DIVE EB

Stephen McGinty

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008410773
• eBook ISBN: 9780008410797
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The Dive is a thrilling narrative nonfiction in the tradition of The Perfect Storm and Apollo 13.

They were out of their depth, out of breath, and out of time. It was 1973. Two men were trapped in a crippled submarine 1,700 feet below sea. They only had enough air to survive for two days. On the ocean's surface there was a hastily assembled flotilla of rescue ships from both sides of the Atlantic. The world held its breath to await word of a rescue.

In a routine dive to fix the telecommunication cable that snakes along the Atlantic sea bed, their mission had gone badly wrong. There was a catastrophic fault on board the Pisces III, and Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson's mini-submarine went tumbling to the ocean bed almost half a mile below.

The crippled sub and its crew were trapped far beyond the depth of any previous sub-sea rescue. They had just two days' worth of oxygen. However, on the surface the best estimates for a rescue of these men was a minimum of three days' time.

The Dive is brilliantly researched by veteran journalist Stephen McGinty. Stephen adeptly reconstructs the race against time as Britain, America and Canada pooled their resources into a 'Brotherhood of the Sea' dedicated to stopping the ocean depths claiming two of their own. Based on previously undisclosed records, maritime logbooks, and exclusive interviews with all the key participants, The Dive takes the reader on an emotional and thrilling ride from the depths of defeat to a glimpse of the sun-dappled surface.

PART I

THE CABLE AND THE SUBMARINE

CHAPTER ONE

The hook resembled an anchor but with five arms instead of only two, the hands at the end of the arms resembling shovels in shape. To the hook was connected a thick wire rope, more than five miles long. Hurled overboard from the deck of the Great Eastern, the world’s largest steamship – designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel – the hook would take two hours to reach the floor of the Atlantic, the crew smoking clay tobacco pipes as they waited for the rope racing overboard to come to rest. When the rope was still and steady, the Great Eastern would move northwards, at a right angle to the line of throw, dragging the giant iron anchor along the ocean floor in pursuit of the lost transatlantic telegram cable. The magnitude of the task of fishing for the cable, snapped and lost in the ocean depths, would be picturesquely described ‘as if an alpine hunter stood on the summit of Mont Blanc and cast a line into the Vale of Chamouni’.

The following morning, after 12 hours’ sailing, the wire rope quivered. The anchor was caught on something and when the crew began to raise it, the object grew heavier the higher it was raised to the surface. It was the cable increasing in weight as more of its length was raised off the seabed. The wire rope had been manufactured in lengths of 100 fathoms, joined by a metal shackle. When the first shackle broke on board, the brakeman controlling the winch was quick enough to clamp it down before it raced freely overboard. The broken end whipped at the hands and faces of two crew, leaving bloody, lacerating wounds. As the cable rose three-quarters of a mile off the seabed, a second shackle broke too quickly to be caught and took two miles of wire rope back to the bottom.

The cable was hooked a second time, then lost at a raised depth of one mile. A third attempt failed and a fourth saw a shackle snap as the cable passed 800 fathoms. As the length of remaining rope was now too short to reach the bottom, the rescue operation was called off, postponed till the following summer of 1867. As the Great Eastern prepared to depart the mid-Atlantic for Britain, Cyrus Field, a quiet, thoughtful, smartly dressed man in his early 50s, came on deck to look overboard at the milky blue waters and to reflect on how far he had come and how far there still was to go.

Over a century before the two-man crew of Pisces III were charged with burying the CANTAT-2 cable, a modern successor to the lost telegram cable, the concept of transatlantic communication was but a distant dream. The decision to cast ‘a thread across the ocean’, as the original transatlantic cable would be called, was made in the library of a grand house facing Gramercy Park in Manhattan. The owner was Cyrus Field, a man of taste, vision and, surprisingly among the entrepreneurs and tycoons of the golden age of American capitalism, fiduciary honour. The financial crash of 1837, which wiped out 70 per cent of all businesses in New York, had presented him with an opportunity to acquire a paper wholesale firm, E. Root & Co., where he had started his career as a junior partner, by paying 30 cents on the dollar for its debts. Fifteen years later, during which time he had built the new entity Cyrus W. Field & Co. into America’s largest paper and printing supply firm, he tracked down everyone to whom he had paid 30 per cent of their original debt and reimbursed them in full.

