PICKAXE AND TROWEL.
That same evening Barbicane and his
companions returned to Tampa Town, and Murchison,
the engineer, re-embarked on board the Tampico
for New Orleans. He was to engage an army of
workmen to bring back the greater part of the working-stock.
The members of the Gun Club remained at Tampa Town
in order to set on foot the preliminary work with the
assistance of the inhabitants of the country.
Eight days after its departure the
Tampico returned to the Espiritu-Santo Bay
with a fleet of steamboats. Murchison had succeeded
in getting together 1,500 workmen. In the evil
days of slavery he would have lost his time and trouble;
but since America, the land of liberty, has only contained
freemen, they flock wherever they can get good pay.
Now money was not wanting to the Gun Club; it offered
a high rate of wages with considerable and proportionate
perquisites. The workman enlisted for Florida
could, once the work finished, depend upon a capital
placed in his name in the bank of Baltimore.
Murchison had therefore only to pick
and choose, and could be severe about the intelligence
and skill of his workmen. He enrolled in his
working legion the pick of mechanics, stokers,
iron-founders, lime-burners, miners, brickmakers,
and artisans of every sort, white or black without
distinction of colour. Many of them brought their
families with them. It was quite an emigration.
On the 31st of October, at 10 a.m.,
this troop landed on the quays of Tampa Town.
The movement and activity which reigned in the little
town that had thus doubled its population in a single
day may be imagined. In fact, Tampa Town was
enormously benefited by this enterprise of the Gun
Club, not by the number of workmen who were immediately
drafted to Stony Hill, but by the influx of curious
idlers who converged by degrees from all points of
the globe towards the Floridian peninsula.
During the first few days they were
occupied in unloading the flotilla of the tools, machines,
provisions, and a large number of plate iron houses
made in pieces separately pieced and numbered.
At the same time Barbicane laid the first sleepers
of a railway fifteen miles long that was destined
to unite Stony Hill and Tampa Town.
It is known how American railways
are constructed, with capricious bends, bold slopes,
steep hills, and deep valleys. They do not cost
much and are not much in their way, only their trains
run off or jump off as they please. The railway
from Tampa Town to Stony Hill was but a trifle, and
wanted neither much time nor much money for its construction.
Barbicane was the soul of this army
of workmen who had come at his call. He animated
them, communicated to them his ardour, enthusiasm,
and conviction. He was everywhere at once, as
if endowed with the gift of ubiquity, and always followed
by J.T. Maston, his bluebottle fly. His
practical mind invented a thousand things. With
him there were no obstacles, difficulties, or embarrassment.
He was as good a miner, mason, and mechanic as he
was an artilleryman, having an answer to every question,
and a solution to every problem. He corresponded
actively with the Gun Club and the Goldspring Manufactory,
and day and night the Tampico kept her steam
up awaiting his orders in Hillisboro harbour.
Barbicane, on the 1st of November,
left Tampa Town with a detachment of workmen, and
the very next day a small town of workmen’s houses
rose round Stony Hill. They surrounded it with
palisades, and from its movement and ardour it might
soon have been taken for one of the great cities of
the Union. Life was regulated at once and work
began in perfect order.
Careful boring had established the
nature of the ground, and digging was begun on November
4th. That day Barbicane called his foremen together
and said to them
“You all know, my friends, why
I have called you together in this part of Florida.
We want to cast a cannon nine feet in diameter, six
feet thick, and with a stone revetment nineteen and
a half feet thick; we therefore want a well 60 feet
wide and 900 feet deep. This large work must
be terminated in nine months. You have, therefore,
2,543,400 cubic feet of soil to dig out in 255 days that
is to say, 10,000 cubic feet a day. That would
offer no difficulty if you had plenty of elbow-room,
but as you will only have a limited space it will
be more trouble. Nevertheless as the work must
be done it will be done, and I depend upon your courage
as much as upon your skill.”
At 8 a.m. the first spadeful was dug
out of the Floridian soil, and from that moment this
useful tool did not stop idle a moment in the hands
of the miner. The gangs relieved each other every
three hours.
Besides, although the work was colossal
it did not exceed the limit of human capability.
Far from that. How many works of much greater
difficulty, and in which the elements had to be more
directly contended against, had been brought to a
successful termination! Suffice it to mention
the well of Father Joseph, made near Cairo by the Sultan
Saladin at an epoch when machines had not yet appeared
to increase the strength of man a hundredfold, and
which goes down to the level of the Nile itself at
a depth of 300 feet! And that other well dug at
Coblentz by the Margrave Jean of Baden, 600 feet deep!
All that was needed was a triple depth and a double
width, which made the boring easier. There was
not one foreman or workman who doubted about the success
of the operation.
