Realizing that we did not have much time to spare before the water would be rushing through and prevent our closing the door, we could hardly wait for the last man to wade through before we slammed it shut. But one of the “dogs,” or metal clamps, was turned the wrong way, so that the door would not close tight enough to be “dogged down.” A little detail like this, which should have been noticed when we “rigged for diving,” had turned out to be a possible matter of life or death, for the dog seemed jammed and would not budge an inch. The water had risen up to our waists, submerging the jammed dog before we gave up, and since it was then too late to get the door closed, we worked our way aft monkey-fashion because of the steep diving angle, hoping that the control-room was not flooded, and that we could find safety there. The big diving angle caused by all the extra water forward turned out to be a great advantage, for although the forward part of the compartment was flooded, the after part was not, and after some of the fastest work I ever expect to see, we had the control-room door undogged—it had been closed by those in the control-room—and rushed through it, closing it behind us just as water began lapping around the bottom of the door. Thank God, the control-room wasn’t flooded! Just then the bow of the ship hit the bottom of the ocean—a rather cushioned blow. Must have been mud bottom. The motors had been backing to break the speed of the crash to the bottom as much as possible. This had been done when the Captain saw that all efforts to stop the dive and get to the surface were hopeless. Fortunately, we had not dived in mid-ocean, for nothing would have stopped our dive but the bottom. If we had been in over one hundred fathoms of water, our hull would have been crushed like an eggshell. I saw the engine-room watertight door was open—the first thing I looked for when I rushed back to the control-room; and this meant that the engine-room gang had by some miracle managed to get their end of the main induction closed. Temporarily we were saved. But to what end? The deck of the control-room was so wet that it was necessary to hold on to something to prevent slipping. As luck would have it, just as we took on our big angle, a mess-cook had been passing through the control-room with a big tureen of soup and an armful of dishes. He was thrown off his balance by the sudden change of diving angle, with the result that hot soup and broken dishes were sprayed all over the deck, adding to the general confusion; nearly everyone in the control-room was thrown by the heavy lurch, and upon trying to regain their feet, slipped on the wet deck and went down again. All this was unfortunately timed so that it occurred at exactly the wrong psychological moment—just when all hands were frantically trying to “surface” the vessel, and every man was needed to do his part.