Paid by the Tide

David Harris found Roderick Cameron struggling with a timber at the bottom of the sea. Cameron had been trying for some time to get a sling around it. Harris took his place, secured the awkward piece and signalled for it to be lifted. He used Cameron's line, so the recovery went against Cameron's name.

The incident belonged to the 1842 season at the wreck of HMS Royal George, off Portsmouth on England's south coast. Thomas Connolly, the military quartermaster who later wrote the sappers' regimental history, said it earned a favourable mention in the operation journal. Recoveries were counted. A diver might help a colleague without taking his timber.

Harris and Cameron were soldiers of the Royal Sappers and Miners, a corps of engineering tradesmen serving under Royal Engineer officers. They worked among the timbers of a great warship which had sunk in 1782, while being heeled over for maintenance in the sheltered anchorage at Spithead. More than half a century later, its remains still obstructed the anchorage. Valuable guns could be salvaged, but clearing the site meant dealing with the hull, its iron ballast and the mud that buried them.

Colonel Charles William Pasley began his main operation in 1839. Explosive charges broke the wreck apart; divers attached slings to pieces which men on the surface hauled aboard working barges called lighters. Carpenters, blacksmiths and other craftsmen maintained the vessels and machinery. A discovery below could set a hundred men to work above. The diver had to find something that could be lifted, secure it and get clear of the load.

Keeping upright

The equipment had begun with smoke rather than water.

In 1823 Charles Anthony Deane patented a helmet supplied with air for entering smoke-filled spaces. He and his brother John adapted the idea for diving. John had worked with the salvagers of Whitstable, on the Kent coast, where recovering anchors, cables and cargo offered a practical use for an apparatus that let a man walk and work underwater. Augustus Siebe, an engineer in London, became an important manufacturer of their equipment.

In its open form, the helmet held a pocket of air around the diver's head, rather like a small diving bell. A hose brought fresh air from the surface. Weights at the chest and back countered the buoyancy which would otherwise lift the apparatus. Waterproof clothing protected the body, but its connection to the helmet was not a watertight seal. The arrangement depended on keeping the helmet upright. Lean too far, and the air could escape while water took its place.

That was a working restriction, not merely an objection on a drawing. In 1840 Private Andrew Duncan was using a Deane dress at Royal George. He lost his upright position, toppled into a hole and flooded the helmet. Connolly records that he was brought up unconscious, his face covered in mud and blood coming from his mouth and ears. He recovered. The defect had become particularly evident in a workplace made of holes, broken planks and things a man needed to reach under.

A seal at the shoulders

Siebe's closed dress joined the helmet and shoulder plate securely to the suit. The pump forced air down against the surrounding water pressure, and an outlet let used and surplus air escape. The air pocket no longer depended on an opening being kept underneath it. The diver gained room to bend and change position without immediately flooding his helmet.

This development had several contributors. George Edwards had worked on sealing the dress to the helmet, and John Deane supplied suggestions. The Science Museum's surviving closed helmet and breastplate, dated 1839, records these contributions alongside Siebe's. It was a development of the earlier working apparatus, with users and makers altering its weak points.

The advantage was being tested at the wreck. In the 1841 season Harris repeatedly went into the sea head-first in Siebe's dress, according to Connolly. The year before, Duncan's fall had nearly drowned him. Now a diver was deliberately trying an orientation the open apparatus could not tolerate.

Harris was learning to dive as the apparatus itself changed. Civilian divers, including Hiram London, worked on the early seasons. When London injured his hand in 1839, Harris went down four times during one interval of slack water and slung four timbers. In 1841 the military divers could earn three or four times their ordinary working pay; Connolly reckoned that hiring one civilian professional could cost as much as paying four or five of the soldiers.

The payment was by the tide. At Spithead a diver could work while the current slackened, but the returning stream could make it impossible to remain at the wreck. In 1841 the men worked sixty to seventy feet down—roughly eighteen to twenty-one metres. A useful interval had to accommodate the descents, the lifting and the return to the surface. James Anderson once stayed below too long and was swept under his lighter. His line caught against its keel when the attendant tried to haul him up. He eventually reached the surface on the other side, uninjured.

