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Engineers, pupils, workmen, all agreed that the only prospect of success consisted in exhausting the water, which was already sensibly diminished, by the working of the steam-pump; the other pumps produced little or no effect, notwithstanding the vigorous efforts employed to render them serviceable.
Having fixed a similar appendage to his own hat and to the hat of the servant that was to follow us, we were considered fully equipped for descending the mine. While standing at the top of the shaft, I was astonished at the size and perfect finish of a steam-pump that had been imported from England by the late English mining company.
There, for instance, was Bradley's famous steam-pump. Some years ago Bradley invented a steam-pump for use on shipboard. He claimed for it that it would pump about three times as many gallons in a minute as any other pump, and he got some of his political friends in Congress to use their influence with the Navy Department to have it tried on one of the navy vessels.
Simpson, an enterprising American engineer engaged in erecting a steam-pump to raise the water for the supply of the town. Above this is an ash bed, then a bed of breccia containing fragments of trachyte, then another bed of cinders, which looks like a rough sandstone, but is pisolitic, and contains pebbles of the size of a bean.
He then made a reservoir on one of the hills, filled it by a steam-pump, and carried the water by pipes to the regimental camps at an expense beyond his means, and which, as it was claimed that the scheme was unauthorized, was never half paid for. A very different character was Joshua W. Sill, who was sent to us as ordnance officer. He too had been a regular army officer, but of the younger class.
Four-Pound-the-Second was coming along like a cataract, easy as an eagle in flight; his great buffeting shoulders were sprayed with foam, his gaping nostrils drinking in oceans of air and spouting them out again with the rhythmical regularity of a steam-pump; and his little jockey sat on his back still as a mouse a pale face, a gleam of fair hair, and two little brown fists that gave and took with each stride of the galloping horse.
A dyke across the mouth, and a steam-pump on it, as in the fens of Norfolk and of Guiana, to throw the land-water over into the sea, would probably expel the evil spirit of malaria at once and for ever. We rowed on past the Boca de Monos, by which we had entered the gulf at first, and looked out eagerly enough for sharks, which are said to swarm at Chaguaramas.
Then the captain swore till the air was blue. Then he put Bradley in irons, and ripped out his pump, and unpacked the boats, and pumped out the water, and picked up the codfish and porpoises, and set sail for home for the purpose of making a report on the subject of the new invention. The Bradley Improved Marine Steam-pump went right out of use at the end of the voyage.
The next forenoon I entered a region of salt wells, with a number of flourishing little towns scattered here and there upon the borders of the stream. One of these, called Hartford City, had a well eleven hundred and seventy feet in depth. From another well in the vicinity both oil and salt-water were raised by means of a steam-pump. These oil-wells were half a mile back of the river.
His joke about the shower-bath came very strictly true to me. We were all on the main deck, bare-armed and bare-legged, mopping and slopping and swabbing about in the cold sea-water, which was liberally supplied to us by the steam-pump and hose.
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