Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

EPILOGUE

Our Log ended at sea, ready for pickup on the morning of the tenth of May, its last entry written several hours in advance of the event in order to have it properly typed and ready upon arrival. Tying up loose ends took until the small hours of the morning, and I finally turned in, exhausted, to get a few hours of sleep before the rendezvous. It fell to Will Adams, therefore, to have the honor of bringing Triton back to the surface just before dawn. I was awakened by the jolt of high-pressure air roaring into her twenty-two main ballast tanks.

As we slowly steered toward the appointed place off Rehoboth Beach, leaden gray skies gradually replaced the dark overcast of night. With the day came our first visitor, a curious sea bird winging in graceful circles and figure eights overhead, swooping in civilized instinct low over our wake for the bits of garbage which he and his fellows have long learned to associate with ships at sea. Land itself was not to be seen, and we might as well have been in the middle of the Atlantic, or in the Pacific, half a world away. But this romantic notion lasted only a short time. Soon our sea bird was joined by another type of bird, a land variety with wheels, a fixed wing, and a propeller glinting light from its nose. Behaving like its handsome wild cousin, the small plane flew low to pass by our side at close range. We waved vigorously at its occupants, who could clearly be seen waving in return. One of them, holding a large camera, appeared to be taking pictures.

Soon, another small plane joined the first one, and then a third. And speeding out of the west, where the shadows of early morning were yet visible in the horizon haze, the bows of a speedboat pushed a white mustache of water in front of it. It looked familiar as it came closer, and in a few minutes, as it turned broadside, I remembered where I had last seen this powerful craft, or one like it. An experimental postwar PT boat, it had been based at the old Washington Navy Yard for the past several years. The Officer-in-Charge was known as a person whose knowledge of the Potomac River and ability to handle small craft were second to none in the Navy. I wondered if it was indeed the same boat, if Walter Slye had been sent to meet us, and indeed whether or not he still held the post. Binocular inspection brought no answer while the boat was still bows on, but when it sheared off and presented its silhouette, the interior of the cockpit became visible and revealed Slye himself, uniform cap, as always, perched squarely on the top of his head. With delight, I waved my cap to him, and he waved back.

It seemed only a few minutes, though it must have been some time later, that one of the lookouts reported the approach of two helicopters lumbering toward us from the hidden continent to the west. Radioed instructions had prepared us; I went on deck with George Sawyer and the helicopter landing party. When one of the machines hovered over our deck aft to lower a strange inverted mushroom-shaped object to us, I set my hat firmly on my head, ignored the fluttering roar and wind from the whirling blades, and seated myself on it, straddling the center stalk and wrapping my arms around it. To my surprise, the mushroom, which had looked like metal of some kind, felt like foam rubber and was not a bit uncomfortable. I looked down. George was already many feet below me, holding up a signal flag, and Triton was receding at a rapid pace. There was suddenly something alongside me—the fuselage of the helicopter and a yawning door into the interior. Friendly faces stared at me and friendly arms reached out to steady the mushroom seat.

Dismounting, I pressed my face against the Plexiglass window of the passenger compartment to see the ship in which I had spent nearly a quarter of a year under water. She looked small, out of her element on the surface. Her sturdy sides were mottled where the paint had been stripped away, and they were speckled here and there with discolorations of rust. A small knot of men stood on her deck—the helicopter handling party whom I had just left—and a group of heads were clustered on her bridge. Slowly, under the command of Will Adams, she gathered way on the leisurely course toward New London which had been directed, holding her speed unaccustomedly low and making only a tiny bow wave. Quickly, she vanished in the distance.

The clattering of the helicopter engine made conversation practically impossible in the passenger compartment, and someone handed me a piece of paper on which was written, “What was your first impression of the world after returning to it?” I wrote back, “It smells fishy!” This was the most immediate sensation, a fishlike odor which had seemed to permeate the entire superstructure of the ship. A number of suckerlike organisms had attached themselves to the bridge area, and there were no doubt many more of them throughout the ship’s immense superstructure. There would have to be a pretty thorough scraping, scaling, and repainting job done during our “post-shakedown” overhaul, I reflected.

