Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Fenian Ram

  The boat carried a crew of three. The operator was positioned amidships, and sat “in a kind of bucket seat perched over the engine.” He controlled two levers, one for the rudder and the other for the diving planes. While surfaced, if he stood on the seat, his head and shoulders would protrude from the conning tower. The engineer ran the motor, monitored the flow of fuel and air, maintained constant pressure inside the hull, and controlled the water ballast, which could be blown in an emergency to send the boat quickly to the surface. The third crewman would fill a role not heretofore assigned in any vessel built to cruise underwater—weapons control.

  Holland had built into his design a pneumatic gun—a nine-inch tube, eleven feet long, which ran through the center of the forward air compartment—which, using compressed air, could fire an underwater missile designed by John Ericsson, who had also designed the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. Ericsson’s torpedo was, according to its inventor, superior to the Whitehead fish, which had yet to be proven capable of being launched from a submerged vessel.

  Since the Fenian Ram was already to carry a store of compressed air, the gun’s placement and mechanics were typical of Holland’s clever, efficient designs. “Its breech of heavy iron casting was centered in the forward water-ballast tank, opening by means of a hinged door into the control compartment. With the pointed bow cap screwed down into a watertight position, the gunner’s task was to undo the inner door, load a six-foot projectile into the tube, shut the inner door, turn a crank which opened the bow cap, reach down and unscrew the balance valve sending a four-hundred-pound air charge into the breech, and thus fire the projectile. Water rushed in to fill the tube. The gunner cranked the bow cap closed. Then he blew the tube forcing the water into the ballast tank that surrounded it, and restoring the fixed center of gravity.”3

  When the Fenian Ram was finally launched for operational testing, the results were spectacular. Even during the shakeout cruises, which began in June 1881, Holland was able to remain submerged for hours. On one occasion, the men at the dock became so frightened when the boat did not surface “that they began to grapple for the hull in an effort to raise her.”4

  By mid-1883, Holland was cruising to the Narrows in New York Harbor and along the Brooklyn shore at depths up to fifty feet. The vessel could make nine knots on the surface and nearly that submerged. Young boys took to loitering about in rowboats where Holland was testing the Ram, hoping to get a tour inside. Holland, “the schoolteacher,” was always happy to oblige. But not everyone was so taken with Holland’s craft. During one trial run in the Narrows, “the captain of the ferryboat St. Johns observed a strange metal monster spouting a mass of water as it reared up in a steep, porpoise-like dive. He brought the ferryboat to a sudden stop; whereupon the monster disappeared below the surface of the harbor. Shaken by the apparition, the captain suddenly turned his vessel in a hasty retreat for shore.” Witnesses watching from shore broke out in laughter, “jumping around and acting as if demented.” When Holland reached the dock, one of the men guffawed, “You frightened the devil out of the St. Johns.”5

  “There is scarcely anything required of a good submarine boat that this one did not do well enough, or fairly well,” Holland wrote later. “It could remain quite a long time submerged, probably three days; it could shoot a torpedo containing a 100 pound charge to 50 or 60 yards in a straight line underwater and to some uncertain range, probably 300 yards over water.”6 Lighting the boat, however, remained a nagging problem; at fifty feet, there was insufficient light for the engineer to read the pressure gauges. Holland eventually carried a lantern that he used for only brief periods so as not to deplete the air supply. Those were the only times he could check the compass he used to maintain course.

  As successful as he was, Holland had ideas on how to improve maneuverability, speed, range, and navigation. He not only tinkered with his design, but also built a sixteen-foot, one-ton model on which he intended to experiment. By this time, even the United States Navy began to express some tentative interest in Holland’s handiwork.

  But the Ram was not destined to be the navy’s prototype submarine, the Fenians’, nor anyone else’s.

