Working Underwater: The Story of the Commercial Diving Industry

THE UNDERSEA GOURMET
George W. Fuller had been making his living as a diver for a good while when he came up
with yet another way to turn a profit in underwater work.
In talking with acquaintances about the sort of things he could accomplish with his diving
apparatus, Fuller asserted that he could even catch, dress and cook a fish under water. Not only that,
he boasted, he could bring it to the surface without even getting it wet, hot and ready to eat.
Of course, no one believed he could do it. In fact, one gentlemen cheerfully wagered $100 that
Fuller could not pull off such a stunt. Taking the bet, Fuller set the date of his demonstration for
the following week. He did that because he knew he had a little below-the-surface work to do first.
The diver took his boat and a couple of his employees to a point far out into the harbor where
he was fairly sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find fish. Fuller lowered a weighted barrel and then
donned his diving suit. On the bottom of the bay, Fuller secured the barrel with ropes and then
stood up inside it. As he stood there, air coming from his escape valve began rising to the top,
steadily pushing down the water. Soon he was able to remove his helmet and before long the whole
barrel was filled with air. Next, with hammer and nails, he attached a board to the side of the barrel
that would serve as a shelf.
The next week, with his crew, the man who had made the bet and assorted hangers on, Fuller
took his boat to the approximate spot where he had tethered the barrel. Then, taking with him
a lantern, a small stew pan, salt, pepper and a fishing hook, he descended to his “fish house.”
He soon spotted a fish, harpooned it with a sail needle attached to a line, and pulled it inside
his barrel. There he gutted the fish, washed it, added salt and pepper and parboiled it over the
flame from his lantern. When the fish was done, he placed the skillet inside the water-proof
lamp container, stepped out of his barrel and pulled the line signaling his men to pull him up.
“I had been gone only a few minutes, and the people thought as a matter of course that I
had come up to say that I could not catch the fish, never dreaming that I had caught it, dressed
it and cooked it already. They were very much surprised when...I showed them the fish
steaming hot and well-cooked.” One of those surprised people was also out $100.
(The story, reprinted from the Boston Globe, appeared in the Bryan [Texas] Eagle on January 9, 1890.)
One of the earliest uses of commercial
diving was sponge harvesting. The industry
grew in Florida in the late 1800s.
THE HISTORY OF COMMERCIAL DIVING
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