Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

by James Delgado

  As for submarines, both sides embraced this new technology. Inventors proposed various underwater craft and built some that operated with various levels of success, killing their builders and crews on more than one occasion. A number of projects were launched, some in secrecy, others more publicly, leaving behind an unfortunately incomplete record of pioneer submarines and submariners. But the rediscovery of Julius Kroehl’s Sub Marine Explorer and a slow unraveling of his wartime career, buried in the National Archives, suggests that at every step of the way, as the Confederates developed both their “torpedoes” and submarines, Kroehl was there to develop something to counter them for the Union side. It may well be one of the last great untold stories of the Civil War.

  Julius Kroehl was a German-born immigrant who came to America in 1838. He studied to become an engineer, and in 1845 he won a U.S patent for a flange-bending machine for ironwork. In 1856, he was well enough established to win a contract from New York City to build a cast-iron “fire watch tower” in Manhattan’s Mount Morris (now Marcus Garvey) Park. In an age before fire alarm boxes, volunteer fire fighters watched the city from towers, ringing a bell to sound the alarm.

  But Kroehl’s real interests lay underwater. At the same time that he was engaged in his fire tower project, Kroehl and his business partner, Peter Husted, were contracted by the City of New York to remove part of Diamond Reef, near Governor’s Island in the East River, as it was a hazard to navigation. According to the Scientific American of August 5, 1856, “Messrs. Husted & Kroehl” were blasting to remove 6 feet of depth on the 300-foot reef. “Large tin canisters attached to the lower ends of strong pointed stakes, are sunk to rest on the face of the reef, and are discharged with a galvanic battery.” It was on this job that Kroehl became interested in diving. In 1858, Husted and Kroehl hired a new partner, Van Buren Ryerson, who had just built a pressurized diving bell that he called Submarine Explorer. Eight years later, Kroehl used the basic principle of Ryerson’s bell to build the world’s most sophisticated submarine.

  With the outbreak of Civil War in April 1861, Julius Kroehl was the first inventor to write to the U.S. Navy to offer a submarine that could be used to enter Southern ports and destroy “obstacles” from below. His “cigar-shaped” design was not adopted, as the Union Navy ended up with another submarine, courtesy of a daring demonstration by French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, who had built a 32-foot submersible and tested it on the Delaware River. Chased by the harbor police and captured when it ran aground, de Villeroi’s submarine attracted the attention of the press and the Navy, which ended up buying it and commissioning it as USS Alligator. Never successful and plagued by problems, the tiny craft ended up being cast adrift off Cape Hatteras in a storm on April 2, 1863, and was lost.

  Meanwhile, Julius Kroehl, his proposal for a submarine rejected, joined the war effort as an expert in underwater explosives. He worked to clear the way for the Union assault up the Mississippi River, which the Confederates had blocked. On the night of April 10, 1862, “Mr. Kroehl went with a party in two boats to make a close reconnaissance of the hulks, rafts and chains below the forts. On the strength of his report plans were made by Admiral Porter and him for the destruction of the obstructions.” Unfortunately, the attempt, made with electrically detonated charges, was “not completely successful,” but the Union fleet did successfully navigate the river.

  In recognition of this and other efforts, the Navy promoted Kroehl to Acting Volunteer Lieutenant and in January 1863 assigned him to remove the Confederate rafts blocking the Yazoo and Red rivers. Just then, Kroehl heard that a Confederate “torpedo” had sunk the ironclad gunboat Cairo on the Yazoo. Ironically, the commander of Cairo, Thomas Oliver Selfridge, had served as captain of the ill-fated submarine Alligator. A colleague sarcastically noted that Selfridge “found two torpedoes and removed them by placing his vessel over them.”

  A month after the fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, Kroehl was discharged with malaria. During his convalescence, he planned a submarine that could descend into the water and there, on the bottom, send out a diver to disarm torpedoes and set charges of his own, beyond the reach of Confederate guns. His submarine would be a perfect counter to the South’s own program of underwater warfare. Kroehl needed backers and money to build his sub, knowing full well from experience that the Navy would not accept plans alone and authorize funds to build an experimental craft. He found his backers in the Pacific Pearl Company, which was interested in exploiting the pearl beds off Panama.

