On the morning following, they were told to gather in the canteen. There Ernest Cox addressed them. The divers sat at their usual table.
‘I don’t know what’s gone wrong, boys,’ he said. ‘Either we can’t lift the stern or when we can her weight seems to shift around. Maybe turning turtle’s loosened everything up inside her. There’s air trapped in some places and water sloshing about in others. The only way to find out what’s happening when we try to raise her would be to have men inside, and that’s too dangerous even for these thrill-seekers.’ He gestured to the divers’ table. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to do that,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I would not. What happened to those two lads was a terrible accident. We all know the risks in this work, and I know you’re all brave as lions, especially you Jock lads, but I won’t go beyond a reasonable limit, no, I won’t, not for any one of you.’
Cox looked around. He was dressed as smartly as he always was, whether he was office-bound or about to spend the day aboard the boat or dock in terrible conditions. His brogues shone with brown polish, his white shirt was freshly starched. There was a woman on Hoy who did his laundry, and new clothes arrived in packages that his wife Jenny Jack had regularly sent to the Flow.
‘But I’ll tell you this, boys,’ he said. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you Ernest Cox knows when he’s beaten. He doesn’t. I’m going to explain to you now what it is we’re going to do.’
Cox nodded to someone at the door. A young lad carried in a large chalkboard and rested it across three chairs, leaning it against their backs. Cox took a stub of chalk from his pocket and drew a side-on outline of the hull of a ship. Then he drew three pairs of vertical straight lines from the top to the bottom of the ship. With crude cross-hatching he filled in the narrow space between each pair of lines, so that the ship was graphically divided into three parts.
Ernest Cox turned back to the company. ‘The hull of a warship,’ he said, ‘is built with many different watertight compartments, partitioned by metal walls or bulkheads. Now, boys, we’ve been making her watertight and pumping out the water. It hasn’t worked. So do you know what we’re going to do next? We’re going to do something different. In fact, we’re going to do the opposite.’
Leo glanced across at Tom McKenzie and Ernie McKeown. It was apparent from their bemused expressions that whatever was coming was going to be as big a surprise to them as it was for everybody else.
‘That’s right,’ said Ernest Cox. ‘Instead of pumping out water, we’re going to pump in air. Compressed air. We’re going to make these three bulkheads airtight, so that we’ve three separate sections of the ship and can control the air pressure in each section separately. Then we might be able to lift her in a controlled manner, do you see? Make the bow less buoyant or the midships more buoyant, as the case may be. We are going to do something, boys, that has never been done before, and in the work you do in these next weeks and months you will write yourselves into the history books.’