Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is known largely in the United States as a futuristic adventure novel, most popular with adolescents. It is anything but. Verne’s narrative is an examination of man’s interaction with technology, how scientific advances are too often used primarily as weapons of war, and also a herald of the environmental movement. It is a highly sophisticated work, which aroused a good deal of philosophical controversy in France. The reason for the difference in the book’s reception is that, when it came time to render Vingt mille lieues into English, its translator, Reverend Lewis Mercier, not only made countless translation errors and altered substantial sections of the work, but he also eliminated almost one-quarter of the original text.

  The most drastic changes were to the novel’s protagonist, Captain Nemo. Verne’s original idea was to make him a Polish nobleman, but that was soon abandoned for a more controversial rendering. In the French editions, Nemo was in no way the cultured Western European depicted by Lewis in translation. He was not even white or Christian, but rather Prince Dakkar, an Indian, Hindu, or Muslim, “son of a rajah of the then independent territory of Bundelkund.” Dakkar was sent to Europe for his education, where he remained until age thirty, acquiring both a love and knowledge of science, and the ambition to “become a great and powerful ruler of a free and enlightened people.” After returning to India, he got married, had two children, but then he helped lead the anti-British Sepoy Rebellion in 1857. His cause was hopeless and, after the inevitable defeat, Dakkar returned to the mountains of Bundelkund. As Verne described him in the sequel, The Mysterious Island, “There, alone in the world, overcome by disappointment at the destruction of all his vain hopes, a prey to profound disgust for all human beings, filled with hatred of the civilized world, he realized the wreck of his fortune, assembled some score of his most faithful companions, and one day disappeared, leaving no trace behind. Where, then, did he seek that liberty denied him upon the inhabited earth? Under the waves, in the depths of the ocean, where none could follow. Upon a deserted island of the Pacific he established his dockyard, and there a submarine vessel was constructed from his designs. He named his submarine vessel the Nautilus, called himself simply Captain Nemo [‘No Man’ in Latin], and disappeared beneath the seas.”

  Nemo is, therefore, a fierce anti-imperialist who loathes the British over all others. Lewis removed all traces of those sentiments. The ship Nemo sinks in revenge is conspicuously British in the original, unidentified in the English translation. Lewis also made certain that American sensibilities were not trifled with. In Verne’s original, on the walls of Nemo’s cabin was a series of portraits of “great men of history who had devoted their lives to a great human ideal.” Washington and Lincoln were there, but also “that martyr to the emancipation of the black race, John Brown, hanging on the gallows, just as Victor Hugo had drawn him.” The first two remained in Lewis’s version, but Brown was expunged.†

  In addition to its scathing treatment of racism—as prevalent then as now in both Europe and the United States—Verne was prescient in some surprising ways. Nemo says in an exchange with one of his captives, “‘I know that [killing for killing’s sake] is a privilege reserved for man, but I do not approve of such a murderous pastime. In destroying the southern whale (like the Greenland whale, an inoffensive creature), your traders do a culpable action, Master Land. They have already depopulated the whole of Baffin’s Bay, and are annihilating a class of useful animals. Leave the unfortunate cetacea alone.’ The Captain was right. The barbarous and inconsiderate greed of these fishermen will one day cause the disappearance of the last whale in the ocean.”

  With Nemo essentially neutered in translation, American readers were left to marvel over the Nautilus, Verne intentionally giving the same name as Fulton’s submarine. As always, Verne had made a careful study of the science and prevailing technology before beginning, and so his model was remarkably detailed, although vague where technological problems remained to be solved. The vessel was powered by electricity, for example, although how the energy was generated was barely hinted at.‡ Verne’s Nautilus was cylindrical, as was Brun’s design—Nemo described it as “cigar shaped”—but was seventy meters long, much larger than the Plongeur. Inside, the ship was marvelous, spacious, and fanciful. Not until nuclear-powered submarines would sailors enjoy such amenities.

