Peter came
to with a start, and he and Mr. Currier raced for the com-
panionway. Larry and Chris looked at one another in
fresh rage. They hadn’t realized the women had been tied.
Mona, Linda and Mrs. Cahill came out on deck rub-
bing their wrists. They had been caught by Benjamin
as they were hauling guns and ammunition out of the
arms chest, and tied up with strong line and tight knots.
Swiftly, Larry and Chris told them all that had happened.
Linda turned to Larry and wailed, “All that lovely treas-
ure, ready and waiting for them. And after all your
work!”
Suddenly Larry remembered something, and began
to laugh. The humor of the situation grew on him, till
he became almost hysterical and had to sit on the hatch
cover, still in his diving dress. The others clamored to
know what was so funny, pushing at him when he didn’t
answer—he couldn’t. Finally Chris’ pushes got so hard
Larry couldn’t ignore them any more. He wiped the tears
from his eyes, swallowed a little of his laughter, and ex-
plained: “Those guys think all they have to do is to send
Max down to guide a bucket, and he can scoop up gold


1 74- ---------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

one else to play with. Yes,” turning to Mr. Currier, “we
salvaged your cannon, too. And we had a right to it.
Sold the whole load for six thousand dollars, and you
know what my share was?” he looked around the fasci-
nated group, as if expecting them to guess. Linda and
Larry shook their heads. “Five hundred measly dollars,”
said Smitty disgustedly. He looked back at where the
Wrangler was moored, and spat contemptuously on the
deck. Chris came to life.
“Wipe that up!” he roared. Smitty grimaced apolo-
getically; went to his knees and wiped up the spittle with
his shirt sleeve, then rose again. He was still not abashed.
Smitty continued, speaking calmly. “We’ve been
waiting for you to show up and go to work on the wreck.
That Gsovski, he’s no great shakes of a diver. They’re
all a bunch of dopes, that lot, except the Captain. l’d have
got their money too, before I was done with ’em, the Cap-
tain’s too, tough as he is. That ain’t the ﬁrst time he’s hit
me. I’ve got a knife that’s been itching for his blood.
“Sure, I wanted to get rich. I’ve been rich before,
lots of times. It was easier for me to get money than to
keep it, and I never got but ten cents on the dollar when
I spent it. But I’ve had money, and I’d like to have it once
more before I die—I like the feel of it. Well, that’s done.
You’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with you. Treat me
right, and I’ll work for you, help you get this hooker
back in shape, even help you go after the treasure again
if you’re game. They ain’t got a pound of powder aboard
the Wrangler and they haven’t got a cutting torch that’ll
work in that depth of water, either. Oxy-acetylene, that’s
what they got—no good except in shallow water. They
were depending on you fellows to do the job for them.
If your blast didn’t open up the Dona Isabella like you
say, they’re stuck too.”
“What do you think they’ll do?” asked Chris.


176 ----------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

anchor,” said Chris. “Then we wouldn’t be canied so far
away. And I’d hate to run into bad weather while we’re
helpless like this.”
“Why don’t you tow the Iolly Roger in with the
yawl boat?” asked Linda. Chris looked at her and then at
Larry. They had forgotten the sixteen foot open boat the
Iolly Roger carried on davits across her stem. The Wran-
gler’s crew had forgotten it, too. The boat had a ten horse
power, heavy duty engine in it, and could either tow or
push the I olly Roger as long as the water stayed calm.
They lowered the yawl boat. Larry took a line from
the Iolly Roger, and slowly towed her in toward the
island. The water in the passage and around Mona Island
is very deep, and they had to run up almost to the cliffs
of the island itself before it was shallow enough for them
to anchor. Their two big anchors had been lost when
Benjamin knocked the shackles loose, and they had only
the light bower anchor left, and not much cable. It would
be an insecure anchorage if the wind shifted to any other
quarter, but as long as the Northeast trades continued to
blow, they were in shelter.
All hands except Chris immediately turned to the rig-
ging, reeving new lines where strength was needed, and
putting long splices in the halyards, which were cut low
enough so that no strain would be put on the splice when
the sails were up. Smitty did more work than any of them,
his nimble ﬁngers unlaying and laying the lines at twice
Larry’s best speed. Mrs. Cahill and the girls brought out
canvas, palms and needles to patch the sails where they
had been slashed, while Chris tackled the discouraging
job of turning the engine back from junk to the piece of
efﬁcient machinery it had been. Fortunately, it was a
diesel, very heavily built, with fewer exposed parts which
could be smashed than a gasoline engine has. They had a


180 -------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures in the Depths

off the wind and ﬁlled on her course to Mayaguez. She
was an inspiring sight, her white sails reﬂecting the light
from the millions of stars above; bright pin points of phos-
phorescent light burning brieﬂy in her bow wash and in
the water that bubbled up in her wake. Then she dissolved
into the velvety night, and Larry was left alone. And very
lonesome.


