Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 February 1893 — Enemies of the Diver. [ARTICLE]

Enemies of the Diver.

The diver, as the reader may imagine, gets many scares when below. A fifteen-foot shark, magnified by the water, and making a bee-line for one, is sufficient to make the strongest heart quake, in spite of the assertion that sharks have never been known to attack a man in dress. Neither is the sight of a large turtle comforting when one does not know exactly what it is, and the coiling of a sea snake around one’s legs, although it has only one’s hands to bite at, is, to say the least, unpleasant. A little fish called the stoneflsh is one of the enemies of the diver, continues a writer in the Century. It seems to make its habitation right under the pearl shell, as it is only when picking them up that anyone has been known to have been bitten. I remember well the first time I was bitten by this spiteful member of the finny tribe. I dropped my bag of shells, and hastened to the surface; but, in this short space of time, my hand and arm had so swollen that it was with difficulty I could get the dress off, being unable to work for three days, and suffering intense pain the while. Afterward I learned that staying down a couple of hours after a bite will stop any further discomfort, the pressure of water causing much bleeding of the bitten part, and thus expelling the poison. One of the strange effects that diving has upon those who practice it is the inevitable bad temper felt while working at the bottom; as this irritability passes away as soon as the surface is reached again, it is only reasonable to suppose that it is caused by the unusual pressure of the air inside the dress, affecting probably the lungs, and through them the brain. My experience has been that while below one may fly into the most violent passion at the merest trifle, for instance, the life-line held too tight or too slack, too much air or too little, or some imaginary wrong-doing on the part of the tender or the boys above, will often cause the temper to rise. I have sometimes become so angry in a similar way that I have given the signal to pull up, with the express intention of knocking the heads off the entire crew; but as the surface was neared and the weight of air decreased my feelings have gradually undergone a change for the better, until by the time I had reached the ladder and had the face glass unscrewed 1 had forgotten for what I came up.