  While the course of the events that doomed Holland’s boat is not in dispute, what sparked the drama is unclear. The bitter factional disputes in the Fenian ranks had escalated, so much so that a Clan na Gael member, one Denis Mulcahy, actually sued the Skirmishing Fund’s trustees—National Fund had not stuck—for his unreimbursed expenses in returning a dead Fenian’s body to Ireland. (The suit was eventually thrown out.) The reason Mulcahy was left to foot his own bills was that funds were getting tight. Although the exact amount spent on the submarine was known to only a few, the sum was obviously quite large and there seemed no date in the foreseeable future when it would be employed as a weapon against the British navy. Rumblings began that perhaps the boat should be sold to recoup expenses and the proceeds applied to more practical pursuits. (Rossa knew precisely what those should be.) When Holland learned of these sentiments, he voiced his concerns to John Breslin, his official liaison to the nationalists. Breslin, fearing to be the focal point of growing suspicion of financial mismanagement, publicly attacked Holland for profligacy. Holland appealed to another of the fund’s trustees, a more sympathetic ear, who then tried to persuade Breslin to allocate an additional $15,000 to build a fleet of submarines. At that point, however, the fund no longer had $15,000 in its account.

  Distrust and recrimination remained unabated when, after midnight one night in late November 1883, a tugboat pulled up to the dock where the Fenian Ram was moored. When the night watchman inquired, a group of men stepped forward, one of whom handed the watchman a pass signed by John P. Holland, with instructions that the submarine be towed away to an undisclosed location for safekeeping. The watchman, seeing nothing out of the ordinary about such an order, given that everything surrounding the building, testing, and possession of the boat seemed bizarre, gave the tugboat crew leave to haul it away. The sixteen-foot prototype seemed to fall under the same aegis, so that was secured by a towline to the larger vessel. As the tugboat with the two vessels in tow steamed off, the watchman was doubtless quite pleased to be relieved of them both.

  So pleased that he had made only a cursory examination of Holland’s signature on the pass, which was in fact a clumsy forgery. Holland would not hear of the boat’s departure until the following morning, when he arrived at the shipyard. And the man who handed the note to the watchman was John Breslin. Why Breslin chose to steal the product of at least two-thirds of the precious Skirmishing Fund dollars was never ascertained. Perhaps it was to keep it away from Rossa, or even from Holland, each of whom might sell the vessel and pocket the proceeds. But for whatever reason Breslin committed the act, he did so with stunning ineptitude. Half of his haul never made it out of the East River. He had neglected to secure the hatch of the sixteen-foot model, and it was swamped in the choppy water. The weight of the water snapped the towrope and it sank, never to be seen again.

  The full-size Fenian Ram was taken to New Haven, where it was secreted in the harbor. There, Breslin and his mates decided to use the new weapon on their own, although it was unclear against who or what, but they discovered only then that it was a bit more complicated to operate than they’d thought.

  “I am told,” Holland wrote later, “that they attempted to make dives, but handled the boat so awkwardly that the harbor master decided that she constituted a ‘menace to navigation,’ and demanded a bond if any further trials were to be made. As a result she was hauled out of the water on the property of [James] Reynolds, another member of the committee, and there she still is. There is also a rumor that they have tried to sell her to the Russian Government, but failed, as on investigation the prospective buyers found that title to her was not clear.”7At that point, Clan na Gael contacted Holland and asked for his help in sailing the boat they’d stolen from him. Holland refused. “I received no notice of the contemp
lated then, nor was I notified after. I’ll let her rot on their hands,” he said. From there, the trustees of the Skirmishing Fund announced they would no longer finance submarine research, which was moot because Holland was through with the lot of them.*

  Having no further use for it, Clan na Gael abandoned the boat in New Haven and left the most advanced submarine ever built to the mercy of the elements. Eventually, they had the boat hauled ashore and deposited in a lumber shed. They gave the Brayton engine to a foundry owner to operate a forge. There it sat until 1916, when the Fenian Ram was brought to Madison Square Garden and exhibited to raise money for victims of the Easter Rising. In 1927, Edward Browne purchased the boat and moved it to Paterson, where it joined its predecessor at the Paterson Museum.