The men at the pump

The Deanes' published instructions described a boat with about seven men. Only one was the diver.

The pump was fastened to the boat at a height convenient for turning its wheel and handles. Once the helmet went on, the pump had to run steadily until it came off again. The hose was made of India rubber and canvas, with an outer serving of yarn to protect it from rubbing. Grease that helped the moving parts of the pump could damage the hose. A careless foot in the boat could obstruct the air passage.

One attendant held the signal line and another looked after the air pipe. They paid them out as the diver moved away and gathered them in as he returned. The instructions expected these men to learn to feel a change of posture through the lines. A sudden pull might mean he had fallen. A separate guide line helped him find the foot of the ladder in thick water.

The Deanes used a code of pulls for checking that all was well, lowering or hoisting a load and requesting tools. A stop signal needed immediate attention: the rising load might be fouling the diver or his lines. Visitors were specifically forbidden to distract the signal man. The communication rope was not a convenient spare lifting line.

A closer look · 3:50 · English on-screen text

Moving in a closed diving dress

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Pasley's men had the same need to communicate across water, though the Deanes' code cannot simply be assigned to their operation. Richard Pillman Jones and John Skelton discovered that, standing close together at the bottom, they could hear each other speak. Shouting exhausted them too quickly for a useful conversation. Skelton greeted the civilian diver George Hall by tapping his helmet with an iron pricker.

Skelton was also a skilled artificer. He worked on the diving apparatus, air pumps and the electrical batteries used to fire charges. His repairs were work his fellow divers depended upon. In 1841 a charge exploded while he was still a few feet below the surface, following a failure in the signals. The shock injured his chest and left him unconscious for a time. He was diving again four days later.

The contested timber

Much of the hull's fallen side lay under mud. Rakes and pieces of anchor dragged across the site helped uncover it. Below, the men worked out how to pass ropes and chains around awkward shapes. By 1841 Harris could send up ninety-one pieces packed into one bundle. Jones sent fifty-eight. That summer the recovered timber amounted to some 18,600 cubic feet, stacked in Portsmouth dockyard.

The competition for a useful piece could become vicious. Connolly describes Jones and John Girvan fighting over a floor timber in 1842; a kick broke a window in Girvan's helmet, and he had to be hauled up as his dress filled with water. He recovered after hospital treatment. The following season they worked together to recover a buried gun. Harris's decision to leave Cameron the credit for a lift belonged to a workplace where credit could cause real trouble.

Physical effort also accumulated. Harris spent a little over two months removing most of Perdita, a smaller lighter sunk during an earlier attempt to raise Royal George. Eventually he asked for a day or two's rest. Men returned with damaged hands; cold could leave them scarcely able to feel the pieces they were trying to sling.

A sealed dress did not remove the dependence on the hose. On 11 July 1842 John Williams's air pipe burst a few inches above the water. Men on deck heard the escaping air, found the rupture and temporarily closed it while he was hauled up. He came aboard badly injured about the head and neck. After a month in Haslar Hospital he returned to diving, then had to stop again because he had resumed too soon. The break had happened above him, within reach of the men on the lighter.

On 17 July 1843 Jones sent up an iron bolt ten feet long and noticed marks where it had touched brass. He went back down to the spot and recovered a brass 24-pounder gun dated 1748.

By 1844 Connolly gives the payment as one shilling and threepence to two shillings per tide, added to ordinary working pay of one shilling a day. A first-class diver could make five or six shillings a day, apart from regimental allowances. Those were the rates of that season, after several years in which volunteers had become experienced underwater workers.

The work continued beyond the wreck. In August 1844 Harris examined the mail steamer Tay at Bermuda after she had struck the Cuban coast. Part of her keel and cutwater were gone, with about twelve feet of planking on the starboard side. Using a helmet and suit supplied from the dockyard, he made forty-one descents in three days to repair the damage. The steamer returned to England with the mails.