Somewhere off Bridgeport lies the wreck of the old Sound steamer _Lexington_. Legend has it that she has a fortune in her safe. Many a ship has been sunken in the waters about Hell Gate; search was carried on there for years for the old British frigate _Hussar_, which struck on Pot Rock and sank during the Revolutionary War. Tradition has it that she had four million dollars (£820,000) in gold on board to pay off the British troops, and that she carried this treasure to the bottom with her. There is a cargo of block tin somewhere in a sunken barge off the Battery, and many a ship with valuable cargoes lies along the coast from Newfoundland to Key West. The yearly loss in ships and cargoes throughout the world has always run into many millions of dollars, and since the war this has been multiplied a hundred-fold, and amounts to billions. The time will come when many of these ships will be found, and such of their cargo as is still valuable will be salvaged. Salving a sunken cargo is not a difficult engineering feat, providing the proper apparatus is at hand. It is the novelty of the enterprise and the mystery surrounding submarine work that make it so difficult to the layman. Diving, as heretofore conducted, has been difficult and dangerous work, and only the strong could stand the hardships connected with it. The advent of submarine salvage vessels fitted with proper machinery and in the application of scientific methods, however, will clear away many of the hardships and dangers connected with salving a sunken cargo, and more experience and proper apparatus will prove that certain cargoes may be removed from sunken ships in moderate depth with almost as much rapidity as they can be lifted from the hold of a vessel alongside of a dock. Take anthracite coal, for instance. With a six-inch pump, on the old _Argonaut_, I have transferred fifteen tons of nut coal from a sunken barge to a sunken freight-carrying submarine in nine minutes. A turn of the air valve then sent the sunken freight boat to the surface. The coal was transferred while all the boats were submerged in seven fathoms of water. It was this kind of experimental work which has enabled me to devise apparatus which will undoubtedly operate successfully on a much larger scale, as explained in the illustrations. [Illustration: EXPERIMENTAL CARGO-RECOVERING SUBMARINE This vessel was built in 1899 and experimented with in 1900, to demonstrate the practicability of transferring cargoes from sunken vessels to submarine freight carriers. (See text.)]