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Sea Devils
Pioneer Submariners
By John Swinfield The History Press
Copyright © 2014 John Swinfield
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5479-2
CHAPTER 1
To Take the Plunge
A monk builds a toy duck, watching it waddle, dive and swim back to the surface, his devotions rudely interrupted by thoughts of carnage and destruction. A submariner throws a switch, accidentally killing himself and others in a deafening explosion. A man pedals a glorified barrel with clever fitments through a harsh sea to fix explosives to a warship's hull. A Frenchman builds a submarine disguised as a watering can. An American is committed to a lunatic asylum after spending his fortune on a steam-driven submarine. A British commander surfaces his boat to perch on its stern rail and answer the call of nature while a German Zeppelin drops bombs on him. Submariners are locked in a bread oven to see if any suffocate. Another departs his craft and swims after a torpedo which has failed to detonate, and, not wishing to see it wasted, chaperones it back to his boat. Three armoured cruisers are sunk in one hour. A liner is attacked and 1,200 drown. A submarine sinks without warning; its commander and crew are never seen again. Forty submariners gasp for oxygen trapped in a hulk on a seabed; fighting for breath, chests heaving, lungs imploding, they last fifty-seven hours, while thirty more are already dead. The saga of the submarine is one of tragedy and triumph, heroism and hardship, its inventors and operators as daring as their exploits.
Across the globe and down the centuries, a diversity of personalities would come to be recognised as central to the advancement of the submarine. They were from different backgrounds and spurred on by a galaxy of motives: some wanted money; others sought maritime supremacy; some were caught in the thrall of new technology; and others strove to go where nobody had gone before. With its powerful navy it was inevitable that Britain would play a central role, though the initial response of its Admiralty was tardy and steeped with suspicion. In the British and American navies, two names stand out in the annals of submarine progress. The first was the mercurial British admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher, who booted Britain's obsolete, class-ridden Victorian navy into a modern fighting fleet. The second was an Irish–American, John Philip Holland, who was a persistent, steel-willed religious schoolteacher and Irish liberationist whose facility for engineering was honed by an animosity towards the British. Holland invented what is now generally accepted as the world's first submarine, though others might claim the distinction. In Britain, Fisher's endorsement ensured its evolution. From designer and believer came a weapon to force eventual obsolescence on the thinking and hardware which had preceded it; an instrument to transform all prevailing strategic and political opinion forever. However, the curious, tragic and sometimes farcical saga of the pioneer submarine pre-dates Fisher and Holland by nearly four centuries.
Though its history brims with sporadic interludes of lunacy, once the template of the contemporary submarine had been achieved then the changes it wrought laid waste to aeons of nautical convention. Before its inception, naval might had been gauged by simple arithmetic: numbers of ships in a fleet, their size, power and range; fortification in terms of thickness of hull and superstructure; numbers of guns, strength of arsenal, capabilities of commanders; and the sagacity of the armchair admirals who directed their deployment. This was a sensible, if prosaic, way of assessing naval potency, though the submarine, and swift ascendancy of the aeroplane, rendered such measurements largely redundant.
The early response from officers in the Royal Navy was imperious: submarines were small, silly and scruffy; their captains and crews the wrong sort. Naval intransigence to the novel was customary, though it would have taken a seer to imagine little 'tin-fish' would at some distant date usurp traditional maritime power, disproving entrenched notions about scale and firepower being immutable guarantees of security and effectiveness. Battleships had ruled supreme: oceanic colossi, their command unchallenged; a daunting invincibility exemplified by the density of their plating; each in its pomp and ceremony a personification of imperial glory. The submarine would eventually reduce the battleship to a state of wretched fragility.
It has become convention that, in charting the heritage of the submarine, the endeavours of a British former naval gunner and mathematician, William Bourne (c. 1535-82) of Gravesend, Kent, are taken as a starting point. Bourne produced what is considered one of the earliest designs for a submersible, though it is no surprise that Bourne was, in fact, pipped by the scientific prophet Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Not content with sketching falling leaves envisaged as helicopters, da Vinci imagined diving suits and diving machines which, in all essentials, were submarines. The self-educated Bourne, a former innkeeper, served as a gunner under Admiral Sir William Monson (1569-1643) and it can be assumed he was greatly influenced by Monson, who was judged among the more enlightened and educated naval officers, as evidenced by his Naval Tracts penned during his final years. The Tracts, though arcane, assured Monson of his place in seafaring history, offering a lucid, if still esoteric insight into naval minutiae.