  “Discovered” by Spanish conquistadors who seized examples from the natives of the isthmus in the early sixteenth century, Panama’s pearls had been the source of many fortunes in the succeeding centuries. But as divers cleaned out the shallower beds, that left only the ones in deeper water. Using a submarine was one way to tap into the hitherto inaccessible riches in the sea off Panama. Kroehl appealed, doubtless, more to the profit motive of his employers than to their patriotism. If the Navy wouldn’t buy the submarine, they could always take it to Panama and use it to rake up pearls off the seabed.

  Work on the submarine began in early 1864. On June 14, Kroehl wrote to the Navy’s Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks to press his case: “I sent you last week a pamphlet issued by the Pacific Pearl Company, for whom I am now building a submarine boat… In the operations against some of the rebel forts and harbors I have no doubt the Navy Department will require submarine boats, and I think it would be advisable to bring this to the attention of the Honorable Gideon Wells, and have the plans examined by a proper board.” The following day, he received a reply. The plans were interesting, and he should send them to the Secretary of the Navy. Kroehl did so, and on June 18, just four days later, was told by Secretary Welles to present his plans to W.W. Wood, the Chief Engineer of the United States Navy.

  Sitting in a folder in the National Archives is Wood’s meticulous eighteen-page report on Kroehl’s submarine, written after he toured the vessel as it was being built in New York. Wood also drew up a large plan of the submarine — a sheet of paper that rolls out 3 feet — fully one-twelfth of the length of the actual craft. Reading the report and perusing the plan, it is obvious that the submarine on the beach at Isla San Telmo is the same vessel. The chamber on the top, according to Wood, was the “compressed air chamber… it has a semi-elliptic form and is built of two shells of best boiler iron % inch thick, the different pieces lapping 4 inches are double riveted with % inch countersink rivets, and braced with ribs of 3½” × 3” × ½” angle iron and 1 inch braces.” That kind of intricate detail is invaluable to an archeologist.

  Wood’s report goes on to explain how a compressor inside the submarine was used to build up sufficient pressure to not only clear the upper ballast chamber to enable the submarine to rise but also to pressurize the hull to allow the unbolting of bottom plates so that the crew could reach into the water and harvest pearls — or to serve the purposes of war. This self-propelled “lock out” dive chamber — which many historians think is an innovation of the twentieth century — was designed and built in 1865. Wood’s report concluded by enthusing that “the uses to which a boat… in Naval Warfare, would be the removal of submerged obstructions in the channels of rivers and harbors. Approaching hostile fleets at anchor and destroying them by attaching torpedoes to their bottoms and exploding such localities as are commanded and covered by the guns of an enemy. The importance of a successful application of the principles involved in such a vessel for such purposes are of much importance and can not be too highly estimated.” Julius Kroehl couldn’t have said it better himself. It is a glowing endorsement, and I wonder what happened. Why didn’t the Navy buy the sub?

  A section drawing of Sub Marine Explorer from the Journal of the American Society of Naval Engineers, 1902. James P. Delgado.

  Part of the answer is that the submarine was not yet finished. Another is that the war was winding down. Most of the major ports of the South had fallen, the Mississippi was secured and the collapse of the
Confederacy was just a few months away. With the end of the war imminent, the Navy Department probably viewed Kroehl’s submarine, brilliant though it was, as coming a bit too late. A genius, yes, an engineering breakthrough, yes. But the time for such an invention to help “win the war” had passed.

  And so the Union Navy, which had already invested much in the unfortunate sub Alligator, declined Kroehl’s offer. But there were still pearls to harvest in Panama, and the Pacific Pearl Company used Wood’s letter as an endorsement, publishing it in a promotional pamphlet to sell stocks in 1865. They mentioned it again in an article in the May 31, 1866, edition of the New York Times:

  Yesterday afternoon there was a private trial of the Pacific Pearl Company’s Sub Marine Explorer, in the dock foot of North third-street, Eastern District… Julius H. Kroehl, engineer, with Frederick Michaels, August Getz and John Tanner, entered the explorer through her man-hole, which being finally dosed and the signal given the boat was submerged, and for an hour and a half she traversed the bed of the dock. During the submersion the friends of those onboard the boat exhibited considerable anxiety for their safety, but then at last when she rose to the surface… they gave vent to their feelings in repeated cheers. These were again and again repeated, when the engineer held up a pail of mud which he had gathered at the bottom of the dock, showing conclusively the success of the experiment.

