Part 30

The sub had now to prove her diving qualities. So tanks were blown out and up she went to the surface again; and there, while she was resting like a bird on the water, ballast-tanks were suddenly filled and down she went. Down, down, down she went--the long green finger on the broad-faced gauge walking around at a fine clip. Dropping so--on an even keel, by the way--she gave out no sense of action such as a man gets on an aeroplane. Flying around in the air, you see what's doing every second. If anything happens, you know you will see it coming, and--perhaps--going: your eyes, ears, brains, and nerves prove things to you.

But action in a submarine lies largely in a man's imagination, unless he be the periscope man; and even there, when she is completely submerged, he sees no more than the others. However, a man did not need to have too much imagination to think of a few things as he looked at the long green finger walking around: 30 feet, 40 feet, 50 feet--This particular observer had no idea she could drop so fast; and as she dropped, he could not help wondering how deep the ocean was around there--this in case anything happened. Sixty feet, 70 feet--she was gathering great speed by then, but at 82 feet she stopped--a pleasant thing to see. And then, maybe to show it was no accident, she did it all over again. Did we feel any difficulty in breathing during all this? We did not, nor during the three to four hours we were under that morning. And let a man listen to these submarine enthusiasts telling how they can live three or four weeks on their compressed air, if they have to, without coming to the surface! Only give them food enough, of course. And coffee--they have an electric range to make the coffee. As it happened, they made coffee for us--not that day, but next morning going home. It was good coffee. The 82-foot-drop stunts were done with each of the crew at his station, ready at any instant to check her.

To meet the further requirements our sub had to rise to the top, fill her tanks, let herself go, and then, by an automatic safety device, fetch up all by herself. So the tank man applied the air-pressure, blew his tanks free of all water, closed his outer valves and brought her up. She was now stretched out on the surface--not quite motionless, for the first of the breeze predicted the night before was on and we could feel that she was rolling a little. A peek through the periscope while she was up disclosed further evidence of the breeze--tossing white crests, two coasters hustling for harbor under short sail, an inbound fisherman with reefed mainsail making great leaps for home. Looking through the periscope so, it was easy enough to understand the feeling of power which might well come to the master of a submarine in war time. The sub can be lying there--in dark or bright water will make no difference; on such a day no eye is going to discern the white bone of the moving periscope; and he can be standing there, with a quick peek now and then to see what is going on above him; and by and by she can come swinging along majestically in her arrogance and power--the greatest battleship afloat, with guns to level a great city, or the biggest and speediest ship ever built--and he can be there and when he gets good and ready--Woof! she's gone. War-ship or liner, she's gone and all aboard gone with her; and the submarine skipper can go along about his business of getting the next one.

However, the automatic device was set for action at the required depth and the word given.

In this same middle compartment--the operating compartment of the ship--was a man with the spiritual face of one who keeps lonely, intense vigils. He sat on a camp-stool, and his business seemed to be not ever to let his rapt gaze wander from several rows of gauges which were screwed to the bulkhead before him. Since I first stepped down into the sub I had spotted him, and had been wondering if his ascetic look was born with him or was a development of his job--whatever his job might be. Now I learned what his job was. He was the man who stood by the automatic safety devices. If anything happened to the regular gadgets and it was life or death to get her at once to the surface, he was the man who pressed a button, or moved a switch, or in some highly mechanical way applied the mysterious power which would get her safe to the surface.

The skipper gave the word, the main ballast lad opened his outer valves, and down she started. We knew this, as always, by the moving green finger on the wide-faced gauge. Downward she kept on going, and to a man not too long shipmates with the creature she certainly did seem to be going down in a hurry. She was nearing the appointed depth; she made the appointed depth, and--went on by. "What's this!" said one observer to himself, and directed an interested eye toward the saint-like lad on the camp-stool.

