Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  The letter was an accurate re-creation, except for what Caldwell yelled up to the battleship’s watch. What he actually said made headlines the following day. “Hello, Kearsarge! You’re Blown to Atoms. This Is The Submarine Boat The Holland.”21 The New York Sun led with, “The Holland Gets Her Game: Theoretically Sinks the Great Kearsarge Off Newport Harbor: The Little Submarine Steals Out Through Blockading Squadron And ‘Sinks’ Hostile Flagship.”22 The reporter pointed out that a $150,000 submarine firing a $3,000 torpedo had sunk a $5,000,000 battleship, and, in an eerie prediction of Weddingen’s feat in September 1914, could easily have sunk two others.

  Although navy officials later retracted the kill credit—the Kearsarge had its running lights on and was thus deemed not an active target, for the public as well as for most observers, the submarine had without question proved its value as a weapon. The captain of the Kearsarge, William Folger observed, “It is clear that the Holland type will play a very serious part in future naval warfare. There is no doubt whatever that the vessel at Newport can approach a turret ship unseen, either by night or day.”23

  On October 12, 1900, the United States Navy officially commissioned its first submarine, the USS Holland. For Rice, Frost, and Creecy—and for John Holland—it must have seemed like the interminable battle for acceptance of the Holland submarine had ended.

  It had not.

  _____________

  *About $4,250,000 each in today’s dollars.

  CHAPTER 19

  BOTTOM FISHING

  With every hallelujah for the Holland submarine, Simon Lake’s conviction that he had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice grew. In late 1899, he wrote a letter to President McKinley as the “inventor of a type of submarine boat that is well adapted to the needs of the government . . . for either harbor or coast defense or for purposes of blockading or destroying fleets in foreign waters or for destroying mines or cutting cables.” Having heard that Congress was considering purchasing submarines, he observed to the President, “It would be to the great advantage of the government if the merits of my vessel were investigated.”1 Lake went on to extol the virtues of the Argonaut, complain of the shabby treatment he had theretofore received, and ask McKinley’s aid in negotiating the crosscurrents of government bureaucracy. He closed by noting, “I am also writing to the Secretary of the Navy and others, and believe if an investigation is made where I can submit plans and have a hearing, I can convince anyone of the great value of this type of vessel to our government.”2

  He received no reply, either from McKinley or the navy secretary. To Lake, the reasons were apparent. Isaac Rice and E. B. Frost had succeeded in seducing a series of debauched and venal Congressmen and naval officers. Lake could not contain his disgust.

  “In 1900,” he wrote later, “the methods of the lobby were neither subtle nor surreptitious and lobbyists were about as clandestine as bull elephants.” The Josephine, anchored in the Potomac, was a particular den of iniquity. “If reports could be trusted Josephine was a pretty loose lady. From the shore one could see lovely creatures floating about the deck, being served by Negro servants in white uniforms; terrapin and champagne and Congressmen seemed to be on the daily bill-of-fare. The ladies who made a habit of visiting the Josephine lived at the best hotels in Washington and some were said to move in the highest social circles. Votes for the projects . . . were secured by a combination of seduction, good fellowship, open purchase, and blackmail. Wives of many a prairie Congressman cried their eyes out while their husbands whooped it up on the Josephine.”3

  Primed with righteous indignation, Lake had no intention of ceding the field to Rice and Frost, thieves and frauds who were foisting an inferior product on easily corruptible government officials using women, liquor, and payoffs. Although he had never designed or built an attack submarine, Lake was convinced that he could and would build a version far superior to Holland’s. His motivation seemed to have little to do with business, but was rather almost entirely personal. In his autobiography, Lake made a strange admission.