Born on 30 November 1819 into a prominent New England family, Cyrus was the son of the preacher David Field, whose family could be traced to astronomer John Field, who introduced the theories of Copernicus into England in the 16th century. Cyrus’s father was fond of quoting a line from The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan: ‘To know is a thing which pleaseth talkers and boasters: to do is that which pleaseth God.’ Cyrus was raised to be a doer. He began an apprenticeship at A.T. Stewart, Manhattan’s leading dry goods store, at the age of 16, took night classes in bookkeeping and, out on the road, proved to be a successful salesman of pith and charm, on whose regular route he met his wife-to-be Mary Stone.

Within a decade of purchasing E. Root & Co., Cyrus Field had become one of the richest men in New York. He was also bored, so he handed over management of the firm to his brother David and embarked on a grand tour of South America to collect specimens of the continent’s fauna. Upon his return in October 1853, his luggage included 20 parrots and parakeets, a jaguar that had to be restrained on a strong leash and a 14-year-old boy called Marcos – the son of one of his guides, a bullfighter in Colombia – who moved in with the family to be educated in America. (The relationship did not take. Field’s daughter noted: ‘A civilised life was not attractive to him,’ and when her father was absent on business, Marcos was quietly shipped back home.)

Field was, however, ready for a new challenge. The opportunity to change the history of global communications, a rather leftfield idea for a retail entrepreneur, came when his brother Matthew, who had left the family business to train as an engineer, introduced him to Frederick Gisborne, a Canadian engineer Matthew had met in the lobby of the Astor Hotel on Broadway. Gisborne was in desperate need of investors with deep pockets. The former chief operator for the Montreal Telegraph Company and later Nova Scotia Telegraph Company, Gisborne, who was born in England, had embarked on an ambitious and arduous new business venture to run a telegraph cable from St John’s in Newfoundland to Cape Ray on the island’s most westerly tip.

As Gisborne explained to Cyrus over brandies in front of the fire in the library of the brownstone mansion in Gramercy Park, initial construction had been beset with difficulty. As the soil was only inches deep across Newfoundland, the telegraph poles had to be erected then supported by extensive rock piles. The initial plan to bury the cable was abandoned on account of the rocky terrain. Delays led to spiralling costs and, eventually, bankruptcy, the seizure of his assets and arrest. Gisborne had, prior to his detention, attempted to pay all his workers, which earned him Field’s respect if not his support. Gisborne insisted that running a telegraph cable from St John’s, Newfoundland’s capital and the first port in North America, to Cape Ray would speed up communications between Europe and the New World by 24 hours. Field thanked Gisborne for his time and showed him to the door, warmed by brandy but without the cold cash he so desperately required.

Returning to the library, Field lingered by his large globe, which seemed to pulse with promise. Spinning the globe around to Newfoundland, Field traced his finger from St John’s, not to New York, but back out across the Atlantic to the west coast of Ireland. Why run a telegraph cable that can speed up communications by hours when you could lay one that would speed up the news by five days? London was the centre of the financial world. To control instant communication with the city’s financial markets would be an exceedingly profitable prize. A letter written the following day to Samuel Morse, who had patented his telegraphy system, brought swift confirmation by return post of the feasibility of Field’s ambition. Thirteen years earlier in 1843, Morse had written to the Secretary of the Treasury John C. Spencer to state that:

a telegraphic communication on the electro-magnetic plan may with certainty be established across the Atlantic. Startling as this may now seem, I am confident that the time will come when this project will be realised.

Field then wrote a second letter, to Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury of the United States Navy. Rendered lame in a stagecoach accident in 1839, Maury had embraced a desk-bound life as head of the Depot of Charts and Instruments, where he devoted himself to the scientific study and documentation of the winds and currents of the world’s oceans. The author of The Physical Geography of the Sea, a 19th-century bestseller, Maury sent Field a paper he had recently written for the secretary of the Navy. The US naval ship the Dolphin had already taken deep-sea soundings between Newfoundland and Ireland.

As Maury wrote:

This line of deep-sea soundings seems to be decisive of the question of the practicability of a submarine telegraph between the two continents, in so far as the bottom of the deep sea is concerned. From Newfoundland to Ireland, the distance between the nearest points is about sixteen hundred miles; and the bottom of the sea between the two places is a plateau, which seems to have been placed there especially for the purpose of holding the wires of a submarine telegraph, and of keeping them out of harm’s way. It is neither too deep, nor too shallow; yet it is so deep that the wires but once landed, will remain forever beyond the reach of vessel’s anchors, icebergs, and disturbances of any kind, and so shallow, that the wires may be readily lodged upon the bottom.

