In the summer of 1931, a salvage diver named Absalom Vardsted descended into the North Atlantic off the coast of Maine. He was a hard man, a professional who had spent more than a decade working in the dark, dangerous depths of the sea. He was not a man who scared easily.
By the time he died in 1968, he had not entered water above his ankles in 37 years. He washed at a sink, standing up with a cloth and a bowl, for the rest of his life. His widow said only this: "He came home wrong that August, and whatever came home with him, it never quite left."
Vardsted was 37 years old that summer. Born near Bergen, Norway, he had worked herring boats out of Gloucester before apprenticing under a Scots diver named Angus Muir. By 1931, he had spent more than a decade in the standard dress—the copper helmet, the canvas suit, the lead-weighted boots. He had cut apart torpedoed ships and walked the mud floors of rivers in blackouts. He was a man who had made peace with death at an early age.
In late July of 1931, Vardsted took a contract with the Petronel Wrecking and Marine Recovery Company, owned by a former merchant captain named Renard Cornish. Cornish had lost most of his fortune in the crash of '29 and was taking jobs other outfits refused.
The job was a wreck called the SS Amberly, a 280-foot coastal freighter that had gone down in a squall in November 1929, about 11 miles south of Petronel Ledges. She lay in about 32 fathoms—190 feet. Twelve of her crew of 19 made it into the boats. Seven did not.
For a year and a half, nobody went down to her. Then an insurance concern in Hartford put out a notice offering a fee to any outfit willing to recover a strongbox from the purser's office. The box was said to contain approximately $60,000 in bearer bonds.
Cornish took the job. He hired Vardsted, a tender named Bertram Kohlstedt, and a young engineer named Emrick Palgrave to run the compressor. On the 7th of August, 1931, they steamed out of Rockland into an overcast dawn that smelled, Vardsted said later, of iron.
The descent to 190 feet took about six minutes. Vardsted landed on the Amberly's boat deck. He was surprised by the state of preservation. The paint was faded but intact. The lifeboat davits stood upright. The silt on the deck looked as if it had been laid there, not settled—neat, even drifts along the corners, as if someone had swept the deck clean.
The companionway door was already open. Wedged under its lower edge was a man's shoe, black leather, polished, placed neatly against the doorframe with its toe pointing inward. Beside it, at the base of the bulkhead, a second shoe was placed in exactly the same manner. Both shoes were clean of silt. The leather was still visibly polished.
Vardsted reported to the surface that there was evidence of prior entry. Cornish ordered him up. Vardsted asked for five minutes to make one look.
He went inside. The passageway was straight and narrow, lined with paneled walls that had been a pale cream color. The floor was covered with a thin, even layer of silt. There were no footprints.
He came to the purser's office. The door was open. Inside, there was a desk, a chair tucked in, a small oil lamp on the desk with its glass chimney intact. There was a ledger open on the desk. The safe against the far bulkhead was open. The strongbox was not in it.
He found the strongbox in the passageway behind him, about eight feet outside the purser's door. He had walked past it. It was sitting upright, its lid closed. On top of it was a folded piece of oilcloth tied with a piece of black ribbon.
He untied the ribbon. Inside was a photograph. It was a sepia-toned portrait of a man standing in a diving suit, in the Mark V standard dress, with the helmet tucked under his arm. The man was tall and gaunt, with hair the color of wet rope. He had a small piece missing from the top of his left ear.
The man in the photograph was Absalom Vardsted, older by perhaps 10 years. In the corner of the photograph, in pencil, was a date: August the 7th, 1941. Ten years to the day in his future.
Vardsted later told a priest that he understood two things at once. He understood that the picture had been left for him, and he understood that the person who left it was in the ship and knew what his face looked like.
He put the photograph back on top of the box. He tied the running line to the iron banding. He gave two hard tugs. He watched the box lift from the deck. He watched the oilcloth tip off and drift to the passageway floor.
At the far end of the passage, where the beam faded into the black, he thought he saw the outline of a man standing in a diving suit, helmet on, facing him, not moving. He did not shine the lamp directly on it. He turned and followed the box up.
He broke the surface at 4:00 in the afternoon. The bearer bonds were inside the strongbox in a sealed leather pouch, and they were dry. Cornish was smiling. Vardsted was not.
That evening, Cornish opened a bottle of rye whiskey and told Vardsted there was more in that ship than a purser's box. A family in Boston had contacted him. Their patriarch had been the Amberly's second officer, one of the seven who did not make it into the boats. He had been carrying in his cabin a small metal case containing three items: a silver crucifix, a leather-bound book of prayers, and a lock of hair wrapped in wax paper.
The family had offered Cornish $250 to recover the case. The shipping clerk who came to see Cornish said that since November of '29, since his father went down with those items in his cabin, the peace had not been kept. His mother, 68 years old, had begun to say she heard his father calling to her from under the floor of the parlor.
The clerk also said his father had told him of a dream on that last voyage. He had dreamed of a diver. In the dream, the diver came to the door of his cabin and knocked. When he opened the door, the diver was standing there with his helmet under his arm. The diver said one thing: "I'm coming for the case."
Vardsted said, "I'll go down tomorrow."
He did not tell Cornish about the photograph. He did not tell him about the shoes. He lay in his bunk that night and did not sleep. He later said he felt a thread running down from him, through the deck of the Petronel, into the water, down along the shot line, into the passageway of the Amberly. Along that thread, occasionally, he could feel a small, deliberate tug.
At first light, he suited up. The weather had changed. The sea was flat. The sky was the color of unbleached linen.
He went over the side at 9 minutes past 7:00. At 190 feet, his boots touched the deck. The two shoes were still there, placed exactly as they had been the day before, not silted over, not moved. He stepped over them.