The grinding beat of the rotating blades brought us over a sandy beach, then some green and plowed farm fields. Here and there were houses. We passed one moderate-sized city, then suddenly were over a bigger one. The helicopter dipped lower. I could see streets and automobiles, and people walking on the sidewalks. There was a surprising number of trees, in many cases almost entirely concealing the streets beneath them. Then we were over a large muddy river. A tall stone obelisk, standing in the midst of a great expanse of grass, reached almost up to us. The helicopter ceased its forward motion, swayed gently fore and aft, swung completely around once or twice, slowly settled. Below us was more grass, a carefully kept lawn dominated by a large building. With a thrill I recognized the White House. The plane landed gently just a few yards in front of the South Portico.

The next two hours were, to say the least, kaleidoscopic. Scores of well-wishers greeted me. I shook hands a hundred times, and suddenly a pair of arms went around my neck from behind and a familiar kiss landed on my ear. There stood Ingrid, looking somewhat breathless but otherwise exactly as I had remembered her these three months.

“How is everybody?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said.

“Come along,” someone else said—and the next thing I knew I was talking to the President.

In my hand I carried a letter and envelope addressed to President Eisenhower, carefully cacheted with a replica of our circumnavigation plaque which we had printed with homemade ink. There had been a number of experimental inks concocted, but the most successful one—hydraulic oil, ground charcoal, and insulating paint, as I recall—was extremely slow in drying. To protect the envelope from being smudged, I had wrapped it, along with others for Mrs. Eisenhower, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of the Navy, in the only readily available highly absorbent paper we had. Now, standing before the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, I shook his proffered hand, reported successful completion of our mission, and handed him the letter we had so painstakingly prepared for him. Only then, to my horror, did I realize that I had neglected to remove the protective paper covering.

“What’s this?” the President asked, with a slightly puzzled frown.

I froze with the realization of the enormity of my faux pas. “It’s—it’s just a little toilet paper we had to use to keep the ink from smudging,” I blurted out despairingly.

I had worked for the President in the fairly intimate capacity of Naval Aide a few years earlier, but nothing in our relationship had prepared me for this situation. I had never lost my feeling of great awe for him, and I stood rooted to the rug in his office, waiting for I knew not what result of this indignity.

People who knew President Eisenhower longer and better than I might perhaps have been able to predict his reaction. For my part, it was with the greatest relief that I became witness to a magnificent set of Presidential “Ha ha’s” and “Ho ho’s,” delivered as he shook with mirth, steadying himself with one hand braced on the top of his desk.

“What in the world did you say to the Old Man?” the Press Secretary demanded, as officials whisked me away again. I told him, and Jim Hagerty chuckled. “That’s probably the most fun the boss has had all week,” he said. “Good for you!” He said something else, too, and there was an undercurrent of seriousness in his manner which came back to me later, but at the time I was too bemused at all that was going on to catch it.

I had a few minutes chat with Admiral Rickover, and then found myself in yet another room where a large map of our route had been prepared, and several thousand newsmen, it seemed to me, had gathered. Each one had a camera, and each used it constantly. Someone had taken care of Ingrid, I saw with relief when I looked around. There were a lot of pictures and many questions, some humorous and some serious, and after a while the President reappeared to pose with us for a few moments. Then Ingrid stood beside me for more pictures, and a large model of the Triton was handed to the two of us, so that we stood there helplessly with all four arms gripping the six-foot-long gray-and-black replica.

“Kiss your wife!” someone commanded, and we dutifully obliged.

“This way—do it again!” We turned toward the latest importunator, kissed again.

The smile on Ingrid’s face was becoming just a little grim, I thought. She leaned over and whispered, “My heel has come off!” I looked around desperately for a rescuer to take the model. Someone nearby took over Triton, junior, and a White House policeman ran off with the shoe for emergency repairs.

Later, riding in a White House limousine toward the Pentagon to call on Mr. William B. Franke, Secretary of the Navy, I had my first sight of a recent newspaper. It was full of stories about the U-2, the high-flying reconnaissance plane which had in some manner been forced down in Soviet Russia, and I read the reports with growing concern and understanding. Ringing through my ears were the cryptic sentences uttered by Hagerty as he ushered me out of the President’s huge oval office: “Have you heard about the U-2?” he had asked.

“No,” I had answered. “What is it—a new German submarine?”

Hagerty’s laugh had not been one of amusement. “Well, you’ll find out soon enough. Thank God you made it back when you did!”

This, of itself, might have meant little to me, had it not been supplemented by another comment from another source: “You’ve shown the oceans are still free to all. Of all the things we’d planned to prove for the summit conference, you were the only one to come through!”

