Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a pressure ridge created as the earth’s mass cooled millions of years ago, has never presented a hazard to mariners. Only the Azores themselves, or certain other islands, are surrounded by water shallow enough to be of any concern. Much of the Ridge, therefore is not even well charted. Deep traveling submarines are not at all like other ships, however, for they require much more depth. This was another reason for our voyage, to make a world-girdling recording of the bottom contour. One of the special devices with which Triton had been fitted during the hectic two weeks before she sailed was for this purpose. Outfitted with many miles of expensive, sensitized paper, the device operated from our fathometer, taking many soundings per minute and recording them graphically so as to show a virtual photograph of the shape of the bottom of the ocean over which we had just passed. It was with justice officially called the “Precision Depth Recorder (PDR).”

As is well known, the ocean is full of mountains, just as is the land, but very few of the ocean’s mountains have ever been mapped. As Triton approached the vicinity of St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks, we expected to notice a gradual shoaling of water, and the PDR was carefully watched.

Civil Engineer Gordon E. Wilkes was aboard to monitor the equipment. In addition, in order to obtain immediate value from anything the PDR might detect, a special watch was detailed to observe it. During the early morning of the twenty-third of February, more than twenty-four hours before we should reach St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks, sudden and very rapid shoaling was recorded on the PDR. This was immediately brought to the attention of the Officer of the Deck by Jerry Saunders, Radarman Second Class, who at the moment was on PDR watch. We were still quite some distance from where we expected to find the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and soundings recorded but a few moments earlier indicated a depth of roughly two thousand fathoms.

This “seamount” must have been of extremely solid structure, for it towered over the relatively flat sea bottom to a height of nearly nine thousand feet. Its sides were precipitous and its craggy form, profiled on the PDR, resembled the spires of a medieval cathedral. We slowed to creeping speed as we came up on the mount, for we had to be able to avoid it should it extend to our depth level. Slowly, we crept over the area, recording a minimum sounding of nine hundred and thirty fathoms, and then reversed course and ran over the same track. Criss-crossing, we pinpointed the peak’s location and traced an outline of it from all sides.

It must be admitted that coming as it did without warning, the abrupt decrease in soundings startled me. We could not see ahead, of course, except by sonar, and until we actually had passed over it and determined the minimum distance between the top of the seamount and the surface, there was no way to guess how high the peak might actually reach. Had it reached higher, had we been traveling much deeper than we were, and had we not been keeping the careful watch that we were keeping, we might have struck it in the manner of an aircraft striking a mountain. The results would have been equally calamitous.

As I left the control room, with the peak safely astern and its location carefully logged, I noticed that this particular submerged mountain had already received a name.

Conforming to the tradition that the discoverer of prominent geographical features has the right to name them, Jerry Saunders had neatly inscribed “Saunders Peak” opposite its location on our track chart.

Saunders Peak will present no hazard to submarines until they travel much deeper than they are yet able to do. But, nevertheless, it had not been marked on any chart before this. We had made a new discovery.

The twenty-fourth of February was the day we expected to sight St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks. According to navigator Will Adams, we should see the islet dead ahead on the horizon at about noon. Prior to this time we had studied every bit of lore we had on board about the Rocks, but there was very little to be learned. Sailing Directions described it as bare and useless, a one-time guano collecting spot, noting that there had once been a small dock, long since washed away, and that the highest rock had an abandoned lighthouse surmounting it.