  Verne included a double hull, eventually standard in submarine construction, but in 1869 present in only one or two otherwise abortive designs. A four-bladed propeller drove the craft, a single-blade rudder steered it, and diving planes were placed amidships, which seemed a logical location but would prove unwieldy in practice. A large air reservoir was in the bow, but with the Nautilus spending so much time submerged, Verne did not indicate how or if the air regenerated.

  Most significantly, although the Nautilus could and did sink surface ships by ramming them, its main purposes were peaceful—exploration and salvage. Large glass windows were built into the hull to allow the submariners to view the wonders outside and a hatch was built so that divers could exit the vessel underwater and patrol the sea bottom. A bright light would be shone outward to facilitate the task. Perhaps never before had an author portrayed the undersea world with such wonder. These sections escaped Lewis Mercier’s red pen and as a result, thousands upon thousands of American children experienced the fascination of exploring beneath the waves.

  Even unutterably bad translations may have their virtues, it seemed, for one of those children was a New Jersey boy named Simon Lake. Within a decade of reading about Nemo and the Nautilus as a boy of twelve, he would be planning and then building a practical version of Verne’s fanciful craft.

  _____________

  *The fog was as a result of air expanding to normal pressure.

  †Although a slightly better English translation was produced in the 1890s, and others were published in the 1960s, it was not until 1993 that a “fully restored” English edition by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter was put out by Tom Clancy’s original publisher, the Naval Institute Press.

  ‡Verne can be excused for this lapse. Commercial electricity, which would be restricted initially to direct current, mostly in small factories, would not come into use until the next decade.

  CHAPTER 6

  FOR AN INDEPENDENT IRELAND

  John Holland joined the underwater ranks inspired not by an adventure story or any nautical deed but rather by that most land-based of activities: farming, specifically potato farming, and the failure of Ireland’s potato farmers to defeat the insects that ravaged a crop on which was based both their economy and their diet.

  The result was the Great Famine, in which at least one million people in Ireland—one resident in eight—died of starvation or disease between 1845 and 1852, causing another million to flee the country, many if not most of them sailing across the Atlantic to America.

  The incredible devastation aroused both deep resentment and fervent nationalism. Conviction was widespread that the English had at best sat on their hands and at worst engaged in a calculated policy of genocide. (To this day, debate over whether the anemic English response would qualify as genocide continues.) An uprising against the English had failed in 1796, and for almost six decades Irish nationalists had attempted to gain freedoms through peaceful negotiations. But the famine had ended all that. By the end of the 1850s, a number of new Irish nationalist groups had sprung up, all of which were either willing or eager to engage in armed struggle. Because the expatriate community was so large and vibrant, the push for Irish independence was equally fervent among those who had settled in the United States.

  On March 17, 1858—St. Patrick’s Day—James Stephens, still in Dublin, and John O’Mahony in New York City, members of a group called Young Irelanders, founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood, called the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States, taking the name from a band of legendary third century Gaelic warriors. The group, soon referred to as Fenians on both sides of the Atlantic,
was a precursor of the twentieth-century Irish Republican Army. They wanted an Ireland totally free from English rule and, like just about every other of the nationalist groups, were convinced only violent overthrow could achieve their aims. At the Fenian Congress in Chicago in November 1863, the group swore “intense and undying hatred towards the monarchy and oligarchy of Great Britain.” The English had “ground their country to the dust, hanging her patriots, starving out her people, and sweeping myriads of Irishmen, women, and children off their paternal fields, to find refuge in foreign lands.”1

  While the Fenians possessed no shortage of fervor, their execution could be lacking. A planned invasion of Canada in 1866 went awry when their chief-appointed strategist, a sympathetic Frenchman named Henri Le Caron, turned out actually to be Thomas Beach, an agent of the British Secret Service.* In fact, the Fenians were so rife with informants and so prone to infighting that the British were sometimes aware of their plots only hours after they had been hatched. Not surprisingly, many of their number were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, some of the more prominent members shipped off to Australia.