This was the outcome of the secret we had carried around the world! I had not realized that other efforts were being made at the same time as Triton’s, but it figured. A thing this important would not, logically, have been left to the single exertions of a single agent.

Five hours after leaving the Triton’s deck, I was delivered back aboard in the same manner—full of news, good and bad information, and the plans for the next day’s arrival ceremonies at New London. I took over the ship’s announcing system to pass the word to as many people as possible all at once, and then surrendered to the avid questioners in the wardroom.

Next morning, Wednesday, the eleventh of May, Triton stood up the Thames River a few minutes before our scheduled arrival at the dock in New London. Except for the temperature, which was considerably warmer, we might have been back in February again. A blustery nor’easter greeted us, with overcast skies and drizzling rain. We had intended to make a grand entrance up the river, with the crew standing in ranks in their whites on deck, the whole ship presenting the formal appearance of spit and polish (except for her weather-beaten sides) traditionally expected of naval vessels home from a long voyage. But not this day. It would have taken a lot to dampen our spirits, and if I had wanted it, I knew the whole crew would willingly have stood on deck, rain or no rain. But there was no point to getting more than the minimum possible number of persons bedraggled and wet. The men in the anchor detail had to be on deck, and a few were needed to break out mooring lines; they wore foul-weather gear and were required to stand in a semblance of ranks when not actually working. Everyone else, except the bridge personnel, was allowed to stay below.

The weather was not bad enough to prevent a number of pleasure boats from coming out to welcome us and escort us up-stream, however, and on both banks of the river cars stopped, honked their horns at us, and people got out to wave. The Groton Police barracks must have halted all administration of justice, for the windows of the building were full of people waving and shouting.

The rain was fitful and there was very little wind; so as we came near to the berth which had been assigned to us, we had all the hatches opened and all hands who wanted to, who were not occupied below, came on deck to man the rail. Gently, we eased Triton into her berth, handling her with affectionate care and minimum speed. At the head of the dock, there was a riot of color amid the somber drabness of the New London “State Pier,” and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind what that was.

We presented, after all, rather a military appearance as our ship inched her way to her mooring. The rain had stopped—or perhaps it was only that we didn’t notice it—and everyone, without orders, stood tall and straight at his post. But it wasn’t quite the Prussian military ideal, either, for there was a certain surreptitious craning of necks, of searching the throng of women and children on the dock for a loved face, and now and then a furtive and thoroughly unmilitary signal of recognition. Studiously, I noticed none of this, kept my attention riveted on getting the ship alongside the dock with the least fuss—except that every now and then I, too, found myself checking over the faces under the rain hats and umbrellas.

Finally, I found those I sought. Ingrid had promised to have our three children out of school for the occasion, and there they were, looking rather unhappy and solemn about the whole thing. Ned, Jr., and Hugh were each dutifully holding one of the large “Welcome Home Triton” signs with which many of those present were provided—no doubt a contribution of Electric Boat’s public-relations outfit.

In a few minutes our visitors were abreast of Triton’s sail, as we warped her slowly in, and I picked up a megaphone and made the shortest speech on record. “Hi!” I bellowed to them.

Not far away the Coast Guard Band played martial music for the occasion, blowing with gusto and not caring, evidently, whether the rain filled their horns with water or not. And as I glanced above me, a gust of wind caught Father’s old flag, flying from the top of our extended periscope, and straightened its ancient folds in reminiscent glory.

Suddenly my eyes smarted, and I deliberately looked down on deck to make sure that number one line had been properly led around a fair-lead cleat to the forward capstan.

A gangway was standing by, ready as soon as our mooring lines were doubled up and secured, and a battery of news cameras was waiting to record the first tender moments of arrival and greeting. Planned for our arrival was a ceremony in which the Secretary of the Navy, having flown from Washington for the purpose, was to award the Presidential Unit Citation to the ship and thereby authorize the entire crew to wear the Citation ribbon on their uniforms. We had designated the Chief of the Ship, Chief Torpedoman’s Mate Chester R. Fitzjarrald, to receive the award in the name of crew and officers. Then the Secretary was to award Allen Steele the Navy Commendation Ribbon for his inspired action in combating the hydraulic oil leak, which had so nearly caused loss of depth control two-and-a-half weeks before.