Bourne, too, wrote maritime articles designed to supplement a meagre living which he forged by addressing numerous technical and natural conundrums. He also researched and wrote navigational critiques which advanced the way sailors might plot and navigate their voyages. The story of the submarine and its lengthy creation is awash with inventive, courageous, largely forgotten souls: Bourne deserves his recognition for refining the navigational principles which enhanced the axioms of good seamanship which prevailed at the time. In 1574 he wrote an approachable, less academic treatise, which challenged those precepts defined in the Arte de Navegar, published in 1551 by the brilliant Spanish royal cosmographer, Martin Cortes de Albacar (1510-81). Arte de Navegar was one of the most important books on navigation in the sixteenth century; it was carried by the English adventurer and explorer Sir Francis Drake (1540-96), an indication of its central position in nautical thinking of the period. Bourne's work, A Regiment of the Sea scrutinised de Albacar's peregrinations and explored, drawing on his own mathematical prowess, the way in which mariners could take bearings using triangulation and, by the use of a cross-staff, determine their own position by plotting that of the stars and the sun.
In 1578, in his book Inventions or Devises,Very Necessary for all Generalles and Captaines, as well by Sea as by Land (usually called Inventions or Devises), Bourne described a submersible wooden-framed craft encased in leather and made waterproof by being smeared in a greased potion. It was to be rowed by its crew, though sadly it was never built. Almost fifty years would elapse before his underwater rowing boat was finally made flesh by an alchemist from the Netherlands, Cornelius Drebbel (1572-1633). Drebbel's fame owed much to the patronage of James I (1566-1625), the first Stuart king. King James I had an inquiring mind and a penchant for filling his court with writers, philosophers, explorers and theologians. The king's pursuit of those he felt could see beyond the accepted led to Drebbel, at the age of 32, being invited to England. Born at Alkmaar in the Netherlands, he had been apprenticed to the painter and engraver Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) who might have introduced him to alchemy.
Drebbel was ingenious and prolific. His most renowned innovation was a perpetual motion device in the form of a globe. He also invented a machine that recorded the season, year, day and hour, a contrivance which bewitched the king and his court and won the Dutchman international plaudits. It also caused him trouble. Its fame saw him twice invited to Prague in 1610 and 1619 by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612), who had a keen interest in scientific development, immersing himself in alchemy, astrology and the occult. On each occasion Drebbel was thrown into jail, becoming ensnared in the volatile politics of the time. It was only royal intervention from England that secured his release.
Drebbel had a cornucopia of amazing inventions: some were wizardly, with one supposedly able to magic up thunderstorms. Coupling his vivid imagination to innate technical flair, he turned his considerable intellect to nautical matters, and his subsequent craft would echo Bourne's earlier ideas. Details about Drebbel's submersible are absent: how he delivered an air supply is a mystery. Such gaps are a bane and apply to numerous aspects of submarine history. It was recorded, however, that he built three submarines, each larger and more capable than its predecessor, and that it is probable they were powered by rowing, with a crew of three or four labouring at their oars. Within the craft, pigskin bladders were tied at the throat by a length of rope. A web of pipes joined the bladders to the exterior of the craft. For it to submerge the ropes were untied, permitting the bladders to fill with water, creating sufficient weight for the vessel to sink. To raise the craft the crew squeezed the water from the bladders, leaving only air, lightening the boat and increasing its buoyancy. The use of animal organs, mixing the archaic with the advanced, played its part in aviation as well as maritime progress.
Much of the thinking in airship technology is in early submarines. An airship's hydrogen gas was held in impervious bags of goldbeaters' skin scrupulously crafted from the intestine of cattle; a voluminous hydrogen bag comprised hundreds of skins sewn together. Large herds of cattle were bred specifically as the source of goldbeaters' skin. Had Drebbel's pigskin diving bladder caught on, doubtless the demand for home-reared swine would have rocketed.
Drebbel's third submarine caused a sensation. It carried a handful of passengers, inarguably intrepid though some questioned their sanity, with a crew of six frenziedly working the oars (others insist it was twelve). As with its two forerunners, the wooden frame of the boat had been encased in a leather shell and coated with layers of grease to make it impervious to water, though in initial tests it leaked like a sieve. It was fitted with a watertight hatch - though in the context of pioneer submarines such reassuring adjectives should be treated with caution - and a primitive rudder for some semblance of steering. In c. 1622, King James I, accompanied by the perfumed elite which comprised his court and thousands of excited Londoners, thronged the Thames to see Drebbel's submersible disappear and, to much babbling and widespread astonishment, reappear. Supposedly it could stay submerged for three hours at 15 feet (ft) below the surface; it seems the problem of getting air to its occupants had been solved by the installation of two pipes which floated above the surface. This might have worked if the machine were to maintain a constant depth, but it would have been catastrophic had it dived more deeply. While the craft remained at a stable level it is feasible that one pipe could have supplied the vessel with fresh air, while used air would have been expelled through the other.