1 8 2-‘ ---------------------------------------------------------- - —Treasures

free to climb. A short way down the beach, he located a
narrow twisting path leading up the cliff—whether made
by animals or human beings he couldn’t tell. Fearfully he
began to climb.
There were several dangerous turns in the trail, but
Larry hugged the side of the cliff and worked his way
around. Tired, hot and breathless, he had almost reached
the top when he saw the dim opening of a cave. This
would do nicely for a hiding place. Larry turned his ﬂash-
light into the cave. It was narrow and deep, but the floor
was fairly level. He crossed the lip, turned off his ﬂash-
light, and looked out to sea. There was nothing in sight
but the wide restless waters and the blazing heavens of
the tropic night. The trade wind was blowing hard—up
to forty knots in the gusts. He couldn’t be sure whether
or not he could spot the site of the wreck from this perch,
so he went on to a higher point.
Narrowing his eyes, he could see the sky glow from
the lighthouse on Cape Engano on Hispaniola. With his
compass he took a bearing on the light. Northwest by
North. According to Larry’s roughly sketched map, the
site of the wreck and of any salvage operations should
be visible either from the top of the cliff or the cave. With
his binoculars, he scanned the water in the direction of
the wreck. He thought there was a black smudge which
might be the Wrangler, but couldn’t be sure. If it was,
they were not showing any lights.
It was chilly in the blast of the wind. Larry took out
his blanket, rolled himself in it, and tried to sleep. But his
nerves were on edge, and he couldn’t get comfortable.
Perhaps he’d be better off in the cave. He worked his way
down again, shining his ﬂashlight on the precarious trail.
It would be better to have the light seen from the Wran-
gler than to tumble to the beach far below. There were


184 ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ - ‘Treasures
covered from the deck of the Dona Isabella. And those
tracks in the path outside. Goats have cloven hoofs. So
does the devil.
Grimly Larry tried to push these childish thoughts
out of his mind. He almost succeeded, when there was a
deﬁnite sound behind him. In a cold sweat of terror he
jumped to his feet, thinking fleetingly of his riﬂe, which
he had left in the launch. A lot of good it would do him
now! He ﬂicked on his ﬂashlight. From the dim gloom of
a deep passageway, a pair of vertical-pupilled eyes glared
at him. They came closer. Larry shoved the light a little
lower. It was an unspeakably evil, devilish face, with a
long beard, and horns above. Then Larry expelled his
breath in a great sigh of relief. It was nothing but one of
the goats with which the island abounded.
Thoroughly ashamed of his terror, he shouted at the
goat, and heard it scamper back out of sight. Then he lay
down on his blanket, and this time managed to fall asleep.
He woke to a blazing morning, and looked out at an
empty sea. A plume of smoke marked a distant steamer,
but there was no sign of the Wrangler. Even though the
face of the cliff was in shadow, he could see the openings
of several caves similar to his, some of them close to the
water, others high in the cliffs. After munching a couple
of sandwiches, and taking a cautious drink of water (for
he had to be careful of his stores) Larry went back into
the cave for a closer examination.
It extended far back into the island, with the ﬁrst pas-
sage branching off to numerous smaller ones. Probably
they branched off in turn—it would be easy to get lost in
there. A greenish phosphorescent glow came from the
rocks, and stalagmites and stalactites stood about in eerie
grace. Small lichens grew on some of the rocks, lizards
scampered about, and green moss hung overhead. There


186 ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ - ‘Treasures in the Depths