  “I had never been much taken by the military possibilities of the submarine. It would be a magnificent weapon some day. Anyone could see that. But I was not interested in drowning people and sinking ships. The thing I had always had in mind was the salvaging of cargoes from ships already sunk, and doing other commercial and scientific work. There must be enough jewels on the floor of the sea to hang a necklace on every good-looking neck in America. And there were plenty of heavy cargoes, too, that would be worth bringing to the surface.”4

  Local sea captains had told Lake that he would “make a fortune” if he could discover the location of wrecked cargo vessels. Lake assured them that he would do that very thing, and would thus fund his attack on his enemies with the riches that he had literally picked up from the ocean floor. “The rebuilt Argonaut was practically fitted to the sound new business on which I proposed to embark. It was big enough to hold a crew large enough to do the work. It wheeled over the bottom as though it were a bicycle on its wheels with their foot-wide tires. A ‘cushioning’ bowsprit was also fitted, with a heavy wire running from its tip down to the keel. With this arrangement I could run over boulders or small wrecks. When we went automobiling on the bottom of the sea it could rise over any obstacle the bowsprit could top, and travel safely up the sides of declivities with angles of as much as forty-five degrees. No surface automobile could do as well.”

  Lake was not the first to see the profit potential in undersea salvage. Treasure hunting had in fact become popular fodder for Sunday supplements as inventors devised new ways to scour the sea bottom. In 1899, for example, a syndicated article, “Treasures of the Sea,” began, “The treasures hidden by the sea have from olden times formed a strong temptation for man’s ingenuity and greed; and in ancient mythology treasure troves, entrusted to the waves play a disastrous part in individual and national fate. No sooner has, in our time, some inventor brought out a new submarine device or diving apparatus, when, to use Shakespeare’s words, all the profound sea hides in unknown fathoms begins to glitter before man’s eyes with its demoniac allurement.”5

  The article referred not to Simon Lake, but rather to an Italian engineer, Piatti del Pozzo, who had designed an ingenious spherical diving apparatus, ten feet in diameter, fitted with three screws that enabled it to shift its position at the bottom of the ocean. He had achieved stunning success in raising sunken ships from the Aegean.

  “A hundred and thirty years ago next July a famous sea fight took place off Tsheshme, an Asiatic-Turkish seaport, between the Russians and Turks. Count Alexis Orlov, the Russian admiral, defeated the Turkish fleet there on July 15, 1770, with great losses on both sides. And now the sea gives up its treasures from the bottom of the Aegean. The divers report that the whole ground about the wrecks is covered with a gigantic carpet of silver coins. In view of the immense yield of treasure, the operation thus far has been confined to the Russian flagship, which lies at a depth of a little over 130 feet. A very large amount of Venetian, Austrian and Russian gold pieces has been brought to light. Besides the coin, bars of gold, gold and silver crosses, medals, and religious Images, sliver and gold services, a Bible bound in silver and adorned with gems, etc., have been found.”6

  Still, even with del Pozzo’s descending sphere, treasure hunting remained a hit-and-miss operation, relying a good deal more on luck than science. Even if a sunken craft was located, getting items of value to the surface was laborious and problematic, especially for anything heavier than jewelry or coins. Lake, who could patrol along the bottom, would bring rigor and the method to undersea salvage. “No one had ever tried to salvage cargoes in a really businesslike way. Divers had been sent down to break into the strong-rooms of vessels in an effort to recover treasure, but salvaging of that kind is disproportionately expensive and rather dangerous. It is miserably easy to foul a diver’s lines, and the necessity of deflating the diver that is a heartless way to put it, perhaps, but that is precisely what
happens when the air-pressure is lifted is a tedious one. If it is not managed properly the diver will be attacked by the painful ‘bends’ and perhaps die. I had realized that my enterprise would only succeed if we had new methods.7

