1890 Diver Part II

[flyboy65]

“It was years ago, in Lake Huron.  I had gone down to recover a valuable cargo from a vessel that had foundered so suddenly that the captain and crew had barely time to escape by the boats. The wreck lay in ninety feet of water.  It was badly broken up and rocked and swayed in the water so that I kept my balance with difficulty as I worked among the timbers.  I was prying and chopping my way to the hatches when from some place about the wreck, but just where I never could tell, a dead man rose suddenly in front of me.  The corpse was not more than ten feet away, erect, facing me, and seemed to me exactly as if it had arisen in alarm at my approach.  The man had died with both hands clutching the breast of his coat.  His open mouth, widely-staring eyes, and distorted face made such a picture of horror as I hope never to see again.  The corpse stood for a second facing me, and it seemed to me as if its horror was of me and at my presence.  I was paralyzed with terror.  The dead man rose at last towards the surface and in such a way as to deepen the impression that I had disturbed him in his subterranean sepulcher, for it was for all the world as if he were fleeing from me.  Several times before the corpse disappeared beyond my line of vision it turned in the water and seemed to gaze back at me with that haunting look of horror, the hands still clutching the breast.  After the body had gone out of sight I tried to proceed with my work, but I was so much unstrung that a fish swimming by, or my air hose flapping against me, gave me such painful starts that I had to signal to be hauled to the surface.  It was a long time before I could venture down on a wreck again, and I have never been able to overcome the feeling of dread for unexpected corpses that was the result of that first experience of mine.  The dead man of that wreck must have been a stowaway.  No one knew him, but in the breast pocket of his coat he clutched so tightly was found $1,000 in bank notes.  No claimant ever appeared for the money, and it was divided between myself and the crew of the wrecked vessel.
“The only time that I ever undertook to do a piece of work on the lake bottom reluctantly, and was badly broken up by the result of it, although I had anticipated and thought I was prepared for a startling sight, was the time I went down twenty fathoms in Lake Erie, and the woman and her children were in their stateroom.  The husband and father of the lost family offered me a big price to go down and recover the bodies, but the touching appeals of the heart-broken man alone induced me to undertake the work.  I found the vessel in easy shape for working, and reached the door of the fatal state-room without difficulty.  The door was locked.  The fact that I must break it down before the imprisoned dead could be released increased the dread that possessed me, and I stood irresolute at the awful threshold.  If the money I was to receive for the work had been my only impelling motive I would have hurried from the wreck that moment; but I was haunted by the memory of that stricken soul above, awaiting in agonized suspense the poor consolation of seeing his cold and lifeless loved ones, and I put aside my foolish fear and with a few blows of my crowbar battered down the state room door.  I had pictured in my mind how the three corpses would in all probability look, floating with staring eyes about the room, and I think if I had come upon them in that way I would have accepted the contact with complacency.  But the reality of their appearance was far different from the one I had imagined.  The vessel gave a hard lurch as I broke the door loose, and the water rushed out of the state-room.  With the rush came the dead inmates of the room.  The three were in a group, and such a group.  One child, a golden-haired little thing of 3 years old, the mother clasped to her breast with one arm.  The little one’s cheek was pressed against its mother’s, and its chubby arms were around her neck.  The second child, older than the first, held its mother’s other hand.  They were all in their night clothes, and the mother floated from the room standing upright, clasping her one child to her breast and leading the other by the hand.  Her long yellow hair was loose and trailed far behind her in the water.  Her eyes were wide open, as I had pictured them, but I had imagined no such depth of horror in them as they expressed.  Her face was frightfully distorted, and showing the intense agony of her death.  The faces of both children were peaceful, and the eyes of the one in its mother’s arms were closed as if in sleep.  The sight was more than I could stand, and I retreated to another part of the wreck.  It was a long time before I could summon courage enough to fasten a line to the dead bodies and signal for them to be raised.  I sent them to the surface just as they had died and as I found them, and quit the wreck myself as soon as the work was done.  No money could have induced me to work another minute in that charnel-house, although it had been made tenantless of its dead.
“In spite of the fact that no lake diver ever goes below without feeling that the chance is by no means remote that he had looked for the last time on the sky and the earth and all that he loves, there is a fascination about the life that few men ever have been able voluntarily to resist after becoming familiar with it.  This seems the more singular because no diver, shut up in armor and held in the depths by a hundred pounds or more of weights, can ever banish the feeling that a little stoppage of the air pump, a leak in his hose, some slight carelessness on the part of his tender in the boat above is sufficient to bring down upon him the weight of a mighty mountain and crush the life out of him in the twinkling of an eye.  There is always danger, too, of the diver fouling his life line himself by catching it on some projecting splinter or around a sharp-edged timber, and in his haste to release it precipitate the catastrophe of which he stands most in dread.  The fouling of a line frequently occurs, and never to me but that I turn cold in my effort to release it, at the thought of what a slender thing holds back the clutch of death down in those moaning depths.
“Lake divers get big pay for their work, but, as there are a good many in the business and jobs sometimes far between, they do well if they average more than ordinary wages year by year.  I have made $1,000 in a month, but there have been many months in succession when I have not made a dollar.  Full of peril as the life of a diver is, it is safety itself in comparison with the life of a lake sailor.  I’d rather work in a nitroglycerine factory than sail before the mast on the Great Lakes.”

(Author Unknown)