Here was Gsovski, coming over the side. A few min-
utes later, an immense geyser of water rose to the sky.
What a charge they must have blown! But what was
this? Gsovski was getting ready to go down again. That
was dangerous—to make two dives to such a depth in the
same day. They probably didn’t even have a recompres-
sion chamber on board. Gsovski was risking the bends.
What’s more, the water below would still be clouded by
silt and dirt blown up from the bottom.
The Wrangler swung her boom over the side, and be-
gan lowering a weighted cargo net. Larry waited, chew-
ing his ﬁngernails in impatience and suspense. Then the
twin lenses of his binoculars saw the winch operating.
The net came up again. Thank heavens, still empty. De-
spite the size of the blast, that strongroom still must not
be open! When Gsovski got back aboard, the Wrangler
hove her anchors short, and took off again in the direction
of Desecheo Island, Borinquen Point, and San Juan.
What were they up to now? Perhaps they had used
all the explosives they had been able to get in one big blast.
Larry wondered what the Dona Isabella was made of, to
withstand this repeated heavy blasting. They might have
gone back for more explosives, or for a cutting torch. In
any case, it behooved Larry to get out over the wreck, and
make fast to the marker buoy, to establish their claim in
case the Coast Guard came along.
He was no sooner on the spot than he saw pointed
sails rising from the west. It must be—yes, it was the Iolly
Roger, coming up under both sail and power at a tremen-
dous clip for such a heavy vessel. Chris was in diving dress,
and as soon as the others had hoisted Larry and the yawl
boat on the stern davits, Chris was over the side to pick up
the two anchor chains which the Wrangler’s boarding
party had knocked loose.


CHAPTER 25

Larry was impatient to hear the
news from the Iolly Roger. They had reached Mayaguez
without incident, and had telephoned Chief Maddox at
Coast Guard headquarters in San Juan. Unfortunately,
one of the two cutters ordinarily stationed there was pa-
trolling the waters off Culebra Island, to keep small boats
clear of the Air Force bombing range. The other had gone
to the assistance of a small yacht, and was towing her in
to Ensenada Honda, between Puerto Rico and the Virgin
Islands. This boat was then going to circumnavigate
Puerto Rico, stopping brieﬂy at Ponce. Maddox promised
to radio the cutter to look in at operations around Mona,
and said that he’d try to get a pass so he could board the
cutter himself at Ponce.
Chris took time while he was below to make a brief
inspection of the Dona Isabella, after he had recovered the
Iolly Roger’s anchor chains. He reported that the Isabel-
la’s decks were a terrible mess, strewn with wreckage, and
that the funnel would probably topple if a blast as big as
I87


188- ---------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

the last one was repeated. But though the deck over the
strongroom was badly bulged, it was still intact.
Smitty had been listening to this discussion with fe-
verish interest. “How are you making your inserts?” he
asked. Chris turned to him in surprise.
“Do you know anything about explosives?” he de-
manded.
“I know everything about ’em,” grinned Smitty.
“All right, then,” said Larry. “Suppose you tell us
what’s holding that ship together?”
“You’re going at it the wrong way. The Dona Isa-
bella won’t break up like a ship of American or British
steel. She’s like a soft pete. You got to know how to
handle your soup and your mud.”
“Soft pete. Soup. Mud. What are you talking about,
Smitty?” wondered Larry. Smitty looked over his shoul-
der and around the deck. “I’ll tell you if you’ll swear to
keep it secret,” he said. They all agreed, and Smitty con-
tinued. “A ‘soft pete’ is a nickname for an old-fashioned
safe, made to resist ﬁre more than safe-cracking. They’re
made of soft iron instead of case-hardened steel, and
they’ve got to be handled different.”
They understood now. The term “soup” was under-
world slang for nitroglycerine. Smitty was, or had been,
a safe—cracker. They listened intently, half amused, half
shocked at this revelation. Smitty went on: “You’re not
blasting modern steel plates, which are hard but brittle.
The Dona Isabella is built of old, soft Swedish iron, not
steel at all. She’ll bend, but she won’t snap . . . not unless
you handle her right.”
Mr. Currier interrupted. “Smitty is right. The Dona
Isabella was built in Sweden, and practically all of the
ships built in the l870’s, when her keel was laid, were
built of iron.”
Smitty nodded complacently. “You’ve probably been


