SALVAGE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 3 September 1924, Page 7

SALVAGE.

ROMANCES OF THE SEA

It ls estimate.d that in ships and cargoes £0,000,000 is lost annually in British waters. The effort to recover part of this sum has led to the invention of ingenious devices and been the inspiration of most daring feats. The devices and the daring—the human brain and the human spirit—are pitted against Nature in the active and ruthless strength of her great waters; and it is the varied, thrilling, and romantic forms taken by the ensuing struggle that make the subject of a new hook. “The Wonders of Salvage,” by Mr. David Masters.

The aim of the salvor is to raise to the surface something that is under water, and that something may be treasure, documents, a battleship‘of 24,000 tons, or, most thrilling of all, yet breathing men imprisoned in a sunken submarine. In the limited space of a review (says a Times critic-) the salvor must be presented as a man who dives, but he would he the first to acknowledge his debt to the scientific investigators who have slowly discovered* general laws and to the practical think, ers of his own craft who employ him as to the solution of his particular problem. But what the diver dares and does in these tales is too enthralling for any debts of his to be remembered by the reader.

How does the ordinary man who can swim and take a header conceive the water ? Its resistance is inconsiderable —enough to give leverage; if he has tried surf bathing he knows he cannot fight the rollers; but in his experience it is quiet enough under Mater; if he could breathe lie could swim the longest bath, and he might assume that, as the diver carries with him an appliance for breathing, his task primarily demands patience. These conditions do not. apply to the diving of the salvor. At _ 300 ft—an insignificant depth in'comparison u-ith the abysses—ivater is almost solid; it takes a concentrated effort to lift a hand. And, as likely as not, on the coasts' 'where ships go down this huge weight of water is flung about by Indent currents —a ship may be covered in sand or mud in a few hours. The passenger has to ask his way about a great liner; the diver has to find his own with the risk that doors may slam udth the current behind him and upon his air pipe. But she does not remain a liner. Take this from the account of the Laurentic, from which in the end the salvors recovered almost the n r hole of her five millions of bullion.

“The sheer weight of the Mater above her was crushing her flat, squeezing her into a shapeless mass, just as you might crush' a lily in your hand. Moreover she was full of silt and mud- . . One© more the u-inter gales played havoe with the wreck, and next spring the divers found that the treasure was lost under a mass of tM’isted plates and girders.. Imagine ,a street of lofty houses ; then imagine that all the buildings were pushed suddenly down into the centre of the road, and you will arrive at some-faint idea of what the ship looked like. Great girders n'ere bent into all kinds of strange shapes: iron hairs as thick as a man’s wrist were tnnsted into fantastic curves.”

To be raised to any purpose a sunken ship must be brought to the surface almost as quickly as a drouming man—hence several thrilling stories of" salvage in the war, during udiich a ship was worth more than many men. “After this rather exciting episode,” continues the author sedatelv, after describing how the diver suddenly found himself pulled from his investigations bv his life-line, and dragged along by an irresistable force until at length he broke the surface; the salvage ship had sighted a submarine, and run for it. For his own safety the diver should have been raised to the surface slowly—stopping every so many, feet to do physical exercises designed to prevent the formation of bubbles of nitrogen in the blood. They put him in the reoompression chamber to redroduee the conditions, and Me infer that he recovered.

This book is to lie recommended for what it tells of the ingenuity of the scientist, of the acumen and enterprise of the expert in charge of the operations, and. above all, of the courage, resource and pertinacity of the diver. But apart from all that it contains tales M-hich make blue-books of sensational magazines. You at length raise your treasure in Chinese waters; you hurry to the top of an island (there is an island in all good stories') to get M-ater for your exhausted diver, and you see just in time the approaching sails of pirate junks. Some of the stories are macabre; you dive to recover secret orders from a sunken German submarine; von find them in a stiffened hand protruding from a conning tower. As the submarine plunged to her doom the cover had slammed on the arm of the commander ridding himself of his papers. Boys’ liooks? What, of the boy Moore, thrice and four times fortunate, M r ho Mas experimenting with his home-made set of wireless long before it Mas a commonplace to do so, and picked up and passed to the naval stations on his own transmitter the u ' , ca I that he alone bad heard—the call from the floating telephone of a sunken American ' submarine? Sharks ? Certainly; though thev are not of much account. If a shark persists in disturbing you at your work \ou signal up for a knife, hold out your hand as bait, “just as you hold out a bone to a dog,” and stab the brute as he turns. As for the octopus, von squirt air at him; presumably but‘for vour helmet you u’ould just make faces.