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Updated: May 2, 2025
As if he were standing at her side, he murmured with strained and labored utterance ejaculations of appeal and adjuration. Then came the climax of the stupendous struggle. He became aware of a sensation so amazing that I know not if it can be described at all, a sensation comparable to that which comes up the mile-long sounding-line, telling that it touches bottom.
"Five fathoms bare!" was the next report of the man with the sounding-line. "We can edge in even a little farther yet," remarked the captain. "But I cannot understand," he continued, "why that man persists in acting so strangely. He must know by this time that we have seen him and will rescue him, yet he continues to signal with his arms and that red rag as though he were demented.
Setting one watch to clear away the wreck and the other to furl all canvas, I requested Courtenay, who was now again on deck, to take the quarter-boat and a sounding-line and to go away in search of the deepest water.
Out of this necessity grew the use of the lead and sounding-line; and, ultimately, marine-surveying, which is the recording of the form of coasts and of the depth of the sea, as ascertained by the sounding-lead, upon charts.
The buoy fastened on to the sounding-line had not yet been seen. At noon Captain Blomsberry, helped by his officers, who controlled the observation, made his point in presence of the delegates of the Gun Club. That was an anxious moment. The Susquehanna was found to be at some minutes west of the very spot where the projectile had disappeared under the waves.
Certainly in his time very little was known about the dwellers in the deep, deep sea, compared with what we may learn in the present day, when the sounding-line has reached the bottom of the Atlantic, and actually brought up some of the clay that forms its floor clay which is made up of the skeletons of myriads of creatures.
"Please, sir, the net him set," shouted Oolibuck from the shore to his master, who floated in the bay at the distance of a hundred yards, busily engaged with the sounding-line. On receiving this piece of information, Stanley ran the canoe on the beach, and said to his follower
Then, as the sounding-line searches still deeper ocean-depths, it brings up a red clay, and this again is shown by the microscope to be composed partly of very minute creatures of a reddish colour, which live near the surface of the ocean, but when they die sink to the bottom.
Furnished with a good sounding-line and a self-registering thermometer, he was enabled to secure some interesting and trustworthy physical results. It is well known that considerable diversity of opinion has prevailed in relation to the actual depth of Lake Tahoe. Sensational newsmongers have unhesitatingly asserted that, in some portions, it is absolutely fathomless.
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen?
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