This “seamount” must have been of extremely solid structure, for it towered over the relatively flat sea bottom to a height of nearly nine thousand feet. Its sides were precipitous and its craggy form, profiled on the PDR, resembled the spires of a medieval cathedral. We slowed to creeping speed as we came up on the mount, for we had to be able to avoid it should it extend to our depth level. Slowly, we crept over the area, recording a minimum sounding of nine hundred and thirty fathoms, and then reversed course and ran over the same track. Criss-crossing, we pinpointed the peak’s location and traced an outline of it from all sides.
It must be admitted that coming as it did without warning, the abrupt decrease in soundings startled me. We could not see ahead, of course, except by sonar, and until we actually had passed over it and determined the minimum distance between the top of the seamount and the surface, there was no way to guess how high the peak might actually reach. Had it reached higher, had we been traveling much deeper than we were, and had we not been keeping the careful watch that we were keeping, we might have struck it in the manner of an aircraft striking a mountain. The results would have been equally calamitous.
As I left the control room, with the peak safely astern and its location carefully logged, I noticed that this particular submerged mountain had already received a name.
Conforming to the tradition that the discoverer of prominent geographical features has the right to name them, Jerry Saunders had neatly inscribed “Saunders Peak” opposite its location on our track chart.
Saunders Peak will present no hazard to submarines until they travel much deeper than they are yet able to do. But, nevertheless, it had not been marked on any chart before this. We had made a new discovery.
The twenty-fourth of February was the day we expected to sight St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks. According to navigator Will Adams, we should see the islet dead ahead on the horizon at about noon. Prior to this time we had studied every bit of lore we had on board about the Rocks, but there was very little to be learned. Sailing Directions described it as bare and useless, a one-time guano collecting spot, noting that there had once been a small dock, long since washed away, and that the highest rock had an abandoned lighthouse surmounting it.
We had been totally submerged for over a week, and as bad luck would have it, for the last thirty-six hours the sky had been overcast. It was consequently impossible for Will to get any sights through our new-fangled periscope. At 4:00 A.M. there was not a star in the sky, and at 0830 we went to periscope depth again in hopes of shooting the morning sun. At this time, as we rose through a temperature layer in the water, the sound of foreign propeller beats suddenly came in loud and clear. It was a striking example of how a temperature or salinity difference in the water will block the sonar return of a ship at relatively close range.
Carefully, we conned Triton through the evolutions necessary to come safely to periscope depth, and finally got the fragile periscope tube out of water. Our contact was a motor ship of eight thousand or ten thousand tons, with a white hull, buff stack, nice-looking clipper bow, a large deckhouse, many king posts, and apparently considerable deck machinery. She must also have been fitted to carry passengers—an easy deduction from the size of her deckhouse and the number of portholes evident. But we were much too far away to make out her nationality.
In the meantime, we had been looking for the sun in hopes of getting an observation. No luck. If there were an unexpected current or, during the last thirty-six hours, a slight error in our dead-reckoning position, it would be more than easy to skid right by this tiny island a few miles either way and never see it. My good friend Fred Janney, navigating the Whale during the war, once missed Midway Island in exactly this manner, and had to spend half a day, with his grumbling crew, groping about looking for the tiny atoll. (I have never let him forget the episode, and he will not be happy to read about it here.)
At 1156, Adams announced St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks should be eleven miles dead ahead. Again we brought Triton to periscope depth, and at 1206 I saw a tiny white spot on the horizon bearing exactly two degrees to the left of dead ahead. For the Rocks to show up so precisely on schedule, from dead-reckoning navigation alone, was an indication of Will’s great ability.
As we approached the islet, it presented varying shapes. The white spot looked at first like the sail of a ship, then like a sun-kissed minaret, finally like a huge birdcage. At last I recognized it as the structure of the abandoned lighthouse. The upper parts of the rocks were pure white from bird droppings, and the lower levels, as we approached, were a sort of brownish-black, ceaselessly washed by the waves. The sea was relatively smooth, yet there was considerable surf breaking in and among the rocks, foaming madly like a miniature waterfall one minute, stopping abruptly the next and reversing itself. As we came closer, we could distinguish a great number of granitelike outcroppings scattered about everywhere, and there were large numbers of sea birds.
The whole scene reminded me of a photograph published after the Battle of Midway, which had shown a Japanese cruiser, the Mikuma, after she had received a tremendous drubbing from our carrier-based aircraft. By squinting a little and using a bit of imagination, St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks in profile looked exactly like His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s ship, Mikuma.
We certainly had to agree to one thing: the Sailing Directions description of this place was exactly right. As a matter of fact, its barrenness had been one of the arguments in favor of selecting it for the official terminus of the circumnavigation. German submarines had been in the habit of stopping at the Rocks, during World War II, to exchange mail, supplies, and munitions. For them, as for us, the Rocks were a convenient navigational reference point and also, no doubt, a concealing backdrop should a strange ship unexpectedly appear on the horizon.
We took a lot of photographs and went through a complete photographic reconnaissance drill. For three-and-a-half hours we cruised slowly about at various ranges, conforming to the bottom topography and carefully avoiding shallow spots. Everyone who wanted to do so was permitted to come to the conning tower for a look, and many crew members availed themselves of this opportunity.
Not a single engineer came forward, however, for Don Fears had taken advantage of our time at reduced speed to make some minor repairs and some low-power checks on various machinery. Mindful of our experience with the condenser, and not one to neglect a chance of this sort anyway, he used every available hand.
At a few minutes after 1600, we turned Triton south and headed for Cape Horn. The equator was only fifty miles away.
For the last two or three days, there had been a steady effort by the Shellbacks to exaggerate the various tortures that would be inflicted on the lowly pollywogs when we crossed the equator. Among our pollywogs, who composed most of the crew, were some apparently made of fairly stern stuff. One obnoxious character, calling himself the Little Gray Fox, attempted to foment a rebellion. He posted signs reading “Pollywogs arise” and “shellbacks take heed and surrender while you may.” And King Neptune’s crown, the equipment for the Royal Barbers, and the painstakingly made shillelaghs for the chastisement of the guilty pollywogs mysteriously vanished. A thorough investigation by the Shellbacks uncovered the information that their paraphernalia had disappeared permanently through the garbage ejector.