But it was only for a few feet. The indicator slacked up, fluttered, stopped dead. And then--without the husky tank boy to lift a finger--we heard the rumph-h and rumbling of the valve-seats as the sea-water was driven out of her ballast-tanks; and then up she started. Soon there she was--did it all by herself--atop of the water. And the face of the young fellow of the automatic devices was like the face of the devout missionary who has just put something over on the heathen.

Later, when you express the feeling of almost holy comfort which these little automatic safety devices give you, the manager--the same with the stop-watch and the note-book--says, "Puh! Look here," and sits down and details--drawing good working plans of them on a pad while he talks--three different ways by which a submarine crew can beat the game should any evil happen to the ordinary and regular means of getting to the surface.

She has a turn at porpoising then; that is from a moderate depth the diving-rudder man shoots her near enough to the surface for the captain to have a look through the periscope--a long-enough look to plot the enemy on a chart, but not long enough to give that enemy much of a chance to pick him up; and then under again. And then up for another peek; and quickly under again, the captain at the periscope taking each time a fresh bearing of the enemy, who is supposed to be at some distance and steaming at good speed. After two or three such quick sights, changing course after each sight, it will be time to discharge a torpedo or two at her. And--the layman may note it--with expert men at the periscope and diving-rudder, a porpoising sub can sight, discharge her torpedo, and dive--all within five seconds.

Steaming back to harbor after our trial run that day, we caught the first rip of the gale which the gummed-over moon and the low barometer had forecast the night before. It was too rough to tie her up to the supply-ship, so the sub was anchored--they carry anchors too--a short distance away, with three men left on her for an anchor watch, the idea being to take them off later for a hot meal. But after the rest of us were safe and warm and well fed aboard the mother ship, the increasing winds came bowling over the increasing seas, and the crew of the sub had to wait.

At intervals we could hear them emitting beseeching, doleful, disgusted moans and shrieks and howls from her air-whistle. But it was too rough for any little choo-choo boat to be battling around. It was 9.30 that night before they could safely be taken off. They were a moderately good-natured lot; but that was the blear-eyed trouble with making sub trial trips with bad weather coming on--a man never knew about his regular meals.

The supply-ship was quite a little institution herself. Approaching her from shore the night before, her lights beneath the dull moon and thin, drifting clouds had loomed up like a dancing-hall across the lonesome harbor waters. When we got aboard, we found her the relic of what had once been a fine block of a three-masted coaster; but moored forward and aft she was now, as if for all time, and no longer showing stout spars and weather-beaten canvas--nothing but two floors of white-painted boarding above her old bulwarks.

She was a boarding-place, a sort of club, for the crew and attendants, as well as a supply station for the submarines which in these New England waters were being tried out for one of the warring Powers. Voices and cigar-smoke as we stepped aboard, and more or less quiet breathing, with partly closed and open living and sleeping rooms, denoted that men were discussing, arguing, sleeping, and otherwise passing a normal evening. Looking farther, we saw that down in the insides of her--where formerly she stowed noble freights of coal or lumber or, sometimes, hay and ice--were now a boiler and engine room, and a good, big repair-shop.

This night, while the gale came howling and the sea rolling and the solid rain sweeping against the sober old sides of our supply-ship--on this night, the finest kind to be sitting in a warm cabin, we sat and, while the smoke rolled high, aired our views of the real things in the world; and the most real thing in the world just then being a submarine, we got this:

"Danger? Of course, there's some danger. So is there danger in bank-fishing, in log-jamming down in Maine, in mining deep down, and in aeroplaning.

"You want to get a sub right. A sub is a ship modelled different from most ships, of course, and built stronger to stand pressure, but only a ship, after all, with special tanks in her. She's on top of the water and wants to go down. Good. She fills her tanks and down she goes. She's down and wants to come up. All right. She empties her tanks and up she comes. She's got to. She couldn't stay down with her tanks empty if she wanted to--not unless she blew a hole in her side, or left her hatches open.

