exceeded. A marked rocking had resulted and it was this motion 

 which had caused the antenna to break (see page 62). 



But how did the water get into the cabin? The direction of the 

 splashes led us to the faulty part : it was the union of the tube bringing 

 water under pressure to the pressure gauge which had become partly 

 unscrewed. If the automatic pilot had had two hands and a pipe wrench 

 it could without difficulty have tightened this joint. On the Trieste the 

 same unions did not allow the passage of a single drop of water, even 

 at a depth of 1650 fathoms. It was a pity, in short, that this dive had 

 been done empty : if one of us had gone with the bathyscaphe, the 

 Press could have spoken of a great success : at this moment it was 

 still Professor Beebe who, with his 508 fathoms, held the world 

 record for depth. Nevertheless, we had not set out to hunt records, 

 and the fact that a habitable cabin had indeed come back from 759 

 fathoms had exactly the same value, from the technical point of view, 

 as if a man or a guinea-pig had been shut up in it. Perhaps even a little 

 more, since the construction of the robot constituted quite a presentable 

 technical achievement. 



It should be noted here that two French officers of the Elie-Monnier, 

 full of enthusiasm for the bathyscaphe and confident of its success, 

 had offered themselves as volunteers for this dive. This courageous 

 offer could not be accepted for the reasons given above, our submarine 

 having first to make a dive without a crew. 



This dive to 759 fathoms put an end to our tests for 1948. 



A few days later Mr. Barton dived in his captive bathysphere to 

 748 fathoms. 



We now set sail for Dakar, arriving there on the 6th November. 

 The end of the expedition came almost without incident. The Scaldis 

 had to go to collect freight in French Equatorial Africa, so as not to 

 go home empty: the budget at our disposal did not allow us to pay 

 for the passages of twelve persons in a passenger boat or a plane. 

 Once more the French authorities made a generous gesture ; and on the 

 1 2th November at ten o'clock in the evening we left Dakar all together 

 on board an Air France plane. We flew over the Sahara on a moonless 

 night : in the darkness we could scarcely distinguish the dunes. A little 

 before dawn we landed at Casablanca. In the east Mercury was visible, 

 standing out against a still dark sky ; in Europe one can never see this 

 planet so clearly. Then the plane left for Paris, passing in a straight 

 line over Cadiz, Toledo, Madrid, the Bay of Biscay, Arcachon. As we 



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