He went down the passage past the purser's office, past the spot where the strongbox had been. He went to the far end of the passage, to the place where he had thought he saw the shape of a diver. There was a door. The door was closed. According to the plan, it would open onto the second officer's cabin.
He put his gloved hand on the door handle. He turned it. The door opened easily, as if it had been ready for him.
Inside the small cabin, on the bunk, there was a man in a diving suit. Not a body. A man lying on his back, boots on, helmet on, hose running from the back of the helmet up along the bulkhead, out through a cracked porthole, and gone. His breastplate was rising and falling slowly, as if he were breathing.
The man on the bunk turned his head. The copper helmet turned slowly so that the face plate was aimed directly at Vardsted. The glass was dark.
The diver very slowly sat up. His movements were smooth, fluid, as if the suit weighed nothing. He swung his lead-booted feet down to the deck. He stood. He was taller than Vardsted.
He raised his right hand, the great gauntleted glove, and pointed past Vardsted's shoulder into the passageway. Vardsted turned his head to look. There was nothing there. He turned back. The diver was two steps closer.
The diver raised the same gauntleted hand, palm up, and made a small deliberate motion, as if inviting him to step inside.
Vardsted later said this was the moment he understood the photograph. The diver in front of him was him, at the age of 47, on the 7th of August, 1941. The diver had come down from that later date to invite him in. If he stepped through the door, he would take the diver's place.
The diver took a third step forward. Vardsted found his voice. He keyed the mic and said very clearly, "Bertram, pull me up now."
Kohlstedt gave the sharp three-tug signal for emergency haul and began hand over hand, with Palgrave's help, to bring Vardsted up.
Vardsted took one step backward into the passageway. The diver did not follow. He stopped where he was. He raised his gauntleted hand again, palm up, in the same slow, inviting gesture.
Then the diver tilted the helmet very slightly, slowly, to one side. The way a person tilts their head when they are asking a question. The way a person tilts their head when they are saying, "Are you sure?"
Vardsted said out loud, to nobody, "I'm certain."
He turned and walked as fast as a man in 18-pound lead boots can walk back down the passageway, over the two shoes, out onto the boat deck, toward the shot line.
He was pulled up too fast. Kohlstedt, Cornish, and Palgrave all later admitted they had panicked. They had not observed proper decompression stops. At 190 feet, that is a killing pace.
When they got him out of the suit on the deck of the Petronel, Vardsted was already unable to stand. His joints were locking. He was bleeding faintly from his nose and from one ear.
There was a hyperbaric chamber at a naval yard in Portland. Cornish drove him there through the night in a borrowed truck. Vardsted went into the chamber at 3:30 in the morning of the 9th of August and came out alive on the 11th.
The man his wife met at the Rockland train station on the 14th of August had aged in one week by 15 years. His hair had gone gray at the temples. His hands had begun to shake very slightly and never stopped. He would not look at the sea.
He never went down again. He never went into water again. He did not fish. He did not row. He did not board a boat, not even a ferry. When he had to cross a river, he would wait for the bridge.
He took work for the rest of his life in a hardware store in a small inland town called Ashcombe in central Maine. He was known as a quiet, deliberate, courteous man who was oddly reluctant to sell anyone anything related to boats.
His wife, Astrid, said he only spoke of the Amberly three times in the 37 years of their marriage.
The first time was in 1933, when a photograph fell out of a book he was moving off a shelf. It was the photograph. He had put it into the pages of a Bible he never opened. Astrid picked it up and asked, "When was this taken?" Absalom said, "It hasn't been." He took the photograph from her and burned it in the stove.
The second time was in 1941. On the 6th of August, Astrid noticed her husband had stopped eating. On the 7th of August, he asked her to keep him away from mirrors for that one day. She covered every mirror in the house with a bedsheet without asking why. They sat in the parlor that whole day and night. Neither of them spoke.
On the 8th of August, he asked her to uncover the mirrors. He looked at himself in the mirror over the mantel for a long time. Then he said quietly, "It wasn't me then. Good."
The third time was in 1968, near the very end, when he was in bed with a cancer that killed him. A priest, Father Cyprian Halverson, was there. It was Father Halverson who wrote the account down.
Absalom, near the end, said this: "Father, there is a man in a copper helmet standing in a cabin in the black at the bottom of the North Atlantic, off the coast of Maine. He has been standing there for 37 years. He is still standing there. Every 7 years I feel him tilt his head."
He said, "I stepped back, but I don't know if I stepped back far enough."
He died on the 12th of November, 1968. At his funeral in Ashcombe, the weather was strange. A light, salt-smelling mist rolled up over the town from the south, from the direction of the coast, 70 miles away, and hung over the churchyard for the entire service.
Astrid Vardsted walked home from the cemetery alone. She said she wanted the walk. Near a small pond at the edge of a farmer's field, a shallow pond not more than 4 feet deep, she stopped because she thought she had heard from the pond the sound of a slow, deep, mechanical breath, like the sound of a compressor or of a man breathing through a copper helmet.
She said, "I did not go closer. I turned my back on the pond and I said out loud, 'He kept his side. Now you keep yours.' And I walked on and I did not look back."
She never spoke of the pond again. She lived until 1981.
The wreck of the SS Amberly has been down for 97 years now. In all that time, no salvage outfit has gone down to her a second time. She sits in the current, in the silt, in the dark.
And in a small cabin along the port side, according to a man who once looked in through the doorway, there is a diver in a copper helmet standing very quietly with his helmet tilted very slightly to one side, waiting. Waiting for someone to say yes.