Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

After long minutes, Don looked up. “It looks as though we made a mistake, Captain,” he said. “The first two sets of readings were written down in a slightly different way from Pat’s here, but they made a mistake in working them out. Look, here it is.”

I guarded myself from being overeager to accept this sudden release. “This is too easy, Don,” I said. “You mean, while I’ve been standing here, after we’ve gone through all this flap, now you say there never was any problem?”

Don nodded. “Let me go through this whole thing once more very carefully, Captain,” he said. “It looks as though we have a couple of problems to straighten out, and I’ll be up making a report to you within the hour.”

“Very well,” I said, not knowing whether to be angry or relieved. “Have a fourth set of readings taken—you and Pat had better do these yourselves—I need to know exactly where we stand.”

Both nodded soberly.

“You may not have permission to start the reactor,” I told them, “until you report to me that you’re absolutely sure it’s all right and always has been.”

With a considerably lighter step, I made my way forward once more. We would be absolutely sure of the plant before starting it again, for the instructions were explicit, but it now seemed morally certain that our five hours of concern had been merely a mental exercise. I could feel my confidence in Triton resurging. With the fathometer fixed, the only problem now was Poole, and even he looked improved.

The first of March had been a long day, but we were snapping back. We were going to come out of this all right!

9

The first of March had indeed been a long day, and at two o’clock on the morning of March second I knew that not all our problems had yet been solved. Poole was having a second attack.

As Jim Stark explained it, perhaps he did not pass the stone a few hours before, despite indications that he had. As a matter of fact, Jim wasn’t really sure that the tiny speck we had seen in the bottle Poole had produced for inspection was a kidney stone. It might have been a tiny grain of sand or dust that somehow had gotten into the bottle after it had been carefully washed. There was always the possibility that Poole had not actually passed the stone; another possibility was that more than one kidney stone might have been involved. This second attack was more severe than the first one, and Poole had to be drugged once more.

Under the morphine, Poole was not too uncomfortable. The question again: what to do? According to Stark, kidney stone attacks frequently clear up by themselves—as Poole’s first one did—and then a second stone causes a relapse. In such cases, the discomfort of the second attack is compounded by the lacerations and swollen tissues resulting from the first. After an hour’s earnest consultation with Jim, I decided we could continue running for Cape Horn. In the back of my mind, however, a firmly rooted thought had taken hold: the nearest help was the Macon, if my several-weeks-old information was still accurate. After that, it was Pearl Harbor or a foreign port. The problem would, somehow or other, have to be sorted out before we rounded Cape Horn.

I had hardly got back into my bunk, it seemed, when the Officer of the Deck sent a messenger to call me. There was a possible submarine contact on the sonar. I was on my feet in a moment, heading for the sonar room.

Some three hundred miles to the west of our course, on the coast of Argentina, lay Golfo Nuevo, a large landlocked bay with a small entrance where, within recent weeks, the Argentine Navy had had a first-class flap. According to the press reports, an unknown submarine had been detected in Golfo Nuevo by patrolling Anti-Submarine units of the Argentine Navy, which had subsequently made several attacks. The submarine, so the newspapers said, had once or twice surfaced in the gulf, and by its maneuvers was apparently damaged. Argentina blocked off the exit to the bay, and at about this time there came evidence of the presence of a second submarine in the same area. Shortly afterward, contact on both of them was lost.

The supposition was strongly supported in the South American press that the second submarine had rendezvoused with its damaged fellow, either to render assistance or, as was considered more likely, to divert attention to itself while the damaged one got away. In my own view, having had intimate experience for many years with the difficulty of making and holding contact on submarines I was not completely ready to accept the story at face value. It is an easy thing for inexperienced people to convince themselves they have made a contact and then, in their gradually increasing excitement and interest, to continue to deceive themselves for considerable periods of time. Whether or not there had actually been a foreign submarine in Golfo Nuevo, however, one thing was pretty certain: ASW units of the Argentine Navy had been convinced of it.