Adventures of a Sea Hunter (30 page)

The tide starts to drop, and suddenly, I see a rusted bit of metal sticking up out of the surf. As the water continues to recede, the unmistakable form of a submarine emerges, dripping wet, stained red and orange with corrosion. But it looks nothing like a Japanese midget submarine of the Second World War. In fact, it looks nothing like most submarines I’ve ever seen, save one, a turn-of-the-century precursor to the sub
Holland I.
That 60-odd-foot submersible, the first of the Royal Navy’s fleet of submarines, is preserved ashore at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, England, not far from where navy divers discovered the sunken
Holland I
and raised her for exhibition.

But while this looks a little like
Holland I
and its numerous early sister subs, the products of the genius of an eccentric Irish-American inventor, John Holland, it’s not one of his. It is simply too small. Football shaped, with a low conning tower, this riveted iron craft looks like something out of 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea.

James Delgado in the hatch of
Sub Marine Explorer
in Panama. Photo by Ann Goodhart

Wading out into the ocean, I splash in water up to my chest to reach the wreck. As the sea washes over and around the hull, I can see that it is firmly bedded down in the sand and that the sea has opened a hole in the iron plates that form the hull. Crawling inside, and ignoring the pain as the sharp metal bites deeply into a shin, I ponder the spider-web lattice of thick iron bars that brace the chamber. I’ve never seen anything like it. The hull form looks to be from around the year 1900, but these iron bars look like they’ve been forged with a heavy hammer, like something out of the 1850s. After crawling out and nicking myself again, I scramble up the slippery top of the submarine to reach the conning tower. It is small, barely big enough for me to fit, and as I look in, I hear the booming of the surf and feel a rush of cool salty air hit my face. There’s more than one hole in this hull.

Balancing myself on my hands, I drop into the hatch. My feet catch on a lip—the seat for another, inner hatch, perhaps. But it is missing, and so, camera in one hand, I carefully line myself up and drop into what I hope will be chest-high water. It turns out to be only waist deep. My feet hit sand, and I’m suddenly in darkness as my eyes adjust. I grab my camera and hit the flash, and see that I’m in an iron cavern that’s dripping with water and rust. I hit the flash again and look into the water. I wish I hadn’t. This submarine, half filled with sand, looks like a perfect haven for the region’s well known venomous sea snakes. At this moment, I know exactly how Indiana Jones felt in the Well of Souls. “Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?” I jump up, catch the lip of the hatch and pull myself out of the hull just as my imagination pictures a tiny pair of fanged jaws reaching for my ankle. As I jump off the sub and wade to shore, I speculate about just what it is I’ve found on this deserted beach. Whose ancient submarine is it, and how did it end up here?

The truth is often stranger than fiction. A return trip to the beach in November 2002, this time armed with a tape measure and a pad for making notes, gives me more than a basic understanding of the submarine. I e-mail photographs of it around the world to colleagues who study old submarines. No one can figure it out, though one researcher, Gene Canfield, says it looks similar to
Intelligent Whale
, a submarine built for the Union Navy during the Civil War but never finished. Could it be that old? I wonder as I continue to send out my queries. Then, in mid-2003, I get an answer from Rich Wills, who thinks it looks more like another long-forgotten Civil War submarine, the
Sub Marine Explorer.
No one knows what happened to that sub, Rich explains. After the war, it ended up in Panama, working for the Pacific Pearl Company, harvesting pearls from deep-water oyster beds.

I sit up and take notice. After all, the wreck lies in the Bay of Panama, in an island group known as the Pearl Archipelago. But is it really a Civil War submarine that vanished from the pages of history after 1869? Could a submarine survive, half submerged on a tropical beach, for more than 130 years? Rich sends me a copy of a 1902 article on pioneer submarines of the nineteenth century. It reproduces a profile plan of
Sub
Marine Explorer and
gives its basic dimensions. As I look at it, I smile. The profile matches perfectly, down to the placement and size of the conning tower. The rounded chamber at the top of the submarine with the forged iron braces would be filled with air for buoyancy. And, as I compare the measurements with my notes, it all fits. The 36-foot
Sub Marine Explorer
is a perfect match.

But how does
Sub Marine Explorer
fit into the history of submarine development? Built in 1865, what role did it play, if any, in the Civil War? And how does it compare with another recent discovery, the Confederate Civil War submarine H.I.
Hunley?
Found after years of hard work by Clive Cussler’s National Underwater and Marine Agency team and raised by the State of South Carolina,
Hunley
is one of the great archeological treasures of the Civil War, on a par with the ironclad
USS
Monitor
, whose engine and turret have also been pulled from the depths. Even as I sit pondering the mysteries of
Sub Marine Explorer
, a team of archeologists is carefully excavating and dismantling
Hunley
to reveal its secrets. So for the answers on
Sub Marine Explorer
, I turn to
Hunley
project historian Mark Ragan. “There’s no one better,” Clive tells me as he reads Ragan’s number to me over the phone.

Mark answers his phone with a laconic drawl that quickens with excitement as I tell him what I’ve found on a Panamanian beach. I e-mail him a handful of photos, and as he opens them on his computer 3,000 miles away, I hear the subtle but sharp intake of his breath. That’s a good thing, because Clive is right. No one knows Civil War submarines better than Mark Ragan. He literally wrote the book on them, and he now turns his considerable energy and skill to dig deep into the archives to learn more about
Sub Marine Explorer
and its inventor, a forgotten American engineering genius named Julius H. Kroehl.

War spurs terrible and magnificent inventions, often taking ideas and concepts developed in peacetime and testing them hurriedly in times of crisis. During the Civil War, technology played a significant role. Among
other innovations, the war introduced new guns and more powerful cannon, ironclad warships with rotating turrets, undersea mines—and the submarine. There was nothing new about each of these inventions save their first practical and deadly use in combat. The pioneering naval accomplishments of the war started with the attack on the wooden fleet of the Union Navy at Hampton Roads, Virginia, by the Confederate ironclad
CSS
Virginia
, demonstrating that this new type of warship doomed the “wooden walls” that had dominated naval warfare for centuries. The first clash between ironclads took place when the Union’s
USS
Monitor
interceded between
Virginia
and the Union wooden fleet the following day and fought the Confederate ship to a standstill.

Another innovation was the use of an electrically detonated “torpedo,” or mine, one of which sent the Union’s ironclad
Cairo
to the bottom of the Yazoo River, giving the ill-fated gunboat the dubious distinction of being the first warship in history to be sunk by a mine. Later, there was the brave but doomed sortie of the Confederate submarine H.I.
Hunley
into Charleston Harbor to sink the Union warship
Housatonic
with a spar-mounted “torpedo” projecting from her bow. Shortly after this victory,
Hunley
sank, taking her crew with her, just a few hundred yards from her victim. No one knows why
Hunley
sank, but the tiny craft gained fame as the first submarine to destroy an enemy vessel in combat. Quickly buried by silt,
Hunley’
’s grave remained undiscovered for 150 years.

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.