Maritime historians ponder if it was a true submarine capable of total or only partial submersion. There is also discussion about the breathing pipes: were they the first snorkels? It is an entertaining proposition, with the first snorkel not being seen until late in the Second World War, three centuries after the Drebbel's invention. The premise is further clouded by reports that he had found a way of purifying contaminated air by heating salt petre to make oxygen, referred to as the magical distillation of a mysterious chemical. There is also speculation about the amount of oxygen which would have been consumed by a crew of six panting oarsmen - let alone twelve - plus the passengers, who would have been breathing heavily if only out of sheer terror; it seems unlikely a solitary pipe would have sufficed in preventing the voyagers being overcome by foul air.
It is usual for maritime historians to dwell on such arcane matters. Even if the detail has become hazy with the passing of centuries, Drebbel seems to have achieved some sort of amazing feat. All this could be wrong: a well-spun yarn romanticised over the years. Perhaps Drebbel's craft was only a partially submerged rowing boat, sloped at the front so that when rowed it became partly awash, driven a few inches beneath the water by the forward motion as the rowers got into their stride. And if the oarsmen ceased at their labours it would have risen as any sodden log might do. We may never know.
Divine Intervention
In Drebbel's wake came men of the cloth, with French and Italian priests producing designs. Though why the Church wished to swim with the fishes is an enigma; it would have been a miracle. Two centuries later, a technically minded English vicar, the Reverend (Rev.) George Garrett, made a significant contribution, but more of him later. Submersible history is rich with references to God and the Devil, the submarine being miraculous and unearthly.
In the 1630s the French priests, thinkers and writers, Georges Fournier (1595-1652) and Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), designed an armed submarine made largely of copper, pointed at the stern and bow, and having wheels with which to trundle along the seabed; an arresting notion if not entirely practical, though wheeled submarines were still being explored two centuries later and are dealt with here. An Italian priest, Abbé Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-79), another submarine hopeful, addressed the eternal problem, that of buoyancy, by squeezing out water from leather containers. While airships used the intestine of cattle and Drebbel employed his pig bladders, Borelli favoured goatskin. He would have made his submarine dive by filling a large quantity of goatskin bags with water and then squeezing them dry to make the craft rise, hopefully; there is no certainty it would have done. He had a knowledge of physics, and understood the theory of displacement and the conundrum of weight versus volume with which designers had to contend. Though strong on the academic and theoretical side, there is little evidence that Borelli ever built a submarine; to further confuse matters there is a well-known diagram of his creation. If in reality it is a work of fiction, nobody knows.
Bishop John Wilkins of Chester (1614-72), England, was another influential figure who recognised the possibilities of the submarine in his work Mathematicall Magick of 1648. Wilkins was a polymath, his book in part influenced by the writings of Marin Mersenne, with Fournier the designer of the wheeled submarine. His tome was concerned with engineering, mechanical and scientific breakthroughs, with some based on achievements of the time and others parts more speculative. If some references to submarines appear optimistic today - with the benefit of over 360 years of hindsight - his prophecies about the submarines' strategic strengths were unerringly accurate. He wrote of the submarine:
Tis private: a man may thus go to any coast in the world invisibly, without discovery or prevented in his journey.
Tis safe, from the uncertainty of Tides, and the violence of Tempests, which do never move the sea above five or six paces deep. From Pirates and Robbers which do so infest other voyages; from ice and great frost, which do so much endanger the passages towards the Poles.
It may be of great advantages against a Navy of enemies, who by this may be undermined in the water and blown up.
It may be of special use for the relief of any place besieged by water, to convey unto them invisible supplies; and so likewise for the surprisal of any place that is accessible by water.
It may be of unspeakable benefit for submarine experiments.
Clockwork Motors and Kettle-like Submarines
Another seventeenth-century submarine was designed in 1653 by the Frenchman De Son. Driven by a clockwork motor, the Rotterdam was spear-shaped at either end in order to ram the English. With its pointed bow and stern, Rotterdam, its sponsors claimed, could punch holes in the hulls of British warships; an alarming strategy had it worked, which it did not. One of many drawbacks was fundamental: its clockwork motor was so limp that it was hardly capable of propulsion. Rotterdam's designer, not famed for modesty, claimed that his clockwork ram, which was more a clockwork nudge, could race to and fro the English Channel in a day and sink a hundred ships en route.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sea Devils by John Swinfield. Copyright © 2014 John Swinfield. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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