Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  The following month, Holland ran a series of short test voyages off Perth Amboy, New Jersey. In some cases, the boat ran only on the surface, in others awash, and only occasionally fully submerged. After each test, Holland made minor adjustments, most frequently to the fixed ballast. On March 12, during the first serious underwater test, when the boat was to remain submerged for thirty minutes, Holland and his two crew members took diving helmets with them as a precaution, but the Holland ran perfectly, and was ready for more extensive and challenging maneuvers.

  On March 17, 1898, St. Patrick’s Day, precisely forty years after the founding of the Fenian Brotherhood, Holland took his boat into Staten Island Sound for an extensive sea trial. The Holland ran successfully both on the surface and submerged, and after its return to dry dock, Holland decided he was ready to schedule a demonstration for the navy.

  Argonaut II

  The test would take place on March 26, but Holland decided to conduct one more full-blown sea test on March 21, to which the press would officially be invited. The day before, Holland and “a score of assistants” checked every inch of the boat and determined that “all the machinery and other appliances to sink the boat and bring her to the surface again have worked satisfactorily.” The crew was also said to have been drilled in working the torpedo and the dynamite gun, both of which were also to be included in the next day’s test, and that they had “perfect control” of each.2

  But newspaper editors did not wait for the test to be successful. Across a nation preparing for war, articles hailed the new weapon in vivid page-one stories, complete with artists’ renderings that bore only a vague resemblance to the actual boat. On March 20, for example, a syndicated feature, titled “FIFTY HOLLAND SUBMARINE TORPEDO-BOATS MAY GUARD OUR COAST,” ran in newspapers from Virginia to California. The text under a drawing of what could have been a swollen pig bladder read, “This is an accurate picture of the Holland submarine boat.” (It wasn’t.) “The government has been considering building fifty of these submarine terrors to scatter along our coasts. It has been demonstrated that one of these boats could easily take care of three battleships of the Vizcaya style.* Upon sighting the enemy, the boats at the different stations along the coast would be sent out and could annihilate the enemy before any damage could be done or a landing secured. A successful trial of the boat was made on Thursday.”3 That cruising at eight knots, to protect thousands of miles of coast, would require some significant multiple of the fifty Holland-style submarines was omitted from the piece. Also omitted was the fact that the weapons’ system on the Holland had yet to be successfully engaged.

  A similar feature article, this one with a more accurate, cross-section depiction of the submarine, read, “That latest invention in naval warfare, the Holland submarine boat is practically finished and will be ready far use against Spain if necessary. Joseph P. Holland [sic] the inventor is sanguine that his submarine destroyer will be a match for any battleship afloat. He asserts that the boat will be under absolute control and may be operated below the surface, rising only at intervals to admit a fresh supply of air.” That piece went on to describe how the submarine could approach by stealth and destroy a vessel many times its size, using either torpedo or pneumatic gun. In this case, no mention was made that true stealth would be impossible since the operator of a submarine had no effect means of locating an enemy craft while submerged and therefore would need to run awash with a crewman in the conning tower, visible to sharp-eyed lookouts.

  But hyperbole, not accuracy, was precisely what press-savvy E. B. Frost had aimed at. After the press event, it was undiminished. In an article headlined “The Holland Dives Again: The Submarine Boat Shows that She Will Fulfill Her Inventor’s Claims; A Most Successful Trial,” the New York Times stated, “That the Holland submarine boat will do all that has been claimed for it by John P. Holland, its inventor, was demonstrated at yesterday’s trial, which was the most successful one since the vessel was launched.” The article went on to praise the boat for sailing both on the surface and submerged in “inclement weather and [in] treacherous channels.”4 Only toward the end of the piece was it noted that neither the dynamite gun nor the torpedo was tested since both tubes were found to contain small leaks, nor could the boat “steer accurately” or determine depth since there was no light on the compass or depth gauge. While most of the flaws were easily correctable, this was not a boat that was “practically finished and ready for use against Spain.”5

  After this test, Lake once more petitioned for his boat to be tested by the navy, if not before Holland’s March 27 event, then at least soon after. He made no secret that he expected the Argonaut to perform so brilliantly in contrast with Holland’s boat that Holland’s contract would be canceled in favor of one for him.