  But a series of conspicuous failures in no way dulled Fenian ardor. In 1875, John Devoy, one of their more adept operatives, and John Boyle O’Reilly, approached the sympathetic captain of the whaling ship Catalpa and proposed a round-trip voyage to the west coast of Australia.† Western Australia was isolated and desolate, and Fremantle, Devoy’s destination, was notable only for being home to one of the continent’s more notorious penal colonies. O’Reilly had, in fact, escaped from Fremantle in 1869 when he broke away from a work detail and, after a harrowing trek through the jungle, had been able to secure a place on a departing freighter. Letters from other prisoners spoke of the horrible conditions, and Devoy and O’Reilly intended to free six Fenian leaders who had been sent to Australia in chains ten years earlier to begin life sentences.

  Devoy told the captain of the plan and offered him enough money to quell any potential objections. No other member of the crew was aware of the true nature of the voyage when the Catalpa set sail from New Bedford, Massachusetts.

  The scheme was audacious and complex, involving expert coordination and a good bit of guile. Soon after the Catalpa weighed anchor, a second ship, carrying the remainder of the rescue party, led by John J. Breslin, was to sail from San Francisco. When it arrived at Fremantle, Breslin, traveling as “James Collins,” would convince the superintendent that he and his fellows were British officials, there for a surprise inspection. The flustered superintendent would then, it was hoped, arrange for an escort to conduct these “officials” on a tour of the prison. During the inspection, the Fenians would pass notes to the six prisoners, giving details of the escape. A seventh Fenian, whom the others suspected of being an informer, would be told nothing of the plan.

  Although this was the very type of adventure for which the Fenians had previously exhibited striking ineptitude, Devoy, Breslin, and their comrades pulled it off. They overcame every obstacle they had anticipated and a number that they hadn’t.

  The false inspection went off without a hitch. The superintendent was so credulous that he led the tour himself. So determined was he to demonstrate his fitness for the post that one of the Fenians had no trouble drifting away from the group and arranging details of the escape.

  On April 17, 1876, Easter morning, two groups of prisoners set out from the prison, in theory for work details in the town. The imprisoned Fenians had become trustees and, with escape over land thought impossible, they were allowed to make the short journey unguarded.

  The prisoners did not report for work, but rather, after trekking miles through underbrush, met the rescue party at a waiting whaleboat. As they rowed out to the Catalpa, which, for security reasons, had been forced to anchor far out in the bay, they saw police ride to the shore. They rowed for seven hours in heavy seas but still could not reach the ship. The six waited until morning when the seas had calmed before once again taking up the oars. As they began, they saw that a British frigate, the Georgette, was also steaming toward the Catalpa. The prisoners reached the ship just before the Georgette, but were seen getting on board. As the Catalpa was getting under way, the Georgette ordered it to halt or be fired upon. The captain of the Catalpa raised the colors and shouted, “If you fire on this ship, you fire on the American flag.” After a brief standoff, the Georgette steamed off.2

  By all accounts, the return voyage was a raucous affair, featuring copious bouts of drinking, roistering, and vomiting over the side. The captain was unable to quell the celebrations and found himself more or less captive on his own ship. With great relief, he discharged his passengers—now known as the “Fremantle Six”—in New York on August 19, 1876. They were greeted by a horde of well-wishers and the “Catalpa Rescue” made news around the world. So wondrous was the freeing of the six revolutionaries that the warring factions of the Fenian movement called a truce to celebrate as one.

  Emboldened and united, the Fenians decided to plan their next spectacular demonstration of revolutionary zeal. At a celebration for their freed comrades, Devoy and Breslin sought out just the man who might help them provide it.

  For about a year, John Holland had been trying unsuccessfully to persuade members of various factions within the Fenian movement that he could build a small, undetectable craft that could travel underwater and place an explosive charge to sink even the most intimidating British battleship. He even claimed to have completed a design for a one-man vessel that could carry four torpedoes. Holland was an amiable enough chap, and everyone was impressed by his obvious technical knowledge, so he wasn’t rebuffed as much as humored. He had not been able to find a single person who would take him seriously.

