THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 35
New Guinea, and became a polar guide.
He is a trained medic, dive master, fire-
fighter, aircraft pilot, and boat operator,
a former New Zealand park ranger who
has served as an adviser to the Norwegian
Navy. He speaks three Neo-Melanesian
languages, and can pilot a Zodiac boat
standing up, in sixteen-foot waves. He is
the subject of a “Modern Love” column,
in the Times. (“My father warned me
about guys like you,” the author recalls
telling him, before marrying him anyway.)
McCallum and his associates have dis-
covered several high-profile shipwrecks,
including Australian and American war-
ships and an Israeli military submarine.
A few months ago, he showed me on his
computer an object on a sonar scan, which
he believes to be Amelia Earhart’s plane.
Vescovo asked what McCallum re-
quired from him. “The first thing I need
is for you to triple the budget,” he replied.
He also shot down several of Vescovo’s
proposals, from the antiquated (no alcohol
or spouses on board) to the insane (install-
ing fake torpedo tubes on the bow; bring-
ing his dog to the deepest point on earth).
Five oceans, five deeps—a journey
around the world and to both poles.
McCallum explained that the expedi-
tion would have to be anchored by the
polar dives. The likely dive spot in the
Arctic Ocean is covered by ice for much
of the year, but there is a two-week dive
window, beginning in late August. The
Antarctic, or Southern Ocean, dive could
be done in February, the height of sum-
mer in that hemisphere. The team would
have to avoid hurricane season in the
Atlantic, and monsoon season in the
Pacific, and otherwise remain flexible,
for when things inevitably went wrong.
Lahey persuaded Vescovo to buy the
U.S.N.S. Indomitable, a two-hundred-
and-twenty-foot vessel that he had found
at a drydock in Seattle. It was built as
an intelligence-gathering ship, in 1985,
and spent much of the next fifteen years
prowling the world’s oceans, towing an
undersea listening device. “It was owned
by the Navy but operated by civilians,”
McCallum told me. He winked. “I didn’t
say C.I.A.—I just said civilians.” Ves-
covo renamed it the Pressure Drop, for
a spaceship from the “Culture” series of
science-fiction novels, by Iain M. Banks.
The Arctic-dive window was fast ap-
proaching, and it seemed unlikely that
the submersible would be ready. “That’s
when Patrick Lahey’s overflowing op-
timism went from being an incredible,
endearing personality trait to being a
huge issue,” Stuart Buckle, the Pressure
Drop’s captain, said. “Every day, Patrick
would say, ‘Oh, yes, it’ll be ready in one
or two days.’ And then two days pass,
and he’d say, ‘It’ll be ready in two days.’”
The final step in building a subma-
rine is to put it in a swimming pool or
in the water at a marina. “You need to
know how much it weighs and how much
it displaces,” Ramsay said, because the
average density of the craft and its pas-
sengers must be equal to that of the water
in which it is submerged. “You’ve only
calculated the volume of each object
through computer models, which can’t
possibly represent the actual thing, with
all its tolerances. Things are a bit bigger,
things are a bit smaller, cables are fatter.”
But there was no time to do this be-
fore loading it onto the ship and set-
ting off for sea trials, in the Bahamas.
They left Florida without knowing how
much the submarine displaced. “It had
never even touched the water,” Ramsay
said. “It was just ‘Right, off we go. Let’s
see if it works.’”SEATRIALS
“
W
hen people talk about sea tri-
als, they always think about test-
ing a ship or testing a sub,” McCallum
told me. “But, really, what you’re doing
is you’re testing people. You are testing
systems, processes, conditions, and teams.”
Buckle, the captain, dropped anchor
near Great Abaco Island, in the Baha-
mas, and immediately became alarmed
by the Triton crew’s cavalier approach
to safety. He had grown up in the Scot-
tish Highlands, and gone to sea when
he was seventeen years old. “Me and my
guys were trying to adjust from the oil-
and-gas industry, where you need a
signed bit of paper to do anything, and
to go out on deck you have to have your
overalls, hard hats, goggles, earmuffs,
and gloves,” Buckle said. “Whereas a lot
of the Triton guys were used to walking
around in shorts and flip-flops, like you
watch on ‘American Chopper.’ They were
grinding and drilling and using hydrau-
lic awls, looking at it, sparks flying ev-
erywhere, not wearing safety glasses or
anything. To them, if something catches
fire, it’s funny—it’s not an issue.”Vescovo named the submarine the
Limiting Factor, for another spaceship
from the “Culture” series. It was secured
to a custom-built cradle, which could be
rolled backward on metal tracks, to lower
the sub into the ocean from the aft deck
of the ship. During launch operations,
the Triton crew attached it to a hook
that hung down from a crane, known as
an A-frame, shaped like an enormous
hydraulic swing set. Buckle had asked
Vescovo to buy a larger A-frame—one
that was “man-rated” by a certification
agency, so that they could launch the sub-
mersible, which weighs around twenty-
six thousand pounds, with the pilot
inside and the hatch secured. But there
was no time to install one. So the Triton
crew lowered the empty submersible into
the water, and the ship’s crew, using a
different crane, launched a Zodiac boat
over the starboard side. McCallum
climbed into the Zodiac, and drove the
pilot to the sub as it was being towed
behind the ship.
The ship had no means of tracking
the submarine underwater. “Once he left
the surface, I had no idea where he was,”
Buckle said. “All we had at that point
was one range.” Buckle could see, for ex-
ample, that the Limiting Factor was five
hundred metres away, but he didn’t know
in which direction. “As long as that num-
ber was getting bigger, that meant he
wasn’t surfacing directly under me,” he
said. “If it just kept getting smaller and
smaller, I’m in trouble.”
“The thing about driving a ship is
that unless you know how to drive a
ship you never see the bad stuff,” Mc-
Callum told me. “It’s only when the
captain’s going ‘Christ, that was close!’
that you go ‘Really? Was it?’”
Other incidents were unambiguous.
“I was seeing Triton guys bouncing up
the ladders without holding the hand-
rails, wanting to jump on top of things
while they were still swinging from the
crane,” Buckle recalled. Ropes failed,
deck equipment snapped under stress.
“One of the big ratchet hooks blew off
the top of the hangar, and missed Pat-
rick’s head by that much,” McCallum
said, holding his fingers a couple of
inches apart. “Just missed him. And he
wasn’t wearing a helmet, so that would
have killed him.”
Lahey piloted the sub on its earliest
dives—first to twenty metres, then fifty,