190 ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ - ‘Treasures

swell,” came back Peter’s voice. “But you’d better ascend
now. The Wrangler’s coming back.”
“Come up nothing!” said Larry excitedly. “Are you
crazy? It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to ﬁnd out
whether or not we’ve hit treasure. I’m going in.”
Cautiously Larry felt his way through the hole in the
deck, lowering himself feet ﬁrst, and keeping his lines as
clear as possible. He called for more line, and was almost
on the bottom when Chris’ voice instead of Peter’s came
over the telephone. “Larry, you come out of that right
away,” he ordered. “The Wrangler’s almost on us, and
there’s no telling what they’ll do with you helpless down
there. I’m going to bring you up fast and then clap you in
the recompression chamber. This is an emergency!”
“Chris, I'm in the strongroom now. Just give me a
couple more feet of line,” pleaded Larry, unable to think
of anything but the possible treasure. “It’ll only take me
a few seconds to see what’s here.”
“No!” came Chris’ angry voice. “You’Il get no more
line. If you weren’t in that hole with all that wreckage,
I’d haul you up whether you liked it or not. Come out!”
But Larry, sniﬂing treasure, was beyond reason. He
was carrying one turn of the air hose and life line over his
arm, so that a sudden surge of tide or surface wave action
wouldn’t cause him to lose his balance. Now he shook off
this coil, ﬂicked on his light, and looked around him.
The strongroom was almost empty except for a huge,
old-fashioned safe, and four small metal boxes about two
feet square and three feet long. He tried to lift one of the
boxes, but it was as immovable as if it were welded to the
deck. He attacked it with a pinch bar from his sack of
tools, but couldn’t even begin to make an impression on
it. With such a weight, and in boxes that strong and that
thoroughly locked and bolted, there must be gold inside.
i
l


in the Depths-‘ ---------------------------------------------------- - -191
All this time, Chris’ voice was droning in his ear al-
ternately commanding and pleading for him to come up.
Suddenly Larry came to his senses. He must be causing
them terrible anguish on the Iolly Roger—and he was in
no comfortable situation himself. He certainly didn’t want
to regain the Iolly Roger, have his helmet removed, and
look into the sneering face of Max Gsovski as he had on
his last dive. Cautiously he inﬂated his suit enough to ﬂoat
up through the opening in the deck, feeling his way
around the tor n plates, and telling Chris to keep his lines
taut. He moved over to his descending line, and told Chris
he was ready to start his ascent.
“What’s the Wrangler doing now?” he asked Chris.
“Nothing,” was the answer. “Just drifting around. They
seem to be discussing or arguing about something. I’ve got
my riﬂe out—I’m not going to let them board us while
you’re down there, even if I have to shoot.”
The slow ascent continued, with the interminable
waits to decompress. “Anything new on the Wrangler?”
Larry asked again. He was answered this time by Peter.
“They’re up to something. Chris is trying to ﬁgure it out
through the binoculars. They’re rigging a long pole at an
angle over the bow. Now they’ve got a grappling iron up
forward. I can’t ﬁgure it.”
Larry was lifted again to the next decompression
stage. Suddenly he felt a tremendous jerk. He was lifted
rapidly about ﬁfty or sixty feet, then dropped back about
thirty. Turning his air valves in a frenzy to keep from bal-
looning to the surface from the change in air pressure, or
being squeezed into his helmet, Larry turned sick with
fright. He knew something was happening to him. The
normal rate of ascent was only twenty-ﬁve feet at a time,
with pauses between, and Peter would never let him fall
like that, with the terrible risk of a squeeze. “What’s hap-


in the Depths‘ ---------------------------------------------------- - -193

volume tank. Then air streamed through the hose in an
explosion of bubbles.
Larry held the hose for Linda, closed his air intake
and exhaust valves, and waited while Linda struggled with
the coupling of his regular air hose. She got it uncoupled,
and coupled on the new air hose. Larry reopened his
valves. Water that had entered his line when Linda uncou-
pled it streamed into his helmet and ran down into his div-
ing dress. Then there was the life-giving rush of air—just
in time, for Larry’s senses were already beginning to reel
from breathing the carbon dioxide of his own exhalations
when he had closed the valves, and had only the air
trapped in the dress and helmet to breathe.
Linda tugged again on the line, and Larry felt it go
taut at the signal, to keep him from dropping when she cut
the life line. Then she began sawing away at his life line.
It parted, and Larry felt himself swing pendulum-fashion
under the Iolly Roger, with Linda swimming beside him.
He was drawn up a little faster than the regular decom-
pression rate, and broke the surface on the side of the
I olly Roger away from the Wrangler and the diving
stages.
Mr. Currier and Mona were crouched over the rail,
concealed by the cabin from those on the Wrangler. They
had lowered a Jacob’s ladder, and had a safety line ready
for Larry. His helmet was unlocked and lifted off, Mr.
Currier having a hard struggle with it. Larry mounted the
ladder and slid prone on the" deck behind the cabin. Linda
followed him. “Get me out of this dress” whispered Larry.
They unlaced his boots and helped him get clear.
Larry crept on hands and knees to the break of the
deckhouse and peeked around it. Larry and Peter were
standing at the rail, both grimly holding their deer riﬂes.
The Wrangler was barely thirty feet away. Larry could
see his lines looped over the bow of the Wrangler, with