But here a contretemps developed—one of those things which make gray hairs grow on the heads of aides and public-relations men. As soon as the ship was secured topside and below, Will ordered the in-port watch to be set and summoned all hands topside to fall in at quarters. They were counted off, sized off, told off by rating—officers in one group, chief petty officers in another, “white hats” in a third—and in a short time Adams reported that we were ready for the ceremony to begin. But there was a strange uneasiness on the canopied presentation platform down on the dock opposite our bridge. So far as I could tell everything was ready there—they, at least, could have very little excuse for not having had the public-address systems and all the other details thoroughly checked out—but instead of going forward with the presentation, there seemed to be some sort of a conference being held instead. There was a certain eagerness on the part of the crew to have the program over with as soon as possible, and the officers and petty officers, for understandable reasons, were impatient, too.

After a short time, the explanation came: the Secretary of the Navy was nowhere to be found!

I had directed that no one was to be allowed aboard or off the ship until the ceremony had been completed; we couldn’t take a chance on lousing things up for the Secretary, I had thought, and this seemed little enough sacrifice at the time. But now Triton’s crew stood eagerly and uncomfortably on deck; our wives and families equally uncomfortably—and no less eager—on the dock. No one knew how long the Secretary would be delayed. Apparently, the plane bringing him had been diverted to the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point because of the bad weather, and he was driving to New London. If so, he should arrive at any moment; but the moments came and the moments went, and the Secretary of the Navy remained absent. As we later found out, fate was not quite through with us even yet. The driver of the lead car of the group assigned to bring the Secretary of the Navy and his party to New London, with Mr. Franke himself riding in the back seat, did not know the way!

I don’t remember anyone putting the idea into my head, but a single wave of thought must have been going full blast that day. When the word arrived that no one knew where the Secretary was, and that for some reason he had entirely missed the police guard waiting for him at the Rhode Island border, I asked Admiral Daspit whether it would be permissible to dismiss the men from their quarters.

“Certainly, send them below,” said the Admiral. But then he had a better idea, and we announced “dockside liberty,” all hands to remain within earshot and get back aboard in a hurry when the Secretary finally showed up. Thus it was that the first reunion of our crew with their loved ones took place before, rather than after, the official reception of our ship. And it’s a pleasure to record that the Secretary of the Navy finally did arrive, and, so far as I knew, not a soul of our crew abused the trust by going AWOL that day!

One man, however, was not affected by any of this protocol; Franklin Caldwell had been expecting a babygram, but none had arrived for him. In vain, he had haunted our radio room those last few days under way, and in vain, he had searched the smiling faces on the dock for that of his wife. She was not to be seen, and when he finally got ashore and to a telephone, it developed that she had one of the best excuses in the world for not being present to welcome her husband. Once informed of the situation, Will had Caldwell off the ship and, legitimate trip or not, into an official car within minutes. An hour or so later, a baby girl named Sandra swelled Triton’s dependent population by one.

With all the goings on, it was quite a while before I was able to have that quiet communion with my own wife and family which is the traditionally most cherished reward for the sailor home from a long voyage. There were a hundred things to talk to her and the children about, and a number which had to wait until the youngsters had said their prayers and gone to sleep.

“Sounds to me,” I said, when we were at last alone, “that you make out better when I’m not here than when I am.”

Ingrid sighed and put her head on my shoulder. “You’d better not put me to another test for a while,” she said. “The children kept me pretty busy, and I got quite a few calls toward the end from some of die wives who were getting rather anxious…. The worst time was when Admiral Rickover called on the telephone.”

“What’s this?” I asked. “Nobody told me about that.”

“Well, I’ve not had a chance to until now, sweetie. I had a party for all the officers’ wives, and right in the middle of it the phone rang. It was long distance. So I said yes, this was Mrs. Beach on the phone, and then a voice said, This is Admiral Rickover. I want you to know privately that your husband is all right. Everything is fine. Don’t worry about him.’

“I must have let out a yelp or something, and I said, ‘That’s wonderful!’ and I could hear all the conversation in the living room suddenly stop dead. Everybody was listening, and everybody was hoping it was some kind of news about the ship.

“I thanked the Admiral, and he said good-bye and hung up. Then I remembered that in the past you had cautioned me against passing on information from calls such as this, and I had missed my chance to ask the Admiral if it was all right to tell the other wives. You said I could never know what might be behind the call, so I was never to let anyone even know that I had been called.

