And even after all the prehistoric beasts became extinct and so were no more on the face of the earth to menace his safety, he still kept thinking over the idea of the submarine, and it kept getting stronger within him as the convolutions of his brain grew deeper.
The Development of the Submarine.—By hard thinking and long experimenting, and the other way about, and always working to the end that he might invent some kind of boat by which he could travel under and through the water (or, as the French have it, sous marin—sous meaning under and, of course marin means sea) like the swiftest of fish and quite as easily.
His reason for wanting a submarine boat now that the animals he had so feared in the past had disappeared, was to find treasure ships that had sunk to the bottom of the old ocean, or, more likely because it seemed more practical, to attack, unseen and without warning, merchantmen that carried precious cargoes—in a word, he would a submarine pirate be.
But like everything else that needs mechanical devices and electrical apparatus the development of the submarine from the first crude attempts to the powerful and perfectly controlled U-boat as we know it to our sorrow to-day took many men working through many years to make it sea-worthy and practical.
In each one of these inventors the thought that ruled him was to make a boat which would sink or swim, as he wanted it to; and though none of the earlier workers succeeded in building a really good submarine, it was not their fault but their misfortune, for the vital mechanical and electrical appliances they needed had yet to be invented.
But the efforts of each one of these pioneers served as a stepping-stone to the building of the first practical boat, in 1901, which could be used successfully as an undersea destroyer. This was the Holland, which you will read more about presently; and the British Admiralty purchased five of the first ones built.
The First Submarine Boat.—Away back there in the very year when the Pilgrims landed from the Mayflower on Plymouth Rock—that is to say, in 1620—a Dutchman named Van Drebel, who happened to be living at that time in England, worked out the idea that originated in the brain of his prehistoric ancestor, and that was to build a submarine boat.
Of course in those days there were no such things as steel boats, nor had engines to propel them been invented, but men were adept builders of wooden boats and, as much or more to their credit, they were past masters of the art of sailing them.
But the lack of steel, of engines, and of other recent inventions didn’t daunt the dauntless Van Drebel in the least; for he went right ahead and built his underwater craft of such materials as he could get hold of. His submarine was nothing more nor less than a regular wooden boat which was completely decked over, covered with leather, and smeared with tallow to make it watertight.
The submarine was propelled through the water by means of a pair of oars on each side as shown in [Fig. 3], very much in the same fashion as were the far-famed Grecian galleys of old; but in this boat the oars passed through watertight flexible covers fastened over the portholes.