  _____________

  *Rossa finally got his dynamite campaign. He began a “dynamite school” in New York and then shipped his trainees across the Atlantic and orchestrated the bombings in key English sites, including Whitehall, Victoria Station, the House of Commons, and the Tower of London. He became a reviled figure in England and a revered one in Ireland. Rossa and Devoy remained estranged until 1915, when Rossa was on his deathbed. His funeral in Dublin was attended by thousands and served as a rallying call for the Easter Rising, which took place ten months later.

  CHAPTER 8

  COMPETITION FROM THE CLERGY

  Few innovators work in a vacuum. Ideas, as they near practical application, will spawn a variety of approaches. As a result, whether or not inventors are even aware of the existence of their competitors, the process is generally more a race than a solo journey. Gutenberg had challengers, as did Newton, the Wright brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Ford. One of those with whom Holland had to compete was an eccentric English clergyman, George William Littler Garrett, and his creation Resurgam (“I will rise again” in Latin), which may—or may not—have been at the finish line with the Fenian Ram as the world’s first successful motorized submarine.

  Garrett was born a decade after Holland, on July 4, 1852, in London, son of an Anglican curate. Soon afterward, the family moved to Moss Side, in central Manchester, where Garrett received his early education. Industrialization was raging in the city, with new inventions and manufacturing processes introduced seemingly by the day. By the time Garrett left for Trinity University in Dublin, at age seventeen—where a fellow student would be Oscar Wilde—he had studied chemistry and mechanics, and been thoroughly inculcated with the miracles of applied science. He was a brilliant student, reported to have passed all his first-year undergraduate examinations in one week. While at Trinity, he accepted a headmaster’s post at a local school, and then was made a master at the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute, where he also passed examinations in chemistry, geology, geography, general science, and art.

  Still in his teens, Garrett left Dublin for London to take instruction in the science department of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert.) He squeezed some theological training into his studies as well, because when he returned to Manchester to teach mechanics, he was appointed by the local bishop as a deacon at Christchurch, his father’s curacy.

  After Garrett received his bachelor’s degree in 1875, he left almost immediately to spend a year traveling around the world. His itinerary included such exotic stops as New Zealand and Fiji, by which time he had become sufficiently versed in marine navigation to be allowed to teach the subject. When he returned to Manchester, he was ordained, took up his position in the church, got married, and had a child. George Garrett was not yet twenty-five years old.

  Garrett never said specifically why he turned his attention to submarines, although some members of his family claimed that, ironically, the Fenian riots of the mid-1870s led him to attempt to build a weapon that could effectively protect British ports and harbors from unfriendly incursion. But Garrett’s father and son also cited two incidents in 1877 during the Russo-Turkish War as spurring him to build a tool of attack and not just defense. In both, Russian torpedo boats were unable to penetrate anti-torpedo defenses—chains stretched across the water’s surface—to attack Turkish warships anchored in the Black Sea. Garrett supposedly decided that surface defenses could be penetrated by a submarine cruising under the surface, which could then attach explosive charges to an enemy’s hull.

  At about the time John Holland launched the Holland 1, George Garrett took on two projects simultaneously. The first was to build an undersea vessel and the second was to create a diving suit that would allow a man to breathe inside that vessel. Such a suit could be used on its own, of course, and could also be employed in coal mines in case of a cave-in, of which there were many in the British midlands.

