Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

Bob interrupted his turnover to Hay, nodded gravely at me. “Aye, aye,” he said, a surprisingly deep voice booming out of his slender physique. Bob was the tallest officer on board and ate like a horse, but it seemed to have done little to fill him out. Perhaps a few more years of service would put enough pounds on him to go with that voice.

Triton was beginning to feel the sea. There was a longer period to her impatient motion as she pierced the ocean rollers, a slight tremor from the increased power as she drove through them. She rolled gently from side to side, but the whistle of wind coming over the bridge cockpit, the spume of angry spray flung back from her razor-sharp prow, and the white foam racing down her dark sides testified to the power and urgency with which she drove southward. Astern and to starboard the looming mass of Long Island reflected the rays of the southwesterly sun. Montauk Point Lighthouse and the nearby radar towers jutted prominently into the sky. At their foot, extending for some distance to the west and at right angles to the frothing wake we were leaving straight behind, could be seen a white, almost steady line where the small Atlantic surf met the white sand beaches of the land.

Ahead was the sea, the horizon, and the cold blue sky. I swung onto the ladder leading below, climbed down to the lower bridge level and through the watertight hatch into the conning tower.

“—that’s about it, Beach,” I heard Honeysette saying. Beacham and Honeysette looked just the slightest bit startled as I appeared.

“Quartermaster of the watch properly relieved, Captain,” Honeysette quickly said. “Beacham has the watch.”

“Aye,” I acknowledged, and then mocked severity: “How many times do I have to tell you that while I’m captain of this ship, Beacham’s nickname is abolished!”

Both men grinned self-consciously. Honeysette strove to retrieve the situation.

“Sorry, Captain, I didn’t see you come down, and it just slipped out by accident.”

Beacham has probably been known as “Beach” to his cronies ever since he enlisted in the Navy some twelve years ago. But, claiming prior rights in the circumstances, I had decreed that so long as he and I were both in the same ship something was going to have to give, and that it was going to be Beacham. I frowned. “It’s a court-martial offense, you know.”

Beacham took a well-chewed cigar out of his mouth. “I’m doing my best to teach all these guys, Captain,” he said, “but some of them don’t seem to want to learn.”

“Humph!” was all I could think to say, as I stepped on the rungs of the ladder and started below into the control room.

Honeysette’s intelligent face was framed above the circular hatchway as I passed through. “If we have a court martial, Captain, we’ll have to go back!”

“Humph!” was all I could say again. Honeysette had got the best of this interchange. It was also obvious that he had guessed that this cruise might be more than it purported to be.

Directly beneath the conning tower is the control room. Its bulkheads and overhead are painted a soft green, but the color scheme as a whole, with all the instruments, is predominantly instrument gray like the conning tower above. In this area Triton is three decks high—and the control room, occupying the highest compartment, has the basic shape of the attic of a Quonset hut. The curved cylindrical pressure hull of the ship, insulated with an inch of smooth cork glued directly to the steel, sweeps in an unbroken arc from starboard to port.

Covering the entire port half of the forward bulkhead is the diving panel: a large gray metal affair in which a great number of instruments are mounted. Here are depth gauges, gyrocompass repeater, speed indicator, engine-order telegraphs (frequently called “annunciators”) a “combined instrument panel” for the bow planesman and another for the stern planes-man, and controls for our automatic depth-keeping equipment. Two armchairs, upholstered in red plastic, face the diving panel. Directly before each of them is a control column that would make a bomber pilot feel right at home.