19% ---------------------------------------------------------- - —Treasures
~ - ,

Chips standing over them with an axe on his shoulder. Ap-
parently no one knew quite how to solve the situation.
Larry hissed at Chris, “Okay. I’m aboard,” and saw both
Chris’ and Peter’s backs stiffen and then relax in relief.
The solution to the still uncomfortable situation ap-
peared around Punta Oesta—a trim gray Coast Guard
patrol boat. It opened its throttle at sight of the Wrangler
and the Iolly Roger broadside to broadside.
There was swift reaction on board the Wrangler. Lar-
ry’s lines were dumped overboard, and there was the ﬂash
of busy knives as they cut the lashings on the long pole
slanting overboard into the water. The Coast Guard boat
ran between the Iolly Roger and the Wrangler. Chief
Maddox stepped out of the wheelhouse and hailed:
“What’s going on here?”
The Captain of the Wrangler, an expression of almost
comic innocence and righteous indignation on his tough
face, answered, “We were working on a salvage job, and
this other boat muscled in on us.”
Maddox turned toward the Iolly Roger. “That
right?” he asked, showing no sign of recognition.
“It’s exactly wrong,” Chris called back. “We were
here ﬁrst, and they crowded in on us. Look, we’ve got
two anchors down, and they’ve got only one light one.
We’ve got a buoy to the salvage job; they haven’t.”
“Do either of you want to put in a legal complaint
against the other one?” asked Chief Maddox.
There was brief consultation on both the Wrangler
and the Iolly Roger. A formal complaint to the Coast
Guard would mean inquiries, possible court action, law-
yers. Chris answered, “No. Just keep them off our backs.”
The Captain of the Wrangler also shook his head.
“Stand by, both of you,” ordered Maddox. “I’m send-
ing a man aboard to inspect you.” The Coast Guard boat
eased over to the Wrangler, and an armed Coast Guards-


196‘ ---------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures
After the Coast Guard boat and the Wrangler had
left, Chris and Larry lost no time in stripping the Iolly
Roger’s heavy gaff of the foresail, and rigging it over the
side, braced by vanes. Chris gave Larry a terriﬁc tongue-
lashing for disobeying topside commands when he was on
the bottom and had lost his head in treasure fever. Larry
took the tirade with shamefaced patience. He knew he de-
served it. But it was hard to accept the punishment. Larry
would have to stay on deck while Chris had the honor of
fastening the treasure chests to the lifting tackle.
Chris went to the bottom. It took little time for him
to attach slings to the four treasure chests, and for the oth-
ers to hoist them aboard with the power winch. The big
safe was a more diﬂicult problem, but Chris managed to
work it through the hole in the Dona Isabella’s deck, and
it came aboard too.
They fairly itched to open the chests as they waited
during Chris’ long ascent. But it wouldn’t be fair to open
the chests before Chris was on deck to share the thrill.
They paced nervously about, never far from the four
black, dripping boxes and the huge safe. Smitty in particu-
lar was unable to sit still a moment, watching the others
suspiciously as if he feared they would throw him over-
board.
Finally Chris surfaced. They all gathered around one
of the chests. It proved impossible to break it open with
ordinary tools, so Larry got the cutting torch and bumed
the bars through. With breaths held tight and chests con-
stricted with excitement, Larry threw back the lid. The
chest was packed tightly with heavy canvas bags, each
one wired at the mouth, with a lead seal on the wire
marked with the coat-of-anns of Spain. His hands trem-
bling, Larry took hold of one of the bags and lifted. The
rotted canvas broke, and dirty coins spilled into the chest,
a few dropping to the deck.


