by Bill Fawcett
Concurrently, those nations that could not project their power to control the seas have always been seeking ways to impede, neutralize, or cripple the naval might of their more seafaring foes. Ancient tactics included pirates and privateers, as well as blockade-runners and smugglers. Still, what was really needed was a way for a weaker navy to strike at the powerful ships of their military rivals.
One idea conceived to solve this problem could not, technically, be termed an idea that failed. The concept was this: put men in a boat and sink it—but not all the way to the bottom. Then move the boat through the water, up to an enemy surface ship, and somehow poke a hole in the hull under the waterline. Oh yes, also figure out a way to bring the sunken boat back up to the surface so the sailors can survive.
If anything, the idea looked so absurd to most military leaders that they were convinced it had no real value and that only a madman, or perhaps a few very drunk sailors, could possibly be persuaded to even give it a try. Yet, give it a try they did, and most of them died during the various early attempts. However, the efforts and sacrifices of the earliest submariners eventually led to the perfection of one of the most deadly ship types ever designed.
Although Leonardo da Vinci is credited with the first submarine design during his spectacular career in the 1500s, the device he designed was never built. Other Europeans, during subsequent centuries, came up with a variety of means for submersing and propelling a boat, but none of these was ever put to practical use. The first useable submarine was eventually conceived by an inventor serving a weak, desperate country, engaged in a war with a mighty naval power.
An American, David Bushnell, designed and built a craft he called the Turtle in 1776, at the start of America’s Revolution. He conceived the ship as a means of attaching explosive mines to the hulls of British warships. With a hull of oak, the Turtle was topped by a brass-encased conning tower, a propeller, and ballast tanks for raising and lowering the buoyancy of the new vessel. Only seven feet high and three feet wide, the sub was operated and manned by a single person. The vessel moved through the water when the operator turned the propeller by one or both hands, while using the rest of his hands to adjust the boat’s trim, control its buoyancy, and steer. (An operator with only two hands would, naturally, be kept very busy.)
The ship was intended to approach the hull of a British ship at anchor, allowing the operator to drill a hole in the hull that would then be filled by a keg of powder, which would be exploded by a timed fuse. Unfortunately for Bushnell, the attack proved more daunting than he had imagined. He did approach a warship, HMS Eagle, but was unable to remain pressed against the enemy hull long enough to bore his hole, despite trying in several different locations. During the attempt, the Turtle sank, but Bushnell was fortunate enough to swim to safety.
The first successful submarine attack occurred during the American Civil War. Naturally, it was the Confederacy, faced with the Union’s control of the seas, which made the bold attempt. A consortium of men led by cotton broker Horace Hunley began working in New Orleans, creating a submersible ship named the Pioneer, powered by sailors lying prone and turning hand cranks that were something like bicycle pedals. The vessel successfully sank a barge in a test, but had to be scuttled when Union forces occupied that great port city during the early stage of the war.
Hunley moved his operations to Mobile Bay, and began working with a more advanced design. The vessel was called a “David,” in reference to the Biblical hero’s battle against Goliath. It was powered by some eight men who turned hand cranks to drive a propeller, while a ninth crewman steered the submarine and raised and lowered it in the water. A long pole protruded from the nose of the vessel, and at the tip of the pole was a mine designed to destroy the hull of a target ship. The men worked in very close quarters, with no air supply except that which was captured in the ship when the hatch was closed.
The David was transported to Charleston, where it was to be used in attempting to break the Union blockade. In testing in that harbor, the submersible sank not once but twice, the first time with some loss of life, the second with the loss of all the crew. Hunley himself perished in the second attempt. The boat was recovered and renamed for Hunley.
Despite the reluctance of the Confederate commander, General Beauregard, to order the ship into action, some of the intrepid sailors who had survived the first sinking finally prevailed upon him to authorize a third attempt. In February 1864, the ship, now christened the CSS Hunley, embarked on a combat mission. Operating very low in the water, it was not truly submerged, but it remained unnoticed as it approached the USS Housatonic, a steam frigate at anchor just outside the harbor.
