It was an otherwise unremarkable day in 1883 as the ferry boat St Johns chugged across the Hudson River towards the New Jersey shore, when all of a sudden a monstrous steel porpoise breached the surface nearby before plunging back underwater. The St Johns turned tail and fled back to harbour. Even after the ferry reached the safety of the dock, an observer noted, the captain and crew were still “jumping around and acting as if demented”. The observer was surprised to find he was the cause of their agitation. Shortly after the ferry reached the dock, a submarine pulled in behind it, and out popped the bespectacled head of John Holland, a thin and dapper Irishman. What was all the fuss about, he asked the dock owner. “Oh, you frightened the devil out of the St Johns,” came the reply.
The ferrymen needn’t have worried. Holland’s contraption, dubbed the Fenian Ram, was designed to hunt bigger fish than their ferry. Holland and his crew were angry Irishmen and their sub was armed with a new type of gun. They had plans to sink the British fleet.
NAVIES had been flirting with submarines for decades, only to be put off by their disquieting tendency to go down with all hands. In the past decade, salvage operations of early wrecks such as the Confederate submarine Hunley off South Carolina have made all too clear the dangers faced by 19th-century submariners. Many sailors were convinced, not unreasonably, that underwater vessels were death traps.
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When British inventor Reverend George Garrett, designer of the ill-fated Resurgam, and his two crewmates surfaced in the craft to ask a passing schooner for directions to Liverpool, the skipper looked blankly at their cramped little vessel. “You are,” he replied, “the three biggest fools it has ever been my misfortune to encounter.”
And in any case, submarines were not a very sporting way to conduct warfare. As early as 1801, when Robert Fulton built his Nautilus, Lord St Vincent, First Lord of the Admiralty, protested that submarines would only be useful for weaker powers attacking a stronger foe. Why would Britain need such a cowardly device? His criticism contained an essential insight: submarines could be used by a desperate and downtrodden group to attack a vastly superior enemy. And so it was in 1876 that the Irish rebels of the Fenian brotherhood discreetly approached a shy schoolteacher living in Paterson, New Jersey, with a proposition: would he help them attack the Royal Navy?
Holland hailed from the Irish seaside town of Liscannor, where his father worked with the British Coastguard Service. He’d taken his vows with the Order of Irish Christian Brothers at the age of 17, but his thoughts drifted from religion to naval design. Without any training in the subject, he doggedly sketched out designs for a one-man, iron-hulled submarine, and experimented in a large wooden tub of water with a tiny model driven by a motor scavenged from a clock.
After emigrating and settling in New Jersey in 1875, he submitted proposals for a treadle-operated one-man sub to the US Navy, which dismissed them as impractical. But if the US Navy couldn’t find a use for his boat, his fellow expatriates certainly could.
Few features that we take for granted in submarine design today had been established by then. Hull shapes ranged from boxy to bulbous. Some captains sat completely enclosed in the sub and steered almost blind. Others had to sit with their torso outside, encased in a diving suit, and steer the craft about like a flashy convertible.
Even the means of propulsion was not yet clear. A number of submarine designs still relied on human power, such as the bicycle-like Aquapede and the wooden-hulled and hand-cranked Protector designed by Simon Lake – contrivances that probably would have drowned anyone foolish enough to build them. But human power was insufficient for an iron-hulled attack vessel, and steam was impractical in cramped quarters. Deciding that the Fenian Brotherhood needed a three-man craft 9 metres long and displacing 19 tonnes, Holland decided to use a compact and efficient petrol engine.
Construction of “Boat Number 2” began at the Delamater Iron Works, New York City, in May 1879, though even the owner of the shipyard predicted that the ship would surely sink. Yet Holland’s design insisted on three things that other submarine builders were slower to grasp – a fixed centre of gravity to maintain stability, a curved hydrodynamic shape, and a reserve of positive buoyancy that would allow the sub to surface in an emergency.
Holland ignored the constant pestering of the Fenian leadership, who were now bickering among themselves about the costs involved, and the attentions of New York journalists, who engaged in wild speculations about his “hell diver”. One newspaper’s misnomer for his contraption, the Fenian Ram, stuck – even though the ship, armed with an experimental pneumatic gun, was not really designed to ram its targets. The project became an open secret among New Yorkers and the foreign diplomatic corps, and Holland was visited at the shipyard by envoys of virtually every major European power. Everyone, that is, except the British. But distant observers with binoculars shadowed every launch and test. There was little doubt among the Fenians as to whose pay the observers were in.
By June 1881, Holland and his crew of an engineer and a gunner were ready to take the plunge. The press was waiting for them, as were shipyard workers and local curiosity seekers. Some in the crowd thought they were about to witness maritime suicide. But after touching the bottom, the ship eventually rose again. As Holland recalled: “The green blur on the ports in the conning tower grew lighter as I gazed through them until suddenly the light of full day burst through, almost dazzling me…A cheer burst from the crowd of observers on the dock.”
Not everyone was delighted to see them return to the surface. On 28 July 1881, the British chargé d’affaires in Washington DC complained to the US Secretary of State James Blaine. He demanded that the US government step in and stop Holland. But staff at the State Department, who remembered with bitterness the days when the British sold ships to the rebels in the Confederate States of America, were not much inclined to stir themselves. And so the Irish rebels were left alone.
Ironically, Holland seems to have been held in much higher regard by his British foes than by his Irish friends. While the British had a grudging respect for his engineering prowess, his backers argued over the cost of the sub – a hefty $13,000 – and wondered whether they really wanted to attack the British fleet after all. It didn’t help when one crew member, Engineer Richards, secretly took the Ram out for a joyride one day. Like any sorcerer’s apprentice, he proved woefully unequal to the task. He sailed with the hatch open into the wake of a tugboat, and water rushed into the sub. “He happened to be just below the hatch,” Holland wearily reported afterwards, “and was blown out by escaping air from within the boat.” Richards may have popped out like a champagne cork into the Hudson, but the Ram plummeted to the bottom. It cost $3000 to retrieve it.
No sooner had they drained and repaired it than the Ram was stolen a second time. A trio of impatient Fenians led by John Breslin, editor of the Irish Nation, strolled into the shipyard one night in August 1883 with forged passes, hooked up the Ram to a tugboat and slid off into the night. They sailed to New Haven. When they attempted to pilot the Ram around the harbour there, it nearly lived up to its name in several narrow misses with other shipping, until an exasperated harbour master finally forbade the Fenians from operating the craft.
On discovering the theft, Holland gave up in disgust. “I’ll let her rot on their hands,” he muttered. He never spoke to the Fenians again, and never received an apology or explanation. The Fenians soon found they had a 19-tonne white elephant on their hands. The Ram was ignominiously dragged to a brass foundry owned by a Fenian leader, who cannibalised its engine for his own use. In a New York lavatory, perhaps, are old sink fixtures scavenged from an engine meant to strike terror into the British fleet.
Holland went on to become one of America’s pre-eminent submarine designers, founding the Electric Boat Company, now part of defence giant General Dynamics. But Holland’s insistence that a sub should be rounded like a porpoise, and that its bulky deck guns should be dispensed with to focus instead on its strengths as a torpedo platform, were mulishly ignored by the US Navy until the launch of the Skipjack in 1958, four decades after the self-taught inventor’s death. Naval architects finally had to admit that Holland was right all along.
The Ram itself was hauled out one last time in 1916 for a benefit exhibition in Madison Square Garden, amid the latest uprising in Ireland. That year, Holland’s surviving brother Michael lamented: “I hate to think of that boat becoming a curiosity in a museum.” But that of course is exactly what it is today.
