t the current was so exceedingly
rapid that the diver could do nothing in it. Eads at once returned to
Keokuk, and, buying a forty-gallon whiskey hogshead, took it out to the
wreck; and having knocked out one head, he slung pigs of lead round his
improvised diving-bell, made a seat inside it, rigged it to his derrick
and air-pumps, and then asked the diver to go down in it. The diver
having very naturally refused, Eads on the spot set himself a precedent
which, during his after life, he never broke,--saying that he would not
ask an employee to go where he would not trust himself, he got inside
his hogshead and was lowered into the river. His assistants were unused
to managing diving-bells, and when they came to haul him up the derrick
got out of order. By main force they were able to raise the hogshead to
the surface, but not above it. As the air-pump continued to work all
the while, Eads, though wondering what was amiss, sat patiently in his
place, till finally he saw a hand appear under the rim of the hogshead.
Seizing this, he ducked under and got out. Although the rough
diving-bell worked thus awkwardly at first, it served well enough, and
finally all of the lost freight was saved.

A young man so fearless, so energetic, and so able to invent mechanical
devices at sudden need, was bound to succeed in a business like this.
And young Eads did succeed. "Fortune," he believed, "favors the brave;"
and his motto was, "Drive on!"

The insurance companies were willing to give the wreckers a large
interest, sometimes as much as a half, of the rescued cargoes; and
there was a law by which a vessel or freight that had been wrecked for
five years belonged to whoever could get it up. Eads and his partners
worked up and down the river for hundreds of miles. The first
diving-bell boat was followed by a larger one, provided with machinery
for pumping out sand, and for raising whole hulls. While in this
hazardous business Eads invented many new appliances for use in its
various branches. Because he was in charge of a boat people began to
call the young wrecker Captain Eads, and that was the only reason for a
title which clung to him always. He grew now to know the river as few
have ever known it,--his operations extended from Galena, Illinois, to
the Balize at the river's very mouth, and even into the tributaries of
the Mississippi,--and he used to say that there was not a stretch of
fifty miles in the twelve hundred between Saint