Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

“All your crew isn’t married, silly! Besides, some couldn’t come. But the garden is big enough, and all the officers’ wives helped.”

Ingrid sighed again. “They were all extremely nice. The only bad time was just before they came, when the telephone operator got me all excited about a long-distance call coming in, and I waited around thinking it must be about your arrival at last. But when the call finally came through, it was just a polite girl’s voice saying she was sorry she couldn’t come.”

We had been home for two days, when all at once I had occasion to recall the intuitive warning I had ignored when we designed and ordered our commemorative plaque. Lieutenant John Laboon, Chaplain Corps—a 1943 Naval Academy graduate who had resigned to enter the Jesuit priesthood after the war and had subsequently re-entered the Service as a Chaplain—was responsible. This onetime All-American lacrosse player and decorated submarine combat veteran, now the Catholic Chaplain for our nuclear submarine unit in New London, had come aboard to see if there were anything he could do for us. Over a cup of coffee, he confessed that although he could translate most of the words in our plaque’s Latin inscription, one of them was too much for him.

“What word?” I asked, my stomach experiencing a precipitant sinking feeling.

“Sactum,” said Laboon. “If it were ‘Factum,’ now, the phrase would literally mean ‘It is again a fact.’ But I don’t know the word ‘Sactum.’ ”

Hasty investigation restored Father Laboon’s faith in his preordainment schooling. There simply was no such word as “Sactum”! It turned out that in receiving and reading back the Latin inscription over the telephone, the letter “F” in the word “Factum” had been erroneously taken down as “S,” and the plaque as delivered to the US ambassador had therefore contained a misspelled word!

The hopelessness of the situation was enough to make one despair, but there was one thing we could do: we could get a new plaque—with the word “FACTUM” spelled correctly—over to Spain immediately; even though the original one might have contained an error, at least all posterity would not have the opportunity to criticize America’s lack of erudition.

So ran my thoughts on that black Friday, the thirteenth of May, as Triton went to work. A new plaque was cast forthwith. It was still cooling as final arrangements were made with a trans-Atlantic airline. In the meantime, I placed a telephone call to the Naval Attaché in Madrid, to insure that the situation would be properly taken care of in Spain.

By Sunday morning the plaque was ready and packaged. Jim Hay took it by automobile directly to New York’s Idlewild Airport, where it was delivered into the hands of the pilot of a TWA plane bound for Boston and thence Madrid, nonstop. At 8:00 A.M., Monday morning, the jet rolled to a stop at the Madrid airport and was met by a US naval officer who took custody of the weighty package; and in due course the replacement was made and the mistake rectified insofar as it lay in our power.

The correct plaque is now mounted on the wall of the city hall of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the port city near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River from which Magellan left on his historical voyage. Beneath it is a marble slab, installed by the Spanish government, memorializing the fact that it had been brought by the United States submarine Triton, first to circumnavigate the world entirely submerged, in homage to the first man to circumnavigate the globe by any means. The plaque originally delivered, bearing the word “Sactum” instead of “Factum,” is now held by the Mystic Seaport Museum at Mystic, Connecticut. A copy from the same mold is mounted in the ship. Four others have been presented to the Naval Academy, the Naval Historical Association in Washington, D.C., the Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut, and the Submarine Library at Groton within arrow shot of the launching ways where the Triton first took the water.

For the next month or so I dreaded the receipt of mail, for the Log of our journey had been made public by the Navy Department, and, of course, our error was plain for anyone to see. But only one person, a woman Latin teacher, very courteously and tactfully wrote to point out the mistake.

There were, of course, several other loose ends to wrap up: Poole, thoroughly examined aboard the Macon and later at a hospital in Montevideo, needed no operation. His third attack, which had precipitated our decision to seek medical assistance, had been his last—even as he himself had predicted. He had had a pretty rough time from curious friends in New London, and to his credit had said nothing to anyone.