in the DeplbS----.-----_-----.-.-.--.--_-_-191
Perhaps you’ve wondered how it feels to dip your
hands into hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
precious metal? Well, Larry knew now, and the others
too. It feels slippery, slimy, green with mold. It’s heavy, it
smells bad—and it is, to be honest, a wonderful sensation!
Larry leaned forward, his mind whirling, polishing
one of the coins till the golden luster shone through the
mold. Suddenly he felt faint. There was an itching and
burning sensation on his skin, and dull pains in his muscles
and joints. Chris looked at him sharply. A mottled rash
was spreading over Larry’s skin.
“Larry’s got the bends,” he gasped. “Open the recom-
pression chamber, Peter, quickly.” The treasure was for-
gotten by everyone but Smitty as Larry was helped over
to the cylindrical chamber. The pain was increasing rap-
idly as Larry crawled in the chamber. The door was
closed and the hiss of compressed air began.
All pain and nausea—the penalty for surfacing too
fast—quickly left him as the compression built up. Chris’
anxious face peered in through the glass port. Larry
grinned self-consciously, and waved to show that he was
all right.


CHAPTER 26

Fortunately, Larry had only a
light case of bends. Compressed air was forced into the
recompression chamber till the air pressure was equal to
that of the deck of the Dona Isabella where he had been
working. Then the air pressure in the chamber was gradu-
ally reduced, just as it would have been if he had made
the normal slow ascent through the water. The nitrogen
which had dissolved in his blood stream under compression
thus gradually passed off as compression was reduced.
Seven hours after his collapse, the door was opened, and
Larry wiggled out. He felt tired, but otherwise all right.
Larry was tempted to tease the others as he lay rest-
ing on a mattress while they sweated to get the anchor up,
but decided he’d better not. He had helped bring on the
attack himself by his own foolishness, and he knew what
a hard, dirty, interminable job it was to crank those end-
less anchor chains up inch by inch on the windlass.
With the engine purring smoothly, the Iolly Roger
headed for Borinquen Point and San Juan, while they
opened the other three chests. All were crammed with
198


in the DeptbS--_--_--------.-.-.-_-.-.-.-_-_--_-.-.~z03
and a succession of small forms bounded aboard. José
had risen bruised and bleeding from the dock. Across the
street from him, taking shelter from the rain, was a group
of his fellow shoe-shine boys, who are as numerous in old
San Juan as the sea gulls. “Qué para?” one of them had
called out to José. That indomitable youngster yelled for
help, and the whole crew of urchins charged like a pack
of terriers. More were on the way, too; not only shoe-
shine boys, but newsboys and the kids who hung around
the docks diving for pennies thrown in the water by tour-
ists.
The kids had a simple tactic. Two of them would
trip or tackle someone on deck, and two others would fall
on him. The spread-eagled adult was then held down, a
boy on each leg and arm. The only difficulty was that
they didn’t know friend from foe, and Larry soon found
himself lying helpless on the deck with the others. As the
sounds of battle lessened, José ran around looking in the
faces of the erstwhile combatants, ordering the release of
the Iolly Roger’s crew in staccato Spanish. Larry was al-
lowed up, his four captors promptly falling on another
prone struggling ﬁgure, which was almost smothered un-
der the wiry bodies of eight youngsters wild with excite-
ment and battle madness.
Then sirens wailed on shore, and the police riot squad
arrived to take over the ship, the headlights of their cars
shining over the deckload of squirming ﬁgures. Chief Mad-
dox, his uniform torn and his knuckles bruised and bleed-
ing, shouldered his way to the police lieutenant. Rapidly
he explained the situation. The Chief was well known in
San Juan, and his word was enough to separate the
modern-day pirates from their intended victims. --


Treasures in the Depths ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ - ‘205

