Sir George Head, in his shrewdly humorous Home Tour, gives an amusing picture of a pair of operative divers whom he saw in the Hull docks. Sir George was passing as the workmen were raising the diving-bell, when he stepped into the lighter to observe the state of the labourers on their return from below. He had a remarkably good view of their features, at a "A pair of easy-going, careless fellows, each with a red nightcap on his head, sat opposite one another, by no means over-heated or exhausted, and apparently with no other want in the world than that of 'summut to drink;' they had been under water exactly two hours. I asked them what were their sensations on going down? They said that, before a man was used to it, it produced a feeling as if the ears were bursting; that, on the bell first dipping, they were in the habit of holding their noses; at the same time of breathing as gently as possible, and that thus they prevented any disagreeable effect: they added, the air below was hot, and made a man thirsty;—the latter observation, though in duty bound I received as a hint, I believe to be true; nevertheless, the service cannot be formidable, as the extra pay is only one shilling per day. Had there been any thing extraordinary to see below, I should have asked permission to go down; but the water was by no means clear, and the muddy bottom of the docks was not a sufficient recompence for the disagreeable sensation. Two men descend at a time, and four pump the air into the bell through the leathern hose; the bell is nearly a square, or rather an oblong, vessel of cast-iron, with ten bull's-eye lights at the top, which lights are fortified within by a lattice of strong iron wire, sufficient to resist an accidental blow of a crowbar, or other casualty.—Notwithstanding the great improvements made in diving-bells since their invention, after all precautions, a man in a diving-bell is, certainly, in a state of awful dependence upon human aid: in case of the slightest accident to the air-pump, or even a single stitch of the leathern hose giving way, long before the ponderous vessel could be raised to the surface, life must be extinct." |