The torpedo exploded and the Housatonic went down, becoming the first warship ever sunk by submarine. Unfortunately, the resulting blast—or perhaps the wake of a passing steamer—proved too much for the not-terribly-seaworthy Hunley, and the submarine was lost with all hands. (The vessel would be recovered again, but not until 1995, when it would earn well-deserved status as a museum piece.)
There would not be another successful submarine attack for some fifty years, but the world had taken notice. Every major naval power began to develop submarine technology, with improvements in propulsion—including battery and steam propulsion—and weaponry, most notably in the self-propelled torpedo, bringing the submarine into the forefront of sea warfare.
During World War I, German submarines came close to bankrupting Great Britain, despite England’s clear superiority in surface ships. During World War II, the same German tactic nearly brought England to her knees, and the strategic pressure of the American submarine blockade was instrumental in the defeat of Japan. By the time of the Cold War, nuclear-powered subs could remain underwater for months at a time, and carried enough ordnance aboard one ship to devastate ten or twenty cities in a matter of minutes.
Indeed, the submarine has come of age.
“The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”
—Thucydides
The Sinking of the Vasa
John Helfers
The ill-fated maiden voyage of the Swedish ship-of-the-line Vasa is a case study of how not to build a seventeenth-century warship. Internal problems and external pressures combined to make what should have been the flagship of Sweden’s navy end up at the bottom of Stockholm harbor.
In 1620, the Swedish Navy consisted of about one hundred old, small, lightly-armed vessels. Wanting to protect his states (modern-day Sweden, Finland, and Estonia) with their long Baltic coastline, King Gustavus Adolphus saw that his nation’s power could be projected by sea. He commissioned four ships, two 108-foot vessels, and two 135-foot-long ships, from the Stockholm shipyards in 1625. The shipyards, run by two brothers, Henrik Hybertsson and Arendt Hybertsson de Groote, were already in economic trouble, which delayed construction. Several months later, the Swedish navy lost ten ships in a storm, and King Gustavus sent a letter to Admiral Klas Fleming telling him to make sure the Hybertssons built the ships as quickly as possible.
Along with the message, Gustavus sent measurements of the ship he desired, which was the first problem, as the king’s plans called for a 120-foot ship. Henrik, however, had already cut timber for a 108-foot boat. After a stern letter from the king in 1626 demanding the 120-foot boat, Henrik added a section to the original plans, making the new ship 135 feet long, which still wasn’t what the king had requested, but apparently bigger was better, since construction continued afterward without too much royal interference.
The next problem besetting the Vasa was the death of the primary shipbuilder, Henrik Hybertsson. At this time, there were no set designs or calculations for any ship; each one was built based solely on the experience and knowledge of the master shipbuilder. When Henrik fell ill toward the end of 1625 and died in 1627, after a year of construction, oversight of the project passed to Hein Jacobsson. During Henrik’s illness, authori
ty had already been shared between the two men, with the lack of central authority creating confusion among the workers.
During construction, several factors combined to ensure the ship’s fate. Sixteenth-century warships tended to be unstable by their very design, since most were built with high aftercastles, allowing soldiers to fire upon their enemies from above. The gun decks also followed the wale planks, thick boards that made up the sides of the ship, which often curved sharply upward at their ends. Later designs flattened the decks and cut ports in the wale planks, but that was not the case with the Vasa.
King Gustavus played his part in the disaster. In addition to his request for a longer boat, which forced a redesign on the fly, he also requested two gun decks. This was done, but instead of placing the heaviest cannons on the bottom levels, and using lighter cannons higher up, heavy cannons were placed on both levels in an effort to make the ship the most powerful in the world, adding even more weight.
On its first voyage, the Vasa didn’t carry enough ballast to counter her weight above water. However, even if more ballast had been added, the ship would have sat so low in the water that she would have flooded when the lower gun ports were opened anyway.