"Of course if her tanks don't work right! But we showed you three different ways to-day how she can beat that game. And anyway, no matter what happens, unless you're cruising deep, it's only a few feet to the top. Not like a crazy aeroplane a thousand feet up in the air! Something happens in an aeroplane, and where are you? With a busted stay or bamboo strut and you a mile in the air, where are you? Volplane? Maybe. But if you didn't--down you'd come atumbling like a hoop out of the clouds. That's 90 per cent--yes, maybe 99 per cent--of the submarine game: See that everything is right mechanically with your sub, then get a competent crew and--well, you're ready."

That is for the submariner's point of view. As for the danger from a shore-goer's point of view: Ashore we make the mistake, perhaps, of thinking of a submarine as a heavy, logy body fighting always for her life beneath an unfriendly ocean; whereas she is a light-moving easily controlled creature cruising in a rather friendly element.

The ocean is always trying to lift her atop and not hold her under water. A submarine could be sent under with a positive buoyancy so small--that is, with so little more than enough in her tanks to sink her--that an ordinary man standing on the sea bottom could catch her as she came floating down and bounce her up and off merely by the strength of his arms. Consider a submarine under water as we would a toy balloon in the air, say. Weight that toy balloon so that it just falls to earth. Kick that toy balloon and what does it do? Doesn't it bounce along, and after a few feet fall easily down again, and up and on and down again?

Picture a strong wind driving that toy balloon along the street, and the balloon, as it bumps along, meeting an obstacle: Will the balloon smash itself against the obstacle, or what will it do? What that balloon does is pretty much what a submarine would do if, while running along full speed under water, she suddenly ran into shoal water. She would go bumping along on the bottom; and, meeting an obstacle, if not too high, she would be more likely to bounce over it than to smash herself against it.

But sometimes they do run into things and fetch up?

That is right, they do. Let our naval men tell of the old C plunger--the first class of sub in our navy--which hit an excursion steamer down the James River way one time. She was a wooden steamer about 150 feet long, and the C's bow went clear through the steamer's sides. The steamer's engineer was sitting by his levers, reading the sporting page of his favorite daily, when he heard a crash and found himself on the engine-room floor. Looking around, he saw a wedge of steel sticking through the side of his ship. He did not know what it was, but he could see right away it didn't have a friendly look; so he hopscotched across the engine-room floor and up a handy ladder to the deck, taking his assistant along in his wake. After rescuing the passengers it took three tugboats to pry sub and steamer apart.

Our C boat must have hit her a pretty good wallop, for as they fell apart the steamer sank. They ran the little old C up to the navy-yard to see how much she was damaged. Surely after that smash she must be shaken up--her bow torpedo-tubes at least must be out of alignment! But not a thing wrong anywhere; they didn't even have to put her in dry dock. Out and about her business she went next morning.

Later another of the same class came nosing up out of the depths, and bumped head on and into a breakwater down that same country--a solid stone wall of a breakwater. What did she do? She bounced off, and, after a look around, also went on about her business.

* * * * *

In the morning our sub up-anchored for her run across the open bay. On the conning-tower was rigged a little bridge of slim brass stanchions and thin wire-rope rail, with the canvas as high as a man's chin for protection; and away she went in a wind that was still blowing hard enough to drive home-bound Gloucester fishermen down to storm trysails and sea enough to jump an out-bound destroyer of a thousand tons under easy steam to her lower plates whenever she lifted forward.

There was not a soul standing around on the main deck of the destroyer as we passed her, nor on her high forward turtle-deck, which was being washed clean; and surely not much comfort being bounced around on transoms in that destroyer below, nor too much dryness on her flying bridge. And yet here was our little sub--full speed and all--heading straight into high-curling seas and making fine weather of it.

Plunging her bow under, and through she'd go; and when she did the seas would go swashing up atop of her make-believe deck and come rolling down her round-top plates and squishing through the hundreds of round holes in her deck sides. But steady? Up on her little bridge we did not half the time have to hold on to her little steel-rope rail lines to keep our balance. She kept on going, hooked-up all the way, seas and wind and all to hinder her, and finished her five-hour run without so much as wetting our coat fronts up on the conning-tower bridge. A great little sea boat--a submarine.