  But the navy would not budge. The Holland, after all, was designed to be a warship, which is what the admirals wanted, and despite its shortcomings, it had demonstrated speed and maneuverability far superior to what Lake could offer. And Holland had promised, no matter what the result of the March 26 trial, to conduct an additional series of test runs quickly and bring the boat to a state where it would replace the Plunger.

  For this crucial test, Holland would have a new crew member. Frank Cable had finally persuaded his bosses in Philadelphia to lend him temporarily to the submarine builders, to ensure that the electrical systems functioned properly. If they failed, he told them, Electro-Dynamic might easily be seen as ruining one of the American navy’s most important new weapons. Temporary, however, would become permanent. Frank Cable would work with and in submarines for the rest of his life.

  March 27 dawned cold and rainy. For the previous weeks, New York newspapers had been running feature articles highlighting the vulnerabilities of the local coastline to Spanish warships, which coupled with tales of the Holland’s prowess, invested the public in the success of the trial. Naval officers, however, remained skeptical. Rather than exhibit the eagerness for Holland’s machine that Lake had complained about, the notion of investing money in a vessel most of them still thought of as crackpot when the needs of surface fleet remained acute was somewhere between irresponsible and idiotic. In order to have any chance at all to change their minds, the Holland would have to perform brilliantly. Frost counted on his friends in the press to make certain that, short of catastrophe, that was at least what the public would believe.

  They did not let him down. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s headline was “The Holland Boat A Diving Wonder,” with an opening line that read, “The submarine boat Holland gave a remarkable exhibition of her powers in the Staten Island Sound.” The piece went on to describe how Holland and his crew of five—one of whom was an army lieutenant—made four distinct dives, all “under perfect control,” while an army colonel, company officials, and newspapermen observed from a nearby tugboat. The boat was on the surface until, “Suddenly the bow of the Holland disappeared at an angle of 15 degrees and her stern rose in the air until part of the propeller was visible. In less than a minute, she was completely out of sight. Her flag staffs, which are about sixteen feet high, could not be seen.” A few minutes later, four-hundred yards away, the Holland surfaced. It did so on an even keel, “which naval experts declared was impossible, holding that in rising the boat would stick her bow above the surface and then her turret, which would expose her to the fire of rapid fire guns.”6 In fact, there was nothing in Holland’s design that prevented even-keel diving or surfacing; he simply believed that such maneuvers were generally inefficient. The New York Times added, “It was shown beyond any doubt that the boat can do all that has been claimed for it.”7

  Although no torpedoes were fired, Holland’s biographer, Richard Morris, son of Holland associate Charles Morris, claims that the dynamite gun was engaged before the official test began, successfully hurling a “three-foot, fifty-pound, wooden dummy-projectile [in] a graceful trajectory three hundred yards out into the channel.”8

  A main question, however, was the Holland’s
ability to navigate with sufficient accuracy and stealth to be effective as a warship. When submerged, the boat steered by compass alone, which, after some trial-and-error experimentation with compensating magnets, was reasonably effective when merely cruising from place to place. But to locate, track, and attack an enemy, compass steering was useless. Periscopes had been around since the 1430s, when Johann Gutenberg had mounted two parallel mirrors in a tube with opposite right-angle extensions at the ends, so that spectators might view the visiting pope from the rear of a huge crowd, but no one had quite figured out how to attach an effective viewing tube to a submarine. There had been a number of attempts to employ a camera lucida, and French submarine designers had experimented with a lens and prism device in 1889. But an effective mechanism for viewing surface objects from the inside of a submarine proved surprisingly thorny, with issues such as resolution, field of vision, distortion, range, and storage thwarting each inventor who had made the attempt.