  But in the Fremantle Six euphoria, two men finally did.

  How John Holland came to submarine research is not clear. There was no nautical background in his family—his father had patrolled the Irish coastline on horseback for the British Coastguard Service—and there is no record of him spending any time in a boat as a child. His mechanical aptitude had come to the fore at a Christian Brothers school, where, as the novitiate Brother Philip, he was under the tutelage of two outstanding science teachers, Brother Bernard O’Brien and Brother James Burke.

  By his early twenties, Holland was teaching at a monastery in Cork. Although he showed great interest in drawing and “was constantly engaged in devising mechanical contrivances and in beautifying the grounds around the Monastery”—he designed and built a windmill to pump water—Holland most distinguished himself as a choirmaster.

  In 1872, Holland’s term of triennial vows ended and he had to decide whether to take perpetual vows and commit himself to the Christian Brothers for life. His mother and one of his brothers had immigrated to the United States earlier in the year and Holland decided to join them. Just before Christmas 1872, he informed the order of his decision and five months later, he boarded a ship at Liverpool bound for New York. Holland lived for a time in Boston—where he was bedridden for weeks after slipping on an ice-glazed street—but moved away and eventually found work as a schoolteacher in Paterson, New Jersey. Soon afterward, his younger brother Michael, active in the cause, introduced him to the Fenians.

  Holland must have been tinkering with submarines for some time, because shortly after those introductions, he began to tout his invention to his Fenian acquaintances. His one-man craft, powered by a foot-treadle, showed great ingenuity—the operator would wear a diving helmet and breathe through tubes attached to a compressed air reservoir. But the notion that a volunteer would squeeze himself into a boat the size of a coffin and launch weapons with his feet seemed harebrained, to say nothing of suicidal. In late 1875, absent any encouragement from his countrymen, Holland approached the United States Navy, but with no better result.

  Holland’s one-man design

  Before the Catalpa rescue, even had the Fenians wanted to employ Holland’s invention, they could not have. Infighting and unwise expenditure
s had left the various competing factions virtually bankrupt. But after Catalpa docked in New York, money poured into Fenian coffers from Irish immigrants across America.

  Suddenly the “Skirmishing Fund,” as it was called—a pool from which each of the factions could draw—was bulging. Monies were allocated for any number of crackpot schemes. Delegations were sent to Russia, Mexico, and even to what is now Belize to determine if any of these locations could be a site to foment mischief against Great Britain. (For reasons never disclosed, Belize had been identified as a possible site for an independent Irish government in exile.)

  At the reception for the newly freed prisoners, Devoy and Breslin approached Holland, who had come with his brother Michael, and queried him at great length about his potential super-weapon. Holland told them that he had already moved past the treadle to a mechanized design, which was much more sophisticated and powerful. The more Breslin and Devoy heard, they more they were convinced that the idea should be pursued. Devoy later wrote, “Holland was well-informed of Irish affairs and was anti-English and with clear and definite ideas of the proper method of fighting England. He was cool, good-tempered, and talked to us as a schoolmaster would to his children.”3 Although they refused to commit any monies, Devoy and Breslin told Holland that if he could create a working prototype, they would tap the Skirmishing Fund to create the actual submarine.

  Inspiration for Holland’s new design emanated from his visit to the 1876 International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine in Philadelphia, the first official World’s Fair ever hosted within the United States. Among the exhibits celebrating the nation’s centennial were such mechanical, agricultural, scientific, and cultural marvels as the bicycle, the typewriter, Heinz Ketchup, and Hires Root Beer. On display as well were the giant Corliss steam engine and the steam locomotive John Bull. There was also a new sort of engine, called the “Ready Motor” by its creator, an English inventor living in Boston named George Brayton. As reported in Scientific American, “The distinguishing features of this engine are that it can be started in a very short time, that it is economical in its consumption of fuel, and that, owing to the constant maintenance of carburetion, it is claimed, the danger of explosion of the hydrocarbon vapor is as greatly reduced as to be practically obviated.”4