I first put on the armor when I was twenty, nothing but a
lad; but I could take the pressure up to seventy pounds even then.
One of my very first dives was off Trincomalee, on the coast of
Ceylon. A mail packet had gone down in a squall with all on
board. Six of the bodies had come up and had been recovered, but
the seventh hadn't. It was the body of the daughter of the
governor of the island, a beautiful young girl of nineteen, whom
everybody loved. I was sent for to go down and bring the body up.
Well, I went down. The packet lay in a hundred feet of water, and
that's a wonder deep dive. I had to go down twice. The first
time I couldn't find anything, though I went all through the
berth-deck. I came up to the wrecking-float and reported that I
had seen nothing. There were a lot of men there belonging to the
wrecking gang, and some correspondents of London papers. But they
would have it that she was below, and had me go down again. I
did, and this time I found her."
The mate paused a moment
"I'll have to tell you," he went on, "that when a body don't come
to the surface it will stand or sit in a perfectly natural
position until a current or movement of the water around touches
it. When that happens--well, you'd say the body was alive; and
old divers have a superstition--no, it AIN'T just a superstition,
I believe it's so--that drowned people really don't die till they
come to the surface, and the air touches them.
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