  Lacking a means of tracking an enemy while submerged, in order to mount a torpedo or dynamite gun attack, the Holland would engage in a maneuver Cable described as “porpoising,” in which “the boat ran a short distance submerged and then came to the surface far enough to expose the conning tower, thus getting a chance to look around, and then diving.” As awkward as this seemed, Cable thought it was an effective means of attack. “This bobbing up and disappearing was swiftly effected; the boat would rise to the surface from a depth, say, of thirty feet, focus on an imaginary target, if such was the occasion for the maneuver, fire its torpedo, and be quickly under water again.”9

  Since the viewing windows were placed at the top of the conning tower, it was in theory possible for the Holland to porpoise its way into a position to attack an enemy while keeping its profile low enough in the water to avoid detection. But on the open sea, where the water was rarely calm, far more likely was that the boat would either rise out of the water enough to be spotted, or that waves would break across the surface of the viewing windows, rendering clear vision impossible.

  Still, Holland’s boat was able to do what no other had ever done, and its virtues for forward thinking naval officers and government officials outstripped its shortcomings. Holland continued to test-run the boat for two weeks, with a steady improvement in performance. On April 10, even before a torpedo had been successfully fired—although one soon would be—Theodore Roosevelt, still assistant secretary of the navy, wrote to navy secretary John D. Long: “I think the Holland submarine boat should be purchased. Evidently she has great possibilities in her for harbor defense. Sometimes she doesn’t work perfectly, but often she does, and I don’t think in the present emergency we can afford to let her slip. I recommend that you authorize me to enter into negotiations for her, or you authorize the bureau of construction to do so, which would be just as well.”10 In addition to casting further doubt on Simon Lake’s assertion that Roosevelt favored his design, this letter offers corroboration that Holland’s boat had indeed satisfied the requirements that the navy had stipulated in its initial contract.

  But either because of Lake’s furious lobbying or simply because of intransigence, the navy refused to purchase the new boat. Their objections, ironically, were not centered on the Holland’s flaws—inability to approach an enemy submerged and an untested weapons system—but rather on quibbles about navigation and instrumentation. Nor did they reject the Holland in favor of the one on which they had imposed a design—the Plunger did not seem to be a part of the conversation. Most likely, the admirals’ reluctance to make a decision stemmed from an inherent prejudice against undersea vessels coupled with a fear of making a mistake and looking foolish in overcoming it.

  Unable to pierce the naval bureaucracy, Frost escalated the publicity war. “Reporters were invited to inspect the boat. Harper’s Weekly, Leslie’s Weekly, and the leading metropolitan newspapers published fanciful accounts of the strange craft, often in nothing short of the most sensational journalism.”11 For example, on the day before the war with Spain would officially begin, newspapers across the nation ran a syndicated feature on “Inventor Holland’s New Sea Fighting Monsters,” complete with half-page cutaway drawings and descriptions of performance that had yet to be attained. Failure to see the virtue of the new technology was condemned. “Naval experts of course are divided on the question, they always are whenever any new instrument of destruction is introduced. The more conservative shake their heads gravely and dwell on the many limitations which natural law imposes on submarine navigation; the younger and more enthusiastic members of the profession make light of these difficulties and claim that we have here a weapon which, in deadly effect, will outrival even the torpedo.”12

  Adding to the confusion, someone in the Navy Department decided “the Holland had designs on the Vizcaya,” the Spanish battleship that had been sent to New York Harbor. In March, the commander of the New York Navy Yard had received an order to keep the Holland under observation and seize the vessel if he thought it was preparing to open fire on the Spanish ship.13 Navy tugboats shadowed the Holland to and from its mooring at Perth Amboy, New Jersey. At one point, Holland submerged his boat and surfaced behind an old canal boat while the tugboats searched vainly to locate it.