  But even if the end of the war had not ended the Navy’s interest in submarines, then the failure of its own great wartime experiment, the submarine Intelligent Whale, decisively closed the door. After three years of work, the shipyard finally launched Intelligent Whale just a month before Kroehl’s highly publicized demonstration of Sub Marine Explorer. Unlike Kroehl’s boat, Intelligent Whale was not a success, reportedly killing dozens of crewmen in various trials and tests. Renamed “Disastrous Jonah” by wags, Intelligent Whale ended her days laid up, unused. Thirty-one years would pass before the U.S. Navy acquired another submarine, in 1897. Another seventeen years would pass until a submarine again sank an enemy vessel in wartime, when the German U-21 sent HMS Kent to the bottom of the North Sea, an act that heralded the opening of a new and far deadlier campaign of submarine warfare and that changed the way war was fought at sea.

  TO PANAMA AND OBLIVION

  After the demonstrations of Kroehl’s submarine, both he and his invention left New York. Sometime that fall, or early the following year, the Pacific Pearl Company shipped Sub Marine Explorer to the Pacific coast of Panama. There, it worked for a while, according to a report published in a company prospectus published in or around 1867, and a 1902 article reported that at Panama, Sub Marine Explorer “was successfully used, and Mr. Kroehl said, the divers employed in the boat enjoyed better health than the other divers… The bottom of the boat could be opened or closed as desired. When exploring in considerable depths the bottom was closed, to save the crew from the heavy pressures.” But at some stage the submarine was abandoned, perhaps as early as the fall of 1869. Kroehl was not around then. He had died of the “fever” in Panama two years earlier.

  Why there and when? Just off the beach where Explorer now rests is a large pearl bed in about 100 feet of water, and it was there that the submarine was working in 1869 in the last known contemporary mention in print. Perhaps Explorer was left on the beach after something broke, or perhaps the pearl bed was fished out. Perhaps, without Julius Kroehl around to care for his invention, no one else could. We may never know. Someone did try to salvage the wreck at some distant time, because the conning tower is wrapped with wire cable, and the tower and the hull around it are slightly deformed from torquing from an offshore direction, as if someone had tried to pull it off the beach and failed. And some features are missing from the submarine — the propeller and the conning tower hatch are gone, stripped for salvage.

  Julius Kroehl’s Sub Marine Explorer, now abandoned on a little-known island off Panama, was the only successful “Union” Civil War submarine, the brainchild of an undersea pioneer whose service in the war was relegated, along with his magnificent invention, to the backwaters of history. History is often dominated by “what if?” What if Kroehl had invented his submarine earlier and sent it into combat against the Confederacy? What if, on one of those missions, Sub Marine Explorer had sunk, carrying vessel and crew into the honored halls of wartime sacrifice like H.I. Hunley? There would have been two Civil War submarines, forever linked in history. But events didn’t work that way, and Sub Marine Explorer had a more peaceful career, far from home, where the memory of her location and identity faded with time, to be resurrected only by chance by a vacationing archeologist.

  CONCLUSION

  WHAT’S NEXT?

  What’s next? It’s a big ocean full of wrecks, and as I write this, The Sea Hunters team is planning to return to Chile to dive on the flagship of the Chilean Navy, Esmeralda, sunk in combat during the War of the Pacific in 1879. That war, between Chile and Peru, was a bloody struggle largely forgotten by the English-speaking world. It is not forgotten in South America. The captain of Esmeralda, Arturo Prat, is buried in a place of honor on Valparaiso’s harbor front, and his name lives on many buildings and streets. Prat died when his wooden warship was rammed by the Peruvian ironclad monitor Huascar. He leapt from the decks of his sinking ship onto the prow of Huascar to inspire his men to follow him and try to take the Peruvian ship. Instead, he was shot down and died, sword in hand, a hero honored by both sides. Esmeralda’s wooden hulk is still intact and holds the bones of many of her dead sailors more than a century after the battle.