The depth of this plateau is quite regular, gradually increasing from the shores of Newfoundland to the depth of from fifteen hundred to two thousand fathoms, as you approach the other side. I [do not] pretend to consider the question as to the possibility of finding a time calm enough, the sea smooth enough, a wire long enough, a ship big enough, to lay a coil of wire sixteen hundred miles in length; though I have no fear but that the enterprise and ingenuity of the age, whenever called on with these problems, will be ready with a satisfactory solution.

Samples revealed the seabed on the plateau consisted not of sand or gravel but microscopic shells from the remains of plankton that tumbled into the depths after they died. There was also no evidence of strong ocean currents liable to shift the cable once in place.

Having resolved the feasibility of the project to his satisfaction, Field’s next consideration was how to fund it. He began with his neighbours. In the affluent neighbourhood of Gramercy Park in the 1850s, one could borrow tens of thousands of dollars as easily as others in a less salubrious locale cadge a cup of sugar. Among his neighbours was Peter Cooper, inventor of the world’s first washing machine, the first locomotive built in the US and one of the nation’s richest men. Cooper recognised the risk – but also the opportunity – and agreed, on condition that others help bear the financial load. Among the early investors depicted in The Atlantic Cable Projectors, an oil painting by Daniel Huntington, was Cooper, alongside Moses Taylor, bank president and investor, and Chandler White, a fellow paper magnet.

The starting capital now accrued, Field’s first step was for the investors to take over Frederic Gisborne’s company, the Newfoundland Electric Telegraph Company, and its debts of $50,000, from which a new corporate entity emerged: the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company. The government of Newfoundland was persuaded by Field, who had lost none of his salesmanship, to grant the new company monopoly rights for 50 years to lay telegraph lines on the island. The estimated construction costs of the transatlantic cable was $1.5 million, the equivalent of 2 per cent of the entire expenditure of the US federal government. As Field later wrote, ‘God knows that none of us were aware of what we had undertaken to accomplish.’

The venture was to be broken into stages, the first of which was to link New York to Newfoundland by the summer of 1854, according to the investors’ prospectus, although the island’s geology and geography were stonily indifferent to deadlines. The work proved interminable, beset by deep snow in winter and heavy summer rains, and it took over a year at a cost of $500,000, a third of their estimated total budget. By March 1855, when Field wrote to his brother Henry, who was leading the project, to enquire how many months more, the curt reply came: ‘Let’s say how many years!’

The cable to cross the Cabot Strait and so connect Newfoundland to Nova Scotia was to be manufactured in England, which had pioneered ‘economic botany’ and held a monopoly on gutta-percha, made from the milky sap of the gutta-percha trees native to Malaya. The sap becomes soft and highly pliable when heated above 100°F (37°C), but at room temperature it’s hard and solid, maintaining enough flexibility to make it the perfect waterproof coating and electrical insulator for sheathing conductive copper cables. Although the German Werner von Siemens had developed a press to sheathe gutta-percha around a copper cable, it was the Gutta Percha Company of London that secured a near monopoly on the importation of the sap and to whom Field now turned.

In England, Field met with John Brett, founder of the Magnetic Telegraph Company, and veteran of underwater telegraphy, who agreed both to invest in the venture and advise on the construction of the cable. This was to consist of three copper wires, each individually wrapped in a sheath of gutta-percha, then collectively lashed together using tarred hemp around which another layer of gutta-percha was wrapped, with the whole package sheathed again in galvanised iron wire. Kuper and Company were contracted to make the cable and a 500-ton brig, the Sarah L. Bryant, hired to lay it.

By March 1855 Field had returned to New York, and with the delay on the land section from St John’s to Cape Ray, it was decided to push on with laying the underwater cable over the 85-mile sound between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. A coastal steamer, the James Adger, was rented to fulfil a dual task: both tow the Sarah L. Bryant as it laid the cable, while also providing a more luxurious accommodation for the directors, their wives, children and invited guests, who envisioned a sun-dappled holiday of chilled champagne and parasols on deck as their future fortune spooled out behind them.