  On April 20, the same day William McKinley asked Congress to declare war on Spain, Holland’s frustration boiled over. An official board of inspection had been sent from Washington to observe a sea test, possibly in response to Roosevelt’s letter, but the board members seemed not especially interested in seeing the Holland perform. All they requested was that Holland demonstrate his boat could actually dive and surface, making it clear they were impatient to return to the capital and deal with genuine naval business. Holland decided to give them a demonstration they would not soon forget.

  At the accompanying tugboat’s signal to begin, Holland took his boat under the surface “in seconds.” He had removed the usual ten-foot flagstaffs, so the inspection board members were left to scan the surface, but there was no indication of where the boat might be. In previous tests, the Holland had remained submerged for perhaps ten minutes, but forty-five minutes later it had not yet come to the surface. Another tugboat was dispatched to search as board members and crew frantically looked for some sign of the boat most thought had flooded and sunk.

  Finally, just short of an hour from when it had submerged, the Holland broke the surface, just a few feet away from its tugboat escort. Holland himself “must have taken particular delight in revealing that he and his crew had traveled several miles in a sweeping circle while submerged in the bay. He had disobeyed the prearranged orders, but he had given the Board a show it had not expected.”14 With this voyage, Holland exceeded every performance standard the navy had established for the Plunger and, in addition, demonstrated that the Holland could quite effectively steer by compass alone—although its conning tower would still need to break the surface in order to mount an attack.

  The board members may have been impressed, but they were not amused. Rather than recommend the navy move forward with what could have been a devastating new weapon, they “quibbled over details,” such as pointing out that they had no confirmation of the depth at which the boat had traveled since the flagstaffs had been removed. (In any case, they would have disappeared at a depth greater than ten feet.) When he heard of the board’s decision, Holland, as had Lake, insisted his boat would be a potent addition to the fleet and, also similar to Lake, issued a public offer to sink the Spanish fleet in Santiago de Cuba Harbor where it had been trapped if the navy would transport his boat to the Caribbean.

  The offer was leaked, of course, to the press, which immediately leaped on the idea. “When the news that [Admiral Pascual] Cervera and his fleet were bottled up in the harbor of Santiago became pretty well confirmed, it was suggested to John P. Holland, the submarine boatman, that he could submit the practical value of his invention to no better test than to take her to Cuban waters, enter the harbor of Santiago, destroy the mines and sink th
e Spanish fleet with a neat hole in each of them, just enough to sink her, not enough to spoil her, because we want those ships ourselves. When the suggestion was made, Mr. Holland said that under certain conditions he was quite willing to undertake the job.”15

  Holland’s conditions were much the same as Lake had proposed in the wake of the Maine sinking. “If the government will transport the boat from the Erie Basin, where it now is, to some point near the entrance to the harbor of Santiago, and a crew can be secured to man the boat, Mr. Holland will undertake the job of sinking the Spanish fleet, commanding the boat in person. If his offer be accepted, and he is successful in his undertaking, he will expect the government to buy the boat.”

  As with Lake, the navy refused. Holland then granted an interview that was printed in newspapers across America under the headline, “Why His Boat Was Ignored.” “It has taken me 23 years to educate the United States government up to the idea of the submarine boat, and the education is still incomplete apparently. Twenty-three years ago I submitted my first plans for a submarine boat to the government. They were returned with the criticism that my invention was impractical, as the men could not be found who would be willing to operate such a craft as I designed to build. You see, the idea back of this objection was that a submarine boat would be a death trap for her crew. I have made simply hundreds of tests to overcome this and similar objections. Each new administration has brought a new set of officials into power, and these I would find entrenched behind the very same prejudices I had had to meet and overcome in the case of their predecessors. That is why it has been such a labor to even partially educate the government.” Holland added, “There are still men in the navy who are bitterly hostile to the torpedo, the ram, and who see only cause for alarm in each step that tends toward the final perfecting of the fighting machine. Innovation of any sort acts on these timid souls just as a sudden plunge in ice water would. Fortunately, they form a hopeless minority.”16