Magee, the shop foreman, sent him a
Facebook message asking if he’d like to
build submarines. They had met in the
two-thousands, after Eigler had saved
up enough money by growing mari-
juana to pay for dive lessons. Magee was
his instructor. Later, Eigler worked as
a car mechanic. “Building submarines—
this shit is exactly the same as cars, just
different components,” Eigler told me.
On December 14th, the Pressure Drop
set off for the Puerto Rico Trench, from
the port of San Juan. “Been feeling a lit-
tle queasy ever since we got underway,”
Eigler wrote that night, in an e-mail to
his wife. It was his first time at sea.
THESTARTINGGUN
V
escovo and Lahey went for a test
dive down to a thousand metres. It
was Lahey’s last chance to train Ves-
covo in the Limiting Factor before he
would attempt an eight-thousand-metre
dive, solo, to the bottom of the Puerto
Rico Trench. A scientific goal for the
expedition was to collect a rock sample
from the bottom of each trench, so Lahey
switched on the manipulator arm.
Seconds later, on the Pressure Drop,
a transmission came up from below.
“Control, this is L.F.,” Lahey said. “We
have lost the arm. It has fallen off.”
It was December 17th. After surfac-
ing, Vescovo and Lahey walked into
McCallum’s office, toward the stern of
the ship. “Patrick was under immense
pressure that would have crushed al-
most anybody else I know,” McCallum
said. “He had applied a huge amount
of his team’s intellectual capital to this
project, at the expense of all other proj-
ects, and yet things were just not quite
where they needed to be.”
Vescovo called off the expedition. “I
think I’m just going to write this whole
thing off as bad debt,” he said. The ma-
nipulator arm had cost three hundred
and fifty thousand dollars, and there
was no spare.
Lahey begged for more time. “Give
my guys one more day,” he said. Vescovo
relented, and went up to his cabin. No
one saw him for the next thirty-two
hours. “The more time I spend with Vic-
tor, the more I think he is Vulcan in his
decision-making but not in his emo-
tions,” Buckle told me. “He’s one of those
guys who has a veneer of calm, but then
probably goes into his cabin and screams
into his pillow after he’s been told the
fifth bit of bad news that day.” (Vescovo
denies screaming into his pillow.)
Lahey pulled his team into the sub-
marine hangar. “Do you think you can
fix this fucking thing?” he asked.
Blades noted that the loss of the ma-
nipulator arm had freed up an electri-
cal junction box, creating an opportu-
nity to fix nearly everything else that
was wrong with the electronics. “Basi-
cally, Tom Blades hot-wired the sub,”
Lahey explained. “There was literally a
jumper cable running through the pres-
sure hull, tucked behind Victor’s seat.”
On December 19th, Vescovo climbed
into the Limiting Factor and began his
descent. “The control room was just
packed, and you could cut the atmosphere
with a knife the entire way down,” Stew-
art told me. “Patrick was just in his chair,
ear to the radio, just wringing sweat.”
At 2:55 P.M., Victor Vescovo became
the first person to reach the deepest
point in the Atlantic Ocean, eight thou-
sand three hundred and seventy-six
metres. It was his first solo dive, and it
was flawless.
That night, “Victor was wandering
around, drinking out of a bottle of cham-
pagne,” McCallum said. “It was the first
time we’d seen Victor relax. It was the
first time we’d seen Victor touch alco-
hol. And from that point we knew we
were going to take this around the world.”
“Puerto Rico was the starting gun,”
Vescovo told me. “The Southern Ocean
was the forge.”
THEFORGE
W
aves are local—the brushing of
the ocean by the wind. Swells
roll for thousands of miles across open
water, unaffected by the weather of
the moment.
On January 24, 2019, the Pressure Drop
set off from the port of Montevideo, Uru-
guay, to dive the South Sandwich Trench,
the deepest point of the Southern Ocean.
Buckle and his crew had loaded the ship
with cold-weather gear, and provisions
for more than a month. There was a five-
thousand-mile journey ahead of them,
and the ship could barely go nine knots.
“Captain, can I have a word?” Peter
Coope, the chief engineer, asked. “Is
this ship going to be O.K.?”
“Yes,” Buckle replied. “Do you think
I would invite on board all the people
I like working with most in the world,
