Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

“OK,” said Smith in a moment, grasping the control stick. “I’ve got it.” In a long-practiced motion, with his left hand he swept up the right arm of the seat in which McKamey was seated—it had been built with a hinge at the back for precisely this purpose—and at the same moment, McKamey, releasing the control column to Smith, flipped up the arm on the far side of the seat, shifted his feet, rose, and stepped back. Effortlessly, Smith slid into his place, and as McKamey passed behind him, he pushed back both arm rests. Triton was already settled into her normal submerged routine.

I nodded to Hay. “You have the deck and the Conn, Jim,” I said. “I’m going aft now. Keep the fathometer going and maintain a careful sonar watch. Call me if you hear anything.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Jim. “Course 180, speed full, depth 150 feet, stay 75 feet above the bottom, when we reach 150 feet sounding, follow it on down to running depth. I understand, sir!”

I nodded again and left him.

McKamey was seated on a tool box in the passageway, pulling off his sou’westers.

“Nice job of diving, McKamey,” I said.

His boyish face glowed with pleasure. McKamey had very recently reported aboard from submarine school and had already showed himself to have the makings of a fine sailor. He couldn’t be long out of high school, I thought, forgetting that I had left home permanently at probably an even younger age.

A few feet farther aft, crammed into a corner among a plotting table, some air-conditioning monitoring equipment, a large stack of radar components, and some fire-control equipment, was a tiny compartment labeled “sonar room.” Here was the nerve center of Triton’s underwater listening equipment. Lieutenant Dick Harris, known as “Silent Dick,” was there, along with two of our Sonarmen, rangy “Dutch” Beckhaus, once of the Salamonie, and Kenneth Remillard, the shortest man aboard and, by dint of his size, probably the most comfortable. Dick was no doubt checking the cruising organization and laying out initial sonar watches, and none of the three saw me. A few feet farther aft I stepped through a watertight hatch, and in a few more feet entered my tiny stateroom.

William Green, our Chief Steward, for some reason known to most of the crew as “Joe,” was standing in the passageway outside my door. Gratefully, I peeled off the uncomfortable heavy garments and passed them to him.

“Dry them out well, Green, and then put them away,” I said. “I won’t be needing them for a while.”

Chief Green, a heavy-set Negro, could upon occasion assume an artless manner calculated to elicit information. It had more than once worked pretty well, but this time I was ready for him.

“It might be cold on the bridge up there in the North Sea, Captain,” he said. “Maybe I’d better just fold these up and keep them where you can get at them.”

Almost, but not quite, his face assumed the expression of solicitous concern he wanted to convey.

“Get out of here, Green,” I said with feigned severity, “and take that gear with you.”

“Aren’t we going up north, sir?” Green’s carefully contrived expression—his big round eyes and innocently questioning face—were too much to hold, and he broke into a broad, white-toothed grin. “Are we going to keep heading down into the warm water, Captain?”

“Green,” I said, lowering my voice to a confidential tone, “I’ll tell you right where you can go in about five seconds. You’re not about to get around me this time!”

Not a whit abashed, Green exited with his arms loaded, chuckling loudly. I sat at my desk and pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward me. A rather comprehensive report of our trip was going to be required of us and we might as well start.

“Dived,” I wrote on the paper. “We shall not surface until May.”

But then, with this bit of incriminating information in black and white before me, I carefully hid the sheet for the time being among the ever-present pile in the basket marked “incoming.”

6

About 2240, traveling deep at high speed, Triton crossed the south boundary of the submarine operating area off Montauk Point. The last statutory restriction on our movements had been satisfied. But instead of changing course from south to east, which would have been in order had we intended only to clear Nantucket before heading into the North Atlantic, we changed half as much, to southeast. Some time would pass before the crew recognized the difference, I felt. It was logical to get well clear of the coast before squaring away on our run to the north. But the big secret could not keep very much longer, for submarine sailors are traditionally alert to their ships’ movements.

We had actually started the first leg of our voyage, a 3,250-mile run to a seldom-visited islet several hundred miles off the Brazilian coast and nearly on the equator.