The Lethbridge story captivated Jack. The others moved on to other tales of daring and shipwrecks, but he was fascinated by Mentor’s account. He noticed that Quince was also preoccupied; he, too, had heard of the device.
Jack knew it would be impossible to manufacture such diving hardware on a primitive island, but he had a basic idea of how a diving bell worked from illustrations he had seen in a book. There was a cooper among the survivors and there were the makings of hundreds of whale oil barrels as part of the ship’s cargo. His mind wandered back to his little experiment with the drinking glass and piece of cloth in Quen-Li’s pot.
Jack approached his mates. “We could make a diving bell,” he said matter of factly.
The subsequent silence was complete.
“What’s ’at now, lad?” Mentor asked.
“A bell, a diving bell. Maybe we could make a diving bell.” The men were slower to laugh at Jack these days. While some smiled and shook their heads, Cheatum and Smithers outright scoffed; others looked at him expectantly.
Only Smithers had a comment. “Sure, O’Reilly, we’ll just open up a factory, make a dozen of ’em, and sell the ones we can’t use ourselves.”
Cheatum joined Smithers in laughter. Jack didn’t even look up.
Quince also ignored the gibe. He looked at Jack over the top of his pince-nez. “Out with it, lad.”
“All we need is a big cask full of air for a man to breathe down there. The cooper can make it, can’t you, Coopie?”
His mouth open at being the new focus of attention, Coopie responded that “a barrel’s a barrel I guess.” As he still held the floor, he went on. “Got all sorts of hoops and staves already pulled out of the Star. Plenty of makings for oakum. If me barrels can keep water in, I ’spect they could keep water out.”
“How in hell you going to get it to stay down?” asked Quince. “You ever try to sink a barrel of air?” The questions came quickly.
As Jack had suspected, Quince had been following the same train of thought.
“Never had a need to sink a barrel full of air before,” Jack mused. “But I bet we could figure out how if it meant we could keep a man down there for an hour, instead of two minutes,” he went on.
“What if we hung some cannonballs from it with rope mesh and chain links?” The last from Mentor. “We could run it with fairleads over the top—yeah, iron balls is the thing for it. Jesus, a man down there for thirty minutes could do a lot of tyin’ and riggin’.”
Jack felt a new exhilaration in his heart.
“He’d take a breath of air from the barrel and do a minute or two of work, then swim a few yards back to the bell,” Mentor continued. “He’d take a few breaths, then, back at it again. Think about it: he could do an awful fine amount of work, maybe even find the kit bags with gun parts and shoes.”
Quince sighed. “The damn bags and best materials is over ten fathom down. Jack, you think we can talk the damn wogs into breathing from that coffin down there?”
“No, and they wouldn’t know what they were lookin’ for either. I wasn’t thinking of the Indians… I was thinking of me. I can swim, you know.”
“Ten fathom is awful deep. You’ll drown your fool ass.” A solemn declaration from Coopie.
“They was going that deep in Southport,” announced Mentor. “They was going so deep and it was so piercin’ wet and cold they was gettin’ the rheumytism down there somethin’ fearful.”
“Well, at least there’s no fear of that here,” Coop said. “It’s warmer’n a lady’s muff in these waters.”
Quen-Li’s gong sounded behind them. The men trooped to dinner, Jack and Quince bringing up the rear. Neither spoke, but Jack knew what was in the mate’s mind.
The pain in his ears was unbearable. If it kept up he would have to drop the steel ball hanging from the lanyard around his wrist and bolt for the surface. From where he was, he could dimly see the top of the bell, beckoning to him from fathoms below. He kept trying to relieve the pain the way the natives had showed him, by wrapping his left arm around the hemp line tied to the bell, and using his right to pinch his nostrils and blow out. When his best efforts failed, he pulled himself several feet toward the surface and was about to release the weight and scramble for the sun when his ears suddenly responded. There was a screeching sound and the agony in his head disappeared, leaving his ears sore but unburdened with the weight of the sea.
Now Jack had to decide whether he could make it to the bell or head for the surface. He was almost out of the air in his lungs. Suddenly, the grip on the line with his left hand came loose and the steel ball started pulling him down. He could have let go but it was almost easier to let the weight make the decision for him. He saw the bell getting closer and felt the pain starting to build again in his ears.
He became panicky from his need to breathe but fought the urge to lunge for the surface. Suddenly, he was there. The top of the cask was a familiar friend in an alien world, and he let himself slide down the smooth wooden shape with which he had become so familiar in the days spent helping Coopie construct the marvel.
He grabbed the rim of the barrel and tried to pull himself under it and up into the life-giving air. Then, to his horror, he was dragged several feet below the rim to the seabed. He seemed trapped. Looking up now he could see the barrel suspended only a body length above him.
It was his subconscious that told him he wasn’t stuck; he was simply holding the weight in a death grip. He relaxed his hand as if in a dream and kicked upward with his last ounce of energy. Suddenly, he was inside the bell, and he breathed in a huge wheezing gasp of air. Unbelieving, he sucked in the sweet vapor, stolen from the world above. Somehow, his ears in all this had once again released, and he realized that he was now ten fathoms deep and still functioning.
For the first moment, all he could think of was to catch his breath enough to bolt to the surface and never again attempt such foolishness with his God-given life. But his head cleared, his wits returned, and with it, his courage. He took stock of his surroundings in the artificial air pocket formed by the barrel. It was dark, but light reflected from the coral provided dim illumination to the interior. He could make out the form of an axe and a lever bar still hanging from the makeshift racks where they had been placed before submersion. He reached tentatively toward the lever and it came off easily in his hands.
He braced his feet on the bell’s rim below him and, pushing lightly with his back, secured himself with no effort in his new confines. Here was an advantage to being underwater he hadn’t thought of—as long as he didn’t fully rise out of the water, his body had hardly any weight. Soon, he had almost completely caught his breath and his mood swung to euphoria. He was safe, and he was going to give it a try.
Jack took a deep breath and ventured a body’s length from the barrel. Everything was blurry but there was plenty of light and he happened almost immediately upon a sea chest, probably from the fo’c’sle. After several excursions he noticed he could hold his breath longer when diving from the barrel than when diving from the surface. The experiment was a success; he grabbed a cutlass and a bolt of cloth, the most valuable items in easy reach, tucked them under his arm, and pulled hand over hand for the surface.
The whole village crowded the shallows around the diving operation. It seemed to Jack that whatever wonders the Americans had so far demonstrated, none matched in the Belaurans’ eyes the ability to stay so long in the depths. The Belaurans lived their lives with the pulse of the tides; they were part of the sea, which made the white men’s apparent mastery even more astounding.