Once the boat was finished, Admiral Fleming tested the Vasa’s stability by the simple method of having thirty men run from one side of the boat to the other, which would help gauge the boat’s tendency to rock. After only three runs, the ship leaned over dramatically, and Admiral Fleming stopped the test, fearing that the boat would capsize. Despite this alarming occurrence, preparations continued for the ship to be outfitted and put to sea.
Finally, when the captain of the Vasa, Söfring Hansson, ordered the ship to sail for the naval station at Älvsnabben, the ship set out with open gun ports, which was not the practice of the day. Especially on maiden voyages, all ships typically sailed with closed gun ports so that the captain and crew could get a feel for how she handled. For some mysterious reason, this wasn’t done for the Vasa’s first—and only—voyage.
On August 10, 1628, with a calm sea and a light wind from the southwest, the Vasa was towed to the south side of the harbor, where three sails were set, and the ship headed east. After traveling less than one thousand meters, a wind gust tipped the ship onto her port side, where the open gun ports immediately took on water. The once-majestic ship-of-the-line quickly sank in about thirty-two meters of water roughly one hundred twenty meters from shore, killing approximately thirty sailors.
When he heard the news, the king angrily demanded that whoever was responsible be punished. An inquest held at the time found no one guilty—Captain Hansson swore that the guns were secure and that the crew had not been drunk at the time of departure; the original designer, Henrik Hybertsson, was dead; his brother, Arendt, had left the country for Holland; and as for the design changes the king had requested—well, who was going to punish the king for his faulty plans?
The Vasa fiasco cost the Swedish government more than forty thousand dalers, or about two percent of the nation’s gross national product for the year. That comes out to about one thousand dalers per meter traveled—a very high price to pay (not to mention the lives of the thirty unfortunate sailors) for such a short trip.
Don’t Blame It on Steam
Douglas Niles and Donald Niles, Sr.
A New Look at the Sudden Demise of the Clipper Ship
The clipper ships of the nineteenth century represented the pinnacle of the Age of Sail. They were beautiful and slender, impossibly tall, bristling with masts and bow- and stern-poles in order to put as much area of sail up as was physically possible. They routinely sailed twice as fast as a typical sailing ship, and were treasured as a means of hauling spices from the Orient to Europe, as well as passengers across the oceans of the world. For a short period they attained legendary status as they carried adventurous Americans from the East Coast around the stormy tip of South America to the burgeoning gold fields of California during the 1850s.
By an accident of natural resources, the clippers were uniquely American in design and construction, though many English and a few other European shipping firms purchased and used them as well. They required the tallest possible masts in order to hoist their massive sail surfaces, and these masts came from the virgin forests of New England. Because the clipper builders wanted to mount a third mast, they needed longer than conventional hulls, and these, too, required lumber from untapped, tall-tree forests.
The name and the design both seem to have been inspired by a Baltimore shipbuilder named Thomas Kemp. He built a ship called the Chasseur, which had two masts, each hoisting many sails, and a long bowsprit sail extending from the prow. Under the command of Captain Thomas Boyle, the Chasseur sailed directly across the Atlantic shortly after the War of 1812 broke out between the United States and Great Britain.
Boyle wielded his fast ship as a privateer, boldly raiding English coastal waters and wreaking havoc with British shipping even as the powerful Royal Navy was shutting down most commerce along the American coast. (Boyle reportedly released a captured merchant captain and required him to post notice on the Lloyd’s of London office, claiming that Great Britain was under blockade by the Chasseur!) In response to the activities of Boyle and other raiders, the Admiralty recalled about half of its ships to home waters, easing the pressure on United States ports.
As a sidelight of history, the British used the portion of their fleet that remained in American waters to stage a raid into Chesapeake Bay, one of the objectives being the destruction of Thomas Kemp’s Baltimore shipyard. Although the redcoats managed to occupy Washington, burning the White House and both houses of Congress, they were stopped at Fort McHenry at the mouth of Baltimore Harbor—the battle memorialized for all Americans by the rocket’s red glare in Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.”