  Garrett seemed to have had some success with the breathing apparatus, which he called a “pneumatophore,” although details of its design and construction remain vague. There are no surviving drawings, but it almost certainly did not resemble modern scuba equipment. His brother described it as a “sort of diving helmet with a knapsack attachment,” but his son (who was too young at the time to give a first-person account), wrote that it was “a chemical device contained in a case attached to a regulation diving suit doing away with the air tubes which are a source of discomfort and danger.” Garrett’s brother added that Garrett, “was always dabbling with chemistry and scientific subjects” and his “starting point was his discovery that caustic potash will absorb carbonic acid given off in a man’s breath . . . The pneumatophore provided for the absorption of carbonic gas by means of sticks of caustic potash, and then he had an attachment for supplying oxygen.”1

  Unfortunately, there is no record of what this “attachment” was and whether it was internal or external to the device. But whatever the configuration, two journal accounts of a demonstration in Paris, each purportedly by an expert eyewitness assigned by the French marine ministry, were translated and published in the Manchester Courier in May 1880. They described Garrett descending into the Seine and remaining underwater for thirty-seven minutes and then emerging “in perfect health and spirits.” It is possible that the reports were fabrications, since, despite its success, neither the French nor any other government or industrial concern sought to purchase Garrett’s invention, nor even to fund further research.

  The issue would be largely moot, however. Garrett had not designed his breathing apparatus for underwater sojourns but to overcome one of the two primary obstacles he saw in creating an effective submarine. So, in addition to developing “some handy and effective method for purifying human breath,” he needed to find “some motive power . . . which would not betray the position of such a vessel by giving off smoke or other evidence of her whereabouts.”

  While Garrett certainly intended to employ some form of mechanical propulsion, he began his submarine research much as had Holland, with a one-man, manually powered craft, only theoretically capable of carrying a weapon. And like Holland, his first design never made it past the drawings. But Garrett soon designed a more sophisticated one-man vessel that was built and tested, although once more how effectively is uncertain. However it performed, Garrett sought a patent for his design in spring 1878.

  This craft, which marine historians have dubbed “the Egg,” for its ovoid shape, did not employ Garrett’s breathing device—no man or machine ever would—but required the operator to sit in the center with his head protruding from the conning tower except for the short distances the vessel could travel underwater. Two gloves made of oil-soaked leather were attached to the outside of the conning tower, which would, in theory, be used to attach a mine to the hull of an enemy ship. Power was supplied by a handwheel, and another wheel operated a piston that would take in or expel water to fine-tune buoyancy. Ballast was adjusted by means of a third hand control, and the rudder and horizontal planes by a fourth.2

  Garrett’s “Egg”

  Although he was “extremely secretive” about his work and gave no specific details, Garrett implied that this design, of which there were at least two more
sophisticated redrafts, performed creditably in tests. It is difficult, however, to imagine a one-man-band layout so unwieldy as to require the manipulation of four different wheels or levers at roughly the same time achieving anything more than frustrating anyone who took on the task. At one point, Garrett’s brother reported that one of the gauntlets split, sending a torrent of water into the hull, which Garrett, after furious bailing, finally managed to clear.

  Garrett paid great attention to the state of research and potential competitors. When news reached England of the Holland 1—and that it was powered mechanically—Garrett abandoned the egg design and set to work finding a propulsion system. What he settled on was clever and creative, a power source that would seem to allow his boat to run both on and below the surface while maintaining the stealth that an attacking submarine required. It was called the “fireless steam engine,” and at the time was most notably used to power French streetcars.

  The motor had originally been fabricated by Émile Lamm, a dentist and inventor who, in 1848, at age fourteen, had emigrated with his parents from Paris to New Orleans. In the late 1860s, after service in the Confederate army, Lamm took out a patent for “sponge gold,” a more effective gold filling. During the same period, he also decided he could improve the quality of New Orleans life by limiting the sooty, gag-inducing exhaust fumes that were spewed from the city’s steam-powered streetcars. In 1869, he introduced an ingenious engine where a piston was driven by boiling off pressurized ammonia housed in a series of holding tubes, which would reduce the pressure in the tubes, resulting in more ammonia boiling off. All that was required to initiate the process was to heat water in a tank surrounding the tubes, which were kept closed to allow the pressure to build. This might take up to three days, but once the proper temperatures and pressures were reached, the engine would run for some distance emission-free.