“There wasn’t a word I could say, but still I had to go back into the living room and face all those girls. They all just looked at me, and I thought fast and said, ‘That was my father’s doctor calling from Washington, where he’s had to come from California for a meeting, and he said that Father has been much better recently.’ I really felt terrible, lying to them like that. They all looked so dreadfully disappointed, and I wanted so much to tell them.”

I hugged her. “Good girl,” I said. “It was a lot tougher on you than on them. Anything else happen?”

She chuckled. “You had said that you didn’t know when you’d be able to get mail, so I didn’t write this time, except a little while ago, when I thought maybe I should have at least one letter in the mail for you just in case—did you get it, by the way?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I suppose it will catch up to you here at home. Anyway, one of your crew didn’t get the word to his wife. A couple of weeks ago, this girl called up, and she was nearly in tears. She had written seventeen letters to her husband, and he hadn’t answered a single one!”

“Why did she call you?” I asked. “We had put out the dope that anyone with a problem should call up the Squadron….”

“I’m glad she did, of course,” Ingrid interrupted. “Women understand these things better than men do. She knew I couldn’t write the letters for her husband. All she wanted was some womanly comfort. Besides, I told them all to call up if they felt like it.”

“You what? How did you do that?”

Ingrid smiled. “I forgot that my letter never reached you. It tells about it. I gave a coffee for all of them—it was a lovely warm day, and we had it outside, and that’s when I told them. Mrs. Poole came, too, and she never said a word about her husband being home.”

“You had 183 women, here?” My voice must have had an incredulous tinge.

“All your crew isn’t married, silly! Besides, some couldn’t come. But the garden is big enough, and all the officers’ wives helped.”

Ingrid sighed again. “They were all extremely nice. The only bad time was just before they came, when the telephone operator got me all excited about a long-distance call coming in, and I waited around thinking it must be about your arrival at last. But when the call finally came through, it was just a polite girl’s voice saying she was sorry she couldn’t come.”

We had been home for two days, when all at once I had occasion to recall the intuitive warning I had ignored when we designed and ordered our commemorative plaque. Lieutenant John Laboon, Chaplain Corps—a 1943 Naval Academy graduate who had resigned to enter the Jesuit priesthood after the war and had subsequently re-entered the Service as a Chaplain—was responsible. This onetime All-American lacrosse player and decorated submarine combat veteran, now the Catholic Chaplain for our nuclear submarine unit in New London, had come aboard to see if there were anything he could do for us. Over a cup of coffee, he confessed that although he could translate most of the words in our plaque’s Latin inscription, one of them was too much for him.

“What word?” I asked, my stomach experiencing a precipitant sinking feeling.

“Sactum,” said Laboon. “If it were ‘Factum,’ now, the phrase would literally mean ‘It is again a fact.’ But I don’t know the word ‘Sactum.’ ”

Hasty investigation restored Father Laboon’s faith in his preordainment schooling. There simply was no such word as “Sactum”! It turned out that in receiving and reading back the Latin inscription over the telephone, the letter “F” in the word “Factum” had been erroneously taken down as “S,” and the plaque as delivered to the US ambassador had therefore contained a misspelled word!

The hopelessness of the situation was enough to make one despair, but there was one thing we could do: we could get a new plaque—with the word “FACTUM” spelled correctly—over to Spain immediately; even though the original one might have contained an error, at least all posterity would not have the opportunity to criticize America’s lack of erudition.

So ran my thoughts on that black Friday, the thirteenth of May, as Triton went to work. A new plaque was cast forthwith. It was still cooling as final arrangements were made with a trans-Atlantic airline. In the meantime, I placed a telephone call to the Naval Attaché in Madrid, to insure that the situation would be properly taken care of in Spain.

By Sunday morning the plaque was ready and packaged. Jim Hay took it by automobile directly to New York’s Idlewild Airport, where it was delivered into the hands of the pilot of a TWA plane bound for Boston and thence Madrid, nonstop. At 8:00 A.M., Monday morning, the jet rolled to a stop at the Madrid airport and was met by a US naval officer who took custody of the weighty package; and in due course the replacement was made and the mistake rectified insofar as it lay in our power.