  Lake’s submarine was not built to carry salvage material, especially if the cargo was industrial. This necessitated repeated trips to surface. A vessel dedicated to storage, however, would make the entire process far more efficient, and therefore far more profitable. “I built a submersible cargo-carrier which proved to be a complete success. It was shaped like the pressure-resisting portion of the Argonaut, cylindrical in form and airtight. In practice it was anchored near a wreck, and by means of air- and water-valves the air was permitted to escape and water to enter. When on the bottom the diver removed the hatch cover, the boat was loaded, the compressed air was turned on and the water forced out, and the boat rose to the surface. That operation was easy enough if the conditions were right.”8

  By mid-1900, Lake’s improved Argonaut II was operating out of Bridgeport, Connecticut, prowling the bed of Long Island Sound with its cargo-carrier in tow. The results were spectacular. Able to cover twenty square miles per day, Lake claimed salvage rights on more than thirty sunken ships. One of his earliest and most lucrative finds was a load of copper ore and copper matte (a mixture of iron, sulfur, and copper, especially rich in the latter) that had been lost seven years before. Others had searched in vain for the cargo, worth tens of thousands, but it was assumed irretrievably lost. Lake located the wreck in two days. He quickly transported the goods to the surface, sold them back to their original owner and made a hefty profit for himself. His cargo-carrier—which newspapers called a “submarine wrecking car”—was built to accommodate even the heaviest material. “Some of the sunken boats were loaded with coal, which is an easy cargo to handle. We merely ran the muzzle of a big suction pump into the hold, drew the coal into the submersible freight boat, and then walked away with her.”

  Lake developed a second method for extracting material from sunken vessels, a long tube that stretched from the surface to the sea floor, “large enough for a man to descend comfortably on a ladder, and with a well-lighted observation chamber at the lower end from which he could walk into the water just as though he were stepping out of the water-lock on the Argonaut. This tube had one very great advantage over anything that had been tried before. A diver was not continually yanked and mauled by the currents of the sea.”9

  Within months, Simon Lake had become a wealthy man, with the promise of growing yet wealthier—“it seemed to me that the Lake family could hardly avoid having one millionaire in it,” he wrote. With money came prestige. By fall 1900, Lake was widely touted as one of Bridgeport’s leading citizens, and leading citizens are sought after, especially by politicians. No longer would Lake have to shuffle through the halls of Congress, helpless to prevent other leading citizens from destroying his dreams.

  And so, having obtained the means to engage his enemy on equal footing, in early 1901, Lake began to plot out a design for a true warship. This time, little was initially leaked to the press. “Great secrecy has been observed by everyone connected with the designing of the boat . . . [but] it is believed that there are a great many features to recommend her to the Navy Department which are being withheld, and will not be divulged until the experimental trials are made.”10 Eventually, however, the basic details emerged. The vessel, which Lake would call the Protector, would be sixty feet in length and carry five Whitehead torpedoes. Like the Holland, it would run on an Otto-style gasoline engine on the surface and storage batteries while submerged, an arrangement that would require Lake to purchase Exide batteries, although where he obtained his supply was never made clear. The Protector was described as being “capable of being navigated on the surface, at any predetermined depth, or on the bottom,” using the Argonaut design, but “with more power and finer lines, so as to get more speed.”11 Also like Lake’s salvage boats, wheels would be fitted on the bottom, and a diving compartment built into the bow. One aspect of the design that would not change was the manner of going under the water—Lake insisted on maintaining his even-keel method of descent rather than adopt the Holland porpoise method.

  With his warship almost completed, on June 10, 1901, Simon Lake incorporated the Lake Torpedo Boat Company in New Jersey, capitalized at $1,000,000, and officially joined the battle to produce the navy’s undersea fleet. The corporate charter was described as “very wide,” but Lake announced that the company’s sole purpose was to design attack submarines that could compete successfully against the Holland design. Lake’s principal partner was Lebbeus Miller, who had also been a major investor in the salvage company. Miller, by then almost seventy years old, was an expert in precision machine tooling and had made a small fortune introducing modern methods to the production of sewing machines for the Singer Manufacturing Company. He viewed Simon Lake as a mechanical genius and had become something of a mentor to the man three decades his junior.