Larry felt left out of things. Chris and Peter had not
included him in their plans. “What am I,” he inquired bit-
terly, “an orphan?”
Chris laughed. “Other people will be making plans
for you, my boy. Do you realize how old you are? Have
you ever heard of the draft board? Peter and I want you
in with us, naturally, but ﬁrst you’ve got a spell to put in
for Uncle Sam.”
Chief Maddox, who was visiting them again—he be-
ing now almost a member of the family—edged his chair
closer to Larry. “What branch of the service are you go-
ing in?” he asked.
“I hadn’t thought much about it, Chief,” answered
Larry. “There’s been so much going on.” They all
laughed. “I’ll probably enlist in the Coast Guard or in the
Navy,” continued Larry. Chief Maddox leaned closer still.
“You’ll have to earn a Chief’s rating before you can dive
in the Navy. Join the Coast Guard here, and I’ll guarantee
you can go on with your diving. If you enlist here in
Puerto Rico, you may be able to do part of your tour of
duty right here where Chris did, and where your friends
and family are.”
“What do you think?” Larry asked Linda.
. “I think it’s the most wonderful idea in the world,”
answered Linda, “provided Chief Maddox can guarantee
that you’ll be assigned to Puerto Rico.” She looked ex-
pectantly at the Chief.
Maddox laughed. “I told you before, a Chief Boat-
swain’s Mate isn’t the same thing as an Admiral. No one can
guarantee anything. But I’ve been in this game and I’ll tell
you one little thing. In a matter like this, you’re better off
having a Chief working for you than an Admiral. Petty
officers handle the actual assignments, and we’ve got
ways.” He laughed again. “I think it can be arranged,
kids.” ’


206“ -------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures in the Depths

There’s nothing much else to tell. Oh yes, the shoe-
shine boys and newsboys of San Juan now have a thriving
baseball league—“beisball,” they call it, with uniforms
and equipment that wouldn’t shame a major league club.
The petty officers’ mess at the Coast Guard base in San
Juan has certain little luxuries which the ofﬁcers’ club
might envy. All paid for by certain anonymous civilian
benefactors.
Smitty? They never had to decide how big a share to
grant that slippery individual. He had secretly dipped into
the treasure chests, and helped himself to all the gold he
could carry. Chris laughed at this, for the share he would
probably have been granted would have been worth more
than the value of the gold he stole, the yellow metal be-
ing heavy stuff, and Smitty not a robust person. Larry was
delighted with this ending, for, as he said, it brought the
parallel with his favorite story, Treasure Island, to a ﬁt-
ting climax. Had not Long John Silver also escaped from
the Hispaniola with a pocketful of gold?


in the Depths ----------------------------------------------------- - -2 09

Claustrophobia
C linker-built
Compressed air
illness
Compressor
Compressor ex-
haust
Compressor in-
take
Con
Corselet
Coupling
Crane barge
Deadeye
Decompress
Decompression
Decompression
chamber
Fear of being enclosed or conﬁned in
a small area.
Boat with overlapping planks.
Disease caused by nitrogen bubbles dis-
solved in the blood stream.
An engine which compresses or
squeezes air to put it under pressure.
Poisonous gases from exhaust of motor.
Place where motor draws in air.
To direct the steering of a boat.
Breastplate to which diver’s helmet is
attached.
Fastening for putting together short
pieces of hose.
A large, clumsy squared-off boat hav-
ing a crane or derrick for hoisting
heavy objects.
A ﬂat circular piece of wood with
three holes, used for tightening a ship’s
rigging.
To reduce air pressure.
Gradual reduction of a diver’s air pres-
sure, to let mtrogen dissolve slowly.
A compartment in which air pressure
can be built up for gradual decompres-
sion after a diver has come up too fast.


2 1 0‘ ---------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

Decompression
stage
Demand valve
Descending line
Displacement
Distance line
Diving stage
Dredge line
Dredge (suction)
Dry rot
Exhaust valve
Faceplate
Fathom
F idley
A platform on which a diver stands
while he is being hoisted up gradually
to decompress.
A valve which lets in just enough air
for a diver.
A rope used by a diver in descending,
which also marks the proper spot to
begin going up.
The weight of water displaced by an
object in water, like a ship or a diver.
A rope used by a diver to keep from
getting lost on the bottom.
A platform on which divers sometimes
stand in descending and ascending.
A suction hose to suck up mud and
silt.
A suction pump which sucks up mud
through a hose or pipe.
Rotten timbers in a ship, caused by
lack of ventilation.
Valve which lets used air out of a
diver’s helmet, and controls pressure
inside.
Hinged front window in diver’s hel-
met.
Six feet.
Part of deck over steamship’s boilers,
through which funnel or smokestack
passes.