The correct plaque is now mounted on the wall of the city hall of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the port city near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River from which Magellan left on his historical voyage. Beneath it is a marble slab, installed by the Spanish government, memorializing the fact that it had been brought by the United States submarine Triton, first to circumnavigate the world entirely submerged, in homage to the first man to circumnavigate the globe by any means. The plaque originally delivered, bearing the word “Sactum” instead of “Factum,” is now held by the Mystic Seaport Museum at Mystic, Connecticut. A copy from the same mold is mounted in the ship. Four others have been presented to the Naval Academy, the Naval Historical Association in Washington, D.C., the Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut, and the Submarine Library at Groton within arrow shot of the launching ways where the Triton first took the water.

For the next month or so I dreaded the receipt of mail, for the Log of our journey had been made public by the Navy Department, and, of course, our error was plain for anyone to see. But only one person, a woman Latin teacher, very courteously and tactfully wrote to point out the mistake.

There were, of course, several other loose ends to wrap up: Poole, thoroughly examined aboard the Macon and later at a hospital in Montevideo, needed no operation. His third attack, which had precipitated our decision to seek medical assistance, had been his last—even as he himself had predicted. He had had a pretty rough time from curious friends in New London, and to his credit had said nothing to anyone.

Our fathometer, when inspected, brought an embarrassed frown to the faces of Triton’s builders. The cables connecting its head, in our bulbous forefoot, to the receiver in our control room, had been laid in an unprotected conduit through our superstructure which by mischance was subjected to severe water turbulence when the ship made high speed. Exposed thus to constant buffeting from the water, one by one the cables had ruptured. This will never happen again.

The return of our hydro papers to the Navy Oceanographic Office (to give it its new title—our Navy is constantly changing the names of things) has been rather disappointing. Only a few of the 144 we launched have come back. Possibly their finders are keeping them, in their pretty orange bottles, as souvenirs of Triton’s voyage.

So far as Carbullido was concerned, Triton kept her promise. The problem was broached to Pan American Airways, and, aided and abetted by various company officials with a warm heart for the Navy, a magazine article about our cruise was sold for exactly the cost of a round-trip ticket to Guam. Carbullido got home on Christmas day, 1960, with sixty days’ leave in his pocket. His father had recently purchased a gasoline station; so the dutiful Carbullido spent his time on Guam pouring gasoline into the gas tanks of automobiles.

The concern I had about the young man who saw our periscope in Magellan Bay is still not completely dissipated. There were no repercussions from the Philippines awaiting us in New London, but after a few months the National Geographic Society believed our friend in the dugout canoe had been located. His photo did not, however, greatly resemble the lad our photographic party snapped on the other side of the world, and his name was the same as that of the local Chief of the Constabulary. Rufino Baring, if it was indeed he, thought he had seen a sea serpent that day, and, in terror, had kept his entire encounter with us a secret.

Commander Will Adams has his own command, the brand-new Plunger, under construction at Mare Island, California, and I expect we shall hear more of her in due course. Les Kelly, also a Commander, has another year or so in command of Skipjack. As this is written, the only one of Triton’s circumnavigation wardroom still in the ship is Tom Thamm, now a Lieutenant Commander and no doubt destined to become the Old Man of the Ship, the oldest plank-owner, as I was of my long-dead Trigger.

As these final words are written, Triton is again at sea, under a different Commanding Officer. In a few more months, she will no longer hold the title of being the world’s biggest submarine, for the first of the new and heavier Lafayette-class ballistic-missile submarines will soon be commissioned. But for a very long time to come, Triton will continue to serve our country to the best of her tremendous and versatile capability, wherever the need may arise. As is true with all naval vessels, she will have a succession of skippers, and a succession of different people will form her crew. Time will slowly erode her newness and freshness, and the diverse requirements of the national policy will send her hither and yon throughout the waters of the world, charting new courses or following courses charted by others, as the case may require.

The members of Triton’s crew who made the voyage with her are already largely dispersed to other assignments, many of them to other submarines. Some of them are, at this very moment, on patrol in ballistic-missile submarines, helping to safeguard America’s ideal of freedom and humanity. Some, having served long and faithfully in the Navy and the Submarine Force, have retired to civilian life.

As time goes on, more and more of us will retire, but in future years, all of us, like myself—though perhaps no one so much as I—may have occasion from time to time to reflect upon the events of this first voyage of the Triton. As we do, we will no doubt find our accomplishment pale beside far greater deeds as yet unaccomplished on or beyond this earth. For as soon as the capability is there, man will do what needs to be done so that earth and the spirit of man will both benefit therefrom.