This, unfortunately, was to fail to consider the contribution of Captain Turner, master of the James Adger and a man so intransigent to instruction as to deliberately sabotage the task at hand. Told by Field to maintain a tight course on the shortest point, he overshot on both sides of the instructed line, with the result that when just nine miles from shore they had already laid over 25 miles of cable. Then the weather turned foul, prompting Turner to abandon the Sarah L. Bryant in heavy fog, and when a violent gale blew up the cable was cut after it threatened to drag the ship under. (Turner turned out to be an inveterate trouble maker, later being one of the rebels who fired on Fort Sumter, and so help trigger the American Civil War.)

The cable laying, or sinking – to be more accurate – cost the company $351,000 (the equivalent of $10.5 million in 2020). More money was required and so Field set sail once again for England to raise capital in London’s financial markets. In 1844 Parliament had passed the general incorporation law, which led to a substantial rise in both the number of companies and investors, yet Field’s principal goal was to focus on one investor and then let the others slot in behind. His first meeting was with the Foreign Secretary George Villiers, the Earl of Clarendon, for he sought the British government as a silent and supportive partner. Britain had form in this field: together with France they had laid a cable across the Black Sea, at that time the longest underwater cable in the world. The meeting was a success, with the British government pledging both a naval ship to carry out further soundings on the seabed and an annual payment of £14,000 to use the cable. The British did insist on a provision that government messages take priority over all others, except those of the US government if they agreed to a similar contract. (They did. Eventually.)

Buoyed by the support of the British government, Field set out on a national tour to promote investment in the Atlantic Telegraph Company, which he had incorporated in London in October 1856. The project triggered both delight and disdain. The delight came from the public, who were enchanted by the idea, writing to newspapers with suggestions that the cable be suspended in the air by a phalanx of hot-air balloons, while others imagined it bobbing on the surface connected to a string of buoys at which passing ships could stop to cable messages home. Prince Albert went so far as to suggest that the cable should be encased in a glass tube. The disdain and dismissal issued from the very top, as the Astronomer Royal Sir George Airy argued that it was ‘a mathematical impossibility to submerge a cable successfully at so great a depth and if it were possible, no signals could be transmitted through so great a depth’. Yet, as Field explained during his presentations in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, Samuel Morse had already calculated that 200 signals a minute could be transmitted along the 2,000-mile wire. The stock issue was an immediate success, with 350 shares sold at £1,000 each and such public figures as the author William Makepeace Thackeray among the investors.

In the spring of 1857 the Royal Navy sent HMS Cyclops to survey the route, and the findings confirmed those of their American counterparts – that between Ireland and Newfoundland lay an uninterrupted underwater plateau of level ground, the exception to which was 200 miles off the coast of Ireland, where in just 12 miles the ground fell from 550 fathoms to 1,750 fathoms. The US Navy had obtained samples from the seabed at a depth of two and half miles showing that the route was covered by an ooze of decomposed plankton.

In the States, ‘cable fever’ was on the rise among the public, while the nation’s press bestowed on the cable the reverential qualities of a Second Coming. What Christ failed to achieve on his first appearance would be achieved by a telegraph cable uniting the Old World and the New. The New York Evening Post declared, ‘The great heart of humanity will beat with a single pulse’; The New York Herald called the cable, ‘The grandest work which has ever been attempted by the genius and enterprise of man’; and a magazine editor in Tennessee prophesied an end to conflict: ‘Wars are to cease. The kingdom of peace will be set up.’

For continent to simply speak to continent, much less communicate an overarching framework for world peace, messages would have to pass clearly along a cable 2,000 miles long, and while Samuel Morse had successfully transmitted messages through a series of ten 200-mile-long cables, this had been achieved on land. Air, unlike sea water, is not a good conductor of electricity, a factor of considerable consequence for the plan.

In a vacuum, electricity will flow through a wire at close to the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. When electricity flows through a wire exposed to air the speed drops to between 1 and 10 per cent of the speed of light, between 1,800 miles per second and 18,000 miles per second, the exact speed being dependent upon the properties, thickness and capac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note To Readers
• Memoriam
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Cast
• Map of rescue site location
• Diagram of Pisces III
• Prologue
• PART I – THE CABLE AND THE SUBMARINE
• PART II – WEDNESDAY
• PART III – THURSDAY
• PART IV – FRIDAY
• PART V – SATURDAY
• Epilogue
• Notes on Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Publisher