On April 25, 1918, ten years to the very day that she sank the _Gladiator_, the tugs were manœuvring her beside her quay in New York when she slowly began to heel over. Men gazed on her with amazement as she heeled more and more. Her masts touched the quay and crumpled like twigs, and as they smashed she went down on her side, even as the _Gladiator_ had gone down in the Solent. In a short time 2000 tons of liquid mud gushed through her open portholes, which had now taken the place of her keel, and the salvage experts of the Merritt and Chapman Wrecking Company found her settled comfortably in a dozen feet of mud between the two quays. Why she sank is still a mystery. Mr. R. E. Chapman, the salvage engineer, had a most difficult problem to tackle. He had to grapple with a dead weight of 13,000 tons in a space so circumscribed that there was hardly room for the salvage craft to move. He did not worry. He set his squads of divers to work cutting away funnels and all the tackle from the top deck, as was done to the _Gladiator_, and when they had finished he sent them into the bowels of the ship in pairs in order to close all the open portholes that were buried many feet in the mud and over 50 feet below the surface of the harbour. It was inky black down below; they had no lights, because lights would not have penetrated the gloom, so they relied on their fingers instead of their eyes, and by using powerful hose to wash away the mud they managed to close over 500 openings in the ship. One particularly clever piece of work was the making of a steel plate to fit over an opening around which were seventeen bolt holes. To get the bolt holes in the plate directly opposite the bolt holes in the ship seems almost an impossibility, but the diver solved the problem by taking down a sheet of lead which he hammered all round the opening until he had made a pattern with every bolt hole exactly in its place. From this pattern the steel plate was made, and it fitted perfectly! Bulkheads to a ship afloat are an undisguised blessing, but the salvors found them a decided drawback on the sunken _St. Paul_. The bulkheads effectually stopped the flow of water from one end of the ship to the other, and before pumping could start it was imperative that the water should flow freely to the pumps throughout the whole length of the ship. It meant breaking through the bulkheads. The divers blasted through one or two with explosives, but the damage was such that the salvors decided to cut holes through the remainder with the electric torch. Among the modern miracles that are little understood may be ranked that of creating a flame hot enough to melt metal immersed deep in the sea. Plunge a lighted match into water and the flame goes out; sink a blazing ship in the sea and the fire is conquered; yet the divers working on the _St. Paul_ not only made a flame burn under the sea, but they also melted and cut holes through strong steel plates.