An important decision taken by Murchison
and approved of by Barbicane accelerated the work.
An article in the contract decided that the Columbiad
should be hooped with wrought-iron a useless
precaution, for the cannon could evidently do without
hoops. This clause was therefore given up.
Hence a great economy of time, for they could then
employ the new system of boring now used for digging
wells, by which the masonry is done at the same time
as the boring. Thanks to this very simple operation
they were not obliged to prop up the ground; the wall
kept it up and went down by its own weight.
This manoeuvre was only to begin when
the spade should have reached the solid part of the
ground.
On the 4th of November fifty workmen
began to dig in the very centre of the inclosure surrounded
by palisades that is to say, the top of
Stony Hill a circular hole sixty feet wide.
The spade first turned up a sort of
black soil six inches deep, which it soon carried
away. To this soil succeeded two feet of fine
sand, which was carefully taken out, as it was to
be used for the casting.
After this sand white clay appeared,
similar to English chalk, and which was four feet
thick.
Then the pickaxes rang upon the hard
layer, a species of rock formed by very dry petrified
shells. At that point the hole was six and a half
feet deep, and the masonry was begun.
At the bottom of that excavation they
made an oak wheel, a sort of circle strongly bolted
and of enormous strength; in its centre a hole was
pierced the size of the exterior diameter of the Columbiad.
It was upon this wheel that the foundations of the
masonry were placed, the hydraulic cement of which
joined the stones solidly together. After the
workmen had bricked up the space from the circumference
to the centre, they found themselves inclosed in a
well twenty-one feet wide.
When this work was ended the miners
began again with spade and pickaxe, and set upon the
rock under the wheel itself, taking care to support
it on extremely strong tressels; every time the hole
was two feet deeper they took away the tressels; the
wheel gradually sank, taking with it its circle of
masonry, at the upper layer of which the masons worked
incessantly, taking care to make vent-holes for the
escape of gas during the operation of casting.
This kind of work required great skill
and constant attention on the part of the workmen;
more than one digging under the wheel was dangerous,
and some were even mortally wounded by the splinters
of stone; but their energy did not slacken for a moment
by day nor night; by day, when the sun’s rays
sent the thermometer up to 99 deg. on the calcined
planes; by night, under the white waves of electric
light, the noise of the pickaxe on the rock, the blasting
and the machines, together with the wreaths of smoke
scattered through the air, traced a circle of terror
round Stony Hill, which the herds of buffaloes and
the detachments of Seminoles never dared to pass.
In the meantime the work regularly
advanced; steam-cranes speeded the carrying away of
the rubbish; of unexpected obstacles there were none;
all the difficulties had been foreseen and guarded
against.
When the first month had gone by the
well had attained the depth assigned for the time i.e.,
112 feet. In December this depth was doubled,
and tripled in January. During February the workmen
had to contend against a sheet of water which sprang
from the ground. They were obliged to employ
powerful pumps and apparatus of compressed air to
drain it off, so as to close up the orifice from which
it issued, just as leaks are caulked on board ship.
At last they got the better of these unwelcome springs,
only in consequence of the loosening of the soil the
wheel partially gave way, and there was a landslip.
The frightful force of this bricked circle, more than
400 feet high, may be imagined! This accident
cost the life of several workmen. Three weeks
had to be taken up in propping the stone revetment
and making the wheel solid again. But, thanks
to the skill of the engineer and the power of the machines,
it was all set right, and the boring continued.
No fresh incident henceforth stopped
the progress of the work, and on the 10th of June,
twenty days before the expiration of the delay fixed
by Barbicane, the well, quite bricked round, had reached
the depth of 900 feet. At the bottom the masonry
rested upon a massive block, thirty feet thick, whilst
at the top it was on a level with the soil.
President Barbicane and the members
of the Gun Club warmly congratulated the engineer
Murchison; his cyclopean work had been accomplished
with extraordinary rapidity.
During these eight months Barbicane
did not leave Stony Hill for a minute; whilst he narrowly
watched over the boring operations, he took every
precaution to insure the health and well-being of his
workmen, and he was fortunate enough to avoid the
epidemics common to large agglomérations
of men, and so disastrous in those regions of the globe
exposed to tropical influence.
It is true that several workmen paid
with their lives for the carelessness engendered by
these dangerous occupations; but such deplorable misfortunes
cannot be avoided, and these are details that Americans
pay very little attention to. They are more occupied
with humanity in general than with individuals in
particular. However, Barbicane professed the
contrary principles, and applied them upon every occasion.
Thanks to his care, to his intelligence and respectful
intervention in difficult cases, to his prodigious
and humane wisdom, the average of catastrophes did
not exceed that of cities on the other side of the
Atlantic, amongst others those of France, where they
count about one accident upon every 200,000 francs
of work.