in the Depths‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘—‘-‘-‘-‘—‘-211
Fife rail
Flotsam
Frigate
Galleon
Galley
Gelignite
Grab bucket
Grouting
H ance irons
H awse holes
Hawsers
Heel
Helium
Helmet
Helmet cushion
Ingots
A rail around a mast with holes for
belaying pins.
Floating wreckage.
In old times, a three-masted warship
with square sails.
An ancient form of ship, with many
decks rising in stern.
A ship’s kitchen.
High explosive.
A large self-closing bucket to pick up
heavy objects.
A form of cementing—using concrete
under water.
Iron braces for bulwarks of boat.
Holes in a ship’s bows through which
anchor cable passes.
Very heavy ropes used for towing or
fastening a ship.
When a boat leans over, as from pres-
sure of wind.
A gas sometimes used‘instead of nitro-
gen in the compressed air a diver
breathes.
Large dome-shaped object with glass
windows, which covers a diver’s head.
A cushion to relieve pressure of hehnet
weight, and to help seal out water.
Small bars of metal. ___i_


212- ---------------------------------------------------------- - —Treasures

Iacob’s ladder
Iet hose
Ietting
I ettison
Knot
Lee
Life line
Lighter
Log
Maelstrom
Make fast
Making (ﬂood)
Moray
Mushroom
Negative buoy-
ancy
Neophyte
Nitrogen
A ladder with wooden steps and side
ropes.
Pressure hose used in jetting.
Using water under pressure to wash
away sand and mud.
Objects thrown off a ship to lighten it.
Unit of speed for a boat; one nautical
mile per hour.
The side of a boat away from the
wind; a lee shore is a shore toward
which the wind is blowing.
Rope used to lower or hoist diver.
Often has telephone cable inside.
A small barge into which cargo is
loaded.
A written record of a ship’s voyage or
of a diver’s dive.
Water moving rapidly in a circle.
To belay or fasten down a rope.
Tide is coming in.
A large, vicious eel.
A very heavy anchor used when a
boat doesn’t move around much, and
seldom has to hoist it up.
Heavier than the water the diver dis-
places, so he sinks.
Beginner.
A gas which comprises % of the air.


2 14-‘ ---------------------------------------------------------- - ‘Treasures

Reef
Reservoir (air)
Salvage
Schooner
Securing pin
Self-contained
diving outﬁt
Shanghai
Sheet
Shoal
Shot line
Skin diving
other logs chained together on the
edges.
To reduce the area of a sail exposed to
the wind by folding in and tieing down
the lower edge.
A tank into which compressed air is
forced, to be used by a diver.
The act of saving a ship or cargo from
the ocean; also legal claim against
owner by someone who has saved it.
Two-masted sailing vessel, usually
with rear mast taller than front mast,
except on a bugeye. Sometimes has
more than two masts.
A pin on a deep sea diver’s helmet
which keeps the lock from coming
loose.
A diving rig with which the diver car-
ries his own air supply in tanks on his
back.
To kidnap a person to make him work
on a ship.
A rope used to control the angle of a
sail to the wind. It is not a sail.
Shallow—not deep.
A line with heavy weight on end,
dropped from a diving boat, used to
guide the diver on his descent and
ascent.
Diving with breathing mask, but with
bathing suit instead of diving dress.


in the DepthS---_-_-----------_-----2is

Slack
Slag
Slip
Sloop
Snorkel
Spindrift
Spume
Squall
Square rigger
Squeeze
Starboard
Storm warnings
Strangulation
Loose.
Molten metal.
A space between two piers for tieing
up a boat.
A single-masted sailboat with one sail
in back of the mast and one or more in
front of the mast.
A device for breathing while just un-
der the surface of the water through a
tube extending above the water.
See Spray . . . water blown from
crest of waves by strong wind.
Foam and froth caused on water by
strong wind.
Sudden, short storm that comes up
without warning.
An old-fashioned sailing ship whose
sails extend crosswise to the deck in-
stead of lengthwise.
Pressure inside a diving dress, lower
than outside pressure of water and
forcing the diver up into his rigid
helmet.
The right side of a ship as you face
forward.
A system of ﬂags ﬂown by lighthouses,
Coast Guard stations, etc., warning of
approaching storm.
Inability to breathe. For a diver, when
air stops coming, or water rises m hel-
met over nose and mouth.
4


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