  We will also journey to the coast of Vietnam to explore the history-rich waters off the ancient city of Hoi An. Located at the silted mouth of a river, Hoi An was a port of the seafaring Cham empire. The Cham, an Indo-Asiatic people, were traders who built magnificent cities of brick, which rivaled nearby Angkor Wat, up the rivers in the heart of Southeast Asia. The Cham empire ultimately fell in the late fifteenth century as a result of warfare with the people of Angkor and the rising power of the Da Viet people of the North, but Hoi An lived on. In the sixteenth century, Hoi An served as Vietnam’s major port. Centuries later, trade shifted to a nearby bay just off the port city of Danang.

  As a result of the centuries of trade, storms and warfare, the waters off Hoi An and Danang are filled with shipwrecks. Medieval wrecks laden with trade goods — mostly pottery — have been discovered by fishermen. Unfortunately, some of the wrecks have been salvaged and their artifacts sold to feed the voracious international antiquities market. Our trip to Vietnam has more than one purpose. We will work on the wrecks of Hoi An to find a suitable site for scientific excavation so that its contents and story can form the basis of a new maritime museum there. Operated by the Vietnamese, the new museum, we hope, will become a centre for Vietnamese archeologists to work to study and recover their country’s rich underwater heritage, and not let it be taken away and sold. Our partner in this new venture is George Belcher, the discoverer of the U.S. brig Somers, who has created the Asia Maritime Foundation to fund the museum and the training of Vietnamese archeologists.

  Then we’re off to the coast of Normandy, where, in June 1944, the greatest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare breached the walls of Hitler’s Fortress Europa on D-Day. Colleagues from the U.S. Navy and Texas A&M University’s Institute of Nautical Archeology have surveyed the wrecks of D-Day’s Omaha beach, site of the American landings. We’ll go there to complete the survey at Juno beach, where Canadian troops poured ashore under heavy fire on “the longest day.” Earlier surveys have found sunken ships, landing craft and tanks just offshore, and we expect to find even more — fallen warriors who never made it to the beach sixty years ago, in a battle that literally changed the face of history. All the more significant is the fact that in the waters of the English Channel, those remnants of battle lie exactly where they fell, on a raw submerged landscape of war that is very different from the manicured lawns, memorials and museums that commemorate D-Day ashore.

/>   In the years to come, there will be many more adventures and many more encounters with shipwrecks and the relics of the events that shaped the world we live in. But as I write, I think of one particular dive with The Sea Hunters. We were surveying the depths of Lake Ontario, on the Canadian side near Point Petre, a graveyard of ships. It is also the site of a 1950s Canadian missile range, where the rocket-launched Avro Arrow test models we were hunting for had been shot out over the lake. A sonar survey of the lake bed by Mike Fletcher’s friend, Dave Gartshore, had discovered a rocket and a two-masted wreck.

  The rocket turned out to be the remains of a Canadian-built missile used to test launch a Velvet Glove air-to-air missile, the weapon being considered for use in the Avro Arrow. This remnant of testing at the Picton range, while an indirect link to the Avro Arrow program, was not what we had come looking for. Them’s the breaks in sea hunting. Sometimes you find what you seek, and sometimes you don’t.

  The unexpected treasure is the shipwreck, which turns out to be a completely intact two-masted schooner. She lies nearly upright and the masts rise out of the deck to reach for the surface, just like Vrouw Maria’s. Unlike that fabled Finnish shipwreck, however, this mystery schooner as yet has no name. But we can say, based on the equipment and the way it is built, that it seems to date to just around 1865, and may have sunk within twenty years of its launch. It may even be older, built around 1850 and updated, as some of its fittings are from that earlier time.

  The quarterdeck at the stern served as the roof for a small cabin, probably the captain’s. The sliding hatch that led below is gone, but looking inside, we see the top of a small iron stove and scattered furniture. Close by, the ship’s wooden wheel sits waiting for a helmsman. The cargo hatches gape open, their wooden covers lying off to one side. The schooner was heavily loaded with coal, which indicates that she had loaded the cargo on the American side at Oswego, New York, the principal coal port on the lake in the mid-nineteenth century.