“In the rivers we invariably found a muddy bed; in Chesapeake Bay we found bottoms of various kinds, in some places so soft that our divers would sink up to their knees, while in other places the ground would be hard, and at one place we ran across a bottom which was composed of a loose gravel, resembling shelled corn. Out in the ocean, however, was found the ideal submarine course, consisting of a fine gray sand, almost as hard as a macadamized road, and very level and uniform.”
During this cruise under the waters of Chesapeake Bay, the Argonaut came on the wrecks of several sunken vessels, which Mr. Lake or some member of his crew examined through the open door in the bottom of the diving-compartment. The air inside was kept at a sufficiently high pressure to keep the water from entering, and the man in the submarine could pull up pieces of the wreck with a short boathook, or even reach down and place his bare hand on the back of a big fish swimming past. Sometimes members of the crew would put on diving-suits and walk out over the bottom, keeping in communication with the boat by telephone. Telephone stations were even established on the bottom of the bay, with cables running to the nearest exchange on shore, and conversations were held with people in Baltimore, Washington, and New York. (Perhaps the commanders of German submarines in British waters to-day are using this method to communicate with German spies in London, Dublin, and Liverpool.)
The Spanish-American War was being fought while Mr. Lake was making these experiments. The entrance to Hampton Roads was planted with electric mines, but though he was forbidden to go too near them, the inventor proved that nothing would be easier than to locate the cable connecting them with the shore, haul it up into the diver’s compartment of the Argonaut and cut it. He did this with a dummy cable of his own, and then repeatedly begged the navy department to let him take the Argonaut into the harbor of Santiago de Cuba and disable the mines that were keeping Admiral Sampson’s fleet from going in and smashing the Spanish squadron there. But his offer, like that of John P. Holland, was refused.
“In 1898, also,” says Mr. Lake, “the Argonaut made the trip from Norfolk to New York under her own power and unescorted. In her original form she was a cigar-shaped craft with only a small percentage of reserve buoyancy in her surface cruising condition. We were caught out in the severe November northeast storm of 1898 in which over two hundred vessels were lost and we did not succeed in reaching a harbor in the ‘horseshoe’ back of Sandy Hook until three o’clock in the morning. The seas were so rough they would break over her conning-tower in such masses I was obliged to lash myself fast to prevent being swept overboard. It was freezing weather and I was soaked and covered with ice on reaching harbor.”
Courtesy of International Marine Engineering.
Argonaut as Rebuilt.
Mr. Lake then sent the Argonaut to a Brooklyn shipyard, where her original cigar-shaped hull was cut in half, and lengthened twenty feet, after which a light ship-shaped superstructure was built over her low sloping topsides. To keep it from being crushed in by water pressure when submerged, scupper-like openings were cut in the thin plating where it joined the stout, pressure-resisting hull, so that the superstructure automatically filled itself with sea-water on submerging and drained itself on rising again. Though uninhabitable, its interior supplied useful storage space, particularly for the gasoline fuel tanks, which, as Mr. Lake had already discovered, gave off fumes that soon rendered the air inside the submarine unbreathable, unless the tanks were kept outside instead of inside the hull. The swan-bow and long bowsprit of the new superstructure, together with the two ventilator-masts, gave the rebuilt Argonaut a schooner-like appearance, and her bowsprit has been compared to the whip-socket on the dashboard of the earliest automobiles. But Mr. Lake declares that this was no useless leftover but a practicable spring-buffer to guard against running into submerged rocks, while the bobstay helped the Argonaut to climb over the obstruction, as she could over anything on the sea-bottom she could get her bows over.
Primarily, the superstructure served to make the submarine more seaworthy as a surface craft. Until then, most inventors and designers of undersea boats had confined their attentions to the problems of underwater navigation only, because, as had been pointed out by the monk Mersenne before 1648, even during the most violent storms the disturbance is felt but a little distance below the surface. But Mr. Lake realized that a submarine, like every other kind of boat, spends most of its existence on top of the water and that it is not always desirable to submerge whenever a moderate-sized wave sweeps over one of the old-fashioned, low-lying, cigar-shaped vessels. With her new superstructure, the Argonaut rode the waves as lightly as any yacht and ushered in the era of the sea-going submarine.