Paintings of the clipper ships that followed the war show a number of elements coming together to create a vessel of exceptional beauty, impressive size, and sleek, streamlined lines. The hull was long and narrow, with a sharply raked prow to cut through the water. In addition to the tall masts, usually numbering three, additional booms and sprits bristled from the hull, each draped with additional canvas.
Because of the narrow hull, clippers were built for speed, not for carrying large volumes of cargo. They were inefficient at hauling heavy freight, and while a lightly armed clipper could make a good raider—as demonstrated by the Chasseur—they were no match for a broadside battle with a man of war. Still, they were ideal for hauling passengers, and low weight/high value cargoes such as spices, silk, tea, and mail. It was said that the owner of a clipper could pay for the cost of the vessel with the profit made from two trips to the Orient for spices.
For some forty years, from 1815 to 1855, clippers were the queens of the sea. Their decline, about the time of the American Civil War, is generally attributed to the rise of the steamship. Even though clippers were frequently faster than steamships, they could not be scheduled as reliably—since they could be becalmed, like any sailing ship—and their popularity gradually began to wane. Contrary to popular belief, however, it was not the steamship that did in the clipper but, specifically, two events occurring in 1869 that almost immediately relegated the clipper to historic, rather than practical, status.
The first of these was the completion of the Suez Canal. This new route dramatically shortened the distance from England to her colonies in the east by effectively removing the circumnavigation of Africa from the distance of the trip. However, the canal could only be used by steamships—sailing vessels, which needed to tack into a headwind, could not navigate back and forth in the narrow canal. Thus, the economic advantage and convenience of steamship travel rapidly became apparent between Europe and Asia.
At about the same time, the “Golden Spike” was driven, completing the transcontinental railroad in the United States. For the first time, cargo and passengers could be transported across the nation with relative ease—and shipped more directly over
the Pacific—at a price and time frame guaranteed to make a sailing voyage around Cape Horn, even on a fast clipper, a relic of the past.
“A ship may belong to her captain, but the lifeboats belong to the crew.”
—Claude Akins, The Sea Chase (1955)
The Sinking of the Titanic
John Helfers
In an age of seemingly boundless technological advancement, luxury, and privilege, one name, more than any other, symbolized what Mark Twain called “the Gilded Age”—the luxury ocean liner Titanic. And it was therefore fitting that this very symbol of an era would also serve to usher in its end, when the ship that was supposed to be one of mankind’s proudest engineering achievements sank on April 15, 1912, during its maiden voyage, carrying more than fifteen hundred people to a watery grave.
Although there is plenty of evidence of the chain of human errors that contributed to the sinking—the unsafe speed through a large field of ice, the failure to heed several ice warnings that came in on the wireless, the missing binoculars in the crow’s nest—there were also several engineering flaws that, when combined with the aforementioned lapses in judgment, could only result in one outcome.
From its very creation, it seemed that fate conspired against the Titanic. The steel for its hull was made in open-hearth, acid-lined furnaces, which didn’t remove phosphorus or sulfur, both impurities that weaken cast metal. If manganese had been added to the metal during production, manganese-sulfide would have been formed, arresting the sulfur’s weakening effects. Testing of recovered hull samples reveal that it contained twice the safe levels of sulfur and four times the safe level of phosphorus, but only half the recommended amount of manganese. Consequently, when the already brittle metal was subjected to icy cold water—like the North Atlantic that April night, which was a metal- and bone-chilling minus two degrees Celsius—and then sideswiped an iceberg, the cold, weak steel could not absorb the energy of the collision, but fractured under the strain, causing ruptures along more than two hundred fifty feet of hull. Also, the iron rivets holding the hull plates together were substandard, containing slag, or impurities from the creation process. When the collision occurred, these weakened rivets burst along the impact line, increasing the already severe damage.