  Lake was by this time sufficiently experienced to recognize that mechanical genius was not enough. If he were to do battle with Electric Boat, he would need to do so in the newspapers and in Congress as well as with naval engineers. Newly appointed to the Lake Torpedo Boat board of directors was Foster Voorhees, a well-placed Washington, DC, attorney, who just months earlier had been governor of New Jersey. But Lake’s most important agent in the capital was his local Congressman, Ebenezer Hill. At Lake’s behest, Hill, who had made a good deal of money in banking, lobbied tirelessly and volubly on his constituent’s behalf, accusing Electric Boat of malfeasance, attempting to stifle competition, violating the terms of its contract with navy, and attempting to perpetrate a fraud on the United States of America. Hill’s scandal-mongering resulted in the House agreeing to revise the terms under which naval appropriations were granted to allow competition between “existing government submarines and those of any American inventor,” which Lake hoped—and Hill insisted—should be between the Protector and the ill-designed Plunger.12 With the question raised of whether the Holland could be deemed an officially sanctioned design, Lake set out to aggressively promote his own boat. And, where he might have refused to adopt Electric Boat’s means of submerging, Lake was all too happy to adopt the Electric Boat ploy of evoking the interest of foreign governments.

  Just one week after the Lake Torpedo Boat Company was incorporated, Lake was able to extol both the boat’s international appeal and his own patriotism. The New York Tribune reported that Lake’s designers had been working on the new boat for six months and had just that week completed their work. Plans and specifications had been sent to construction companies and “Mr. Lake, the inventor of the new type of torpedo boat who is president of the company, expects to place the contract for the trial boat this week.”

  Demand would be vigorous but Lake wanted Congress and the public to know he intended to put his own nation first. “During the last few weeks, representatives of the British, Chilean, Russian and Japanese governments have been in Bridgeport investigating the Argonaut type, and efforts have been made to purchase outright from Mr. Lake the rights to manufacture the boats for these foreign governments. ‘I have refused to consider the offers of foreign governments,’ said Mr. Lake, ‘until after my own, government has had an opportunity to decide if it cares for the Argonaut type of submarine torpedo boat. If the United States Navy does not want the boat, then it will be time enough to consider the offers of foreign governments.’”13 As with Electric Boat, however, Lake’s patriotism was thus not unconditional. If Congress and the navy insisted on moving forward with Holland Torpedo Boat’s ill-gotten contract, Lake made it clear that what he insisted was a superior machine would be sold to foreigners.

  Lake was apparently unaware, however, that his threat might be rendered moot as he would no longer be competing with the Holland. As he had been blindsided when the Holland had been substituted for the Plunger, on June 14, 1901, only four days after the Lake Torpedo Boat
Company was incorporated, the Holland Torpedo Boat launched a far more advanced vessel for its first test run.

  CHAPTER 20

  DISPLACEMENT

  Despite its success against the Kearsarge, opposition to Holland submarines within the navy hierarchy remained intense. Admiral Charles O’Neil, who headed the Bureau of Ordnance, while recognizing that “several eminent naval officers,” looked favorably on the Holland, “was at loss to understand them” as the boat “has never shown the ability to do anything more than run at slow speed on the surface and make submerged runs of short duration at a much slower speed, always in carefully selected localities and under most favorable conditions.”1 Admiral George Melville was equally skeptical. Melville headed the navy’s Bureau of Steam Engineering, which had insisted Plunger use that manner of motive power. “From the time that the Senate and House naval committees look with favor on these boats, there will be a decreased construction of battleships . . . to be able to fire one torpedo from a submarine after hours and even days of preparation is far from promising work.”2

  How much of this was genuine and how much attributable to Simon Lake’s machinations cannot be discerned. But with money, stock, and favors flying thick and fast, it is impossible to say how heartfelt was any condemnation or testimonial. Both O’Neill and Melville were, not surprisingly, Lake advocates.