While ice is a deterrent to surface navigation, it is actually an aid to under-water navigation, providing the submarine boat is specially equipped with guide wheels or "runners" on top of the hull to enable her to slide or wheel along under the ice.
A design of the under-ice submarine illustrated was prepared by me a number of years ago to meet the desires of an associate of Captain Nansen, the Arctic explorer, for a vessel that could be navigated either on the surface or under the ice. I explained the principal features and possibilities of a vessel of this type for under-ice navigation before the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, in 1898, and at one time I thought one of the prominent New York newspapers was going to finance the building of such a vessel for North Polar exploration work, but the submarine was then looked upon as too much of an experiment and nothing ever came of the negotiations.
Some years afterward, in Christiania, Norway, I met and discussed the project with Captain Scott Hanson, R.N., who was associated with Nansen in his historical search for the North Pole, and he became quite enthusiastic over the possibilities of a submarine of this type for North Polar exploration.
An under-ice submarine of the type illustrated, fitted with large storage-battery capacity, would be able to average one hundred miles per day under the ice and about two hundred and fifty miles per day in open water. Starting from Spitzbergen, therefore, and going over Nansen's route, if the same conditions were met as he describes, the round trip to the Pole should be made in about ten days' time and in perfect comfort, as, no matter how cold the weather is above the surface, the temperature of the water is always above the freezing-point below the ice.
Later I was asked to submit to the chief engineer of one of the Canadian railways plans for an under-ice cargo-carrying submarine to enable them to transport passengers, mail, and freight from their mainland terminal at Vancouver to an open harbor on the island of Victoria.
Cargo-carrying submarines fitted to under-run ice fields will shorten trade routes by opening up to navigation the Northwest Passage, and will also open up new ports in northern Europe and Asia, and provide an outlet for Siberian-grown wheat and other northern products which are not now utilized because of lack of transportation facilities.
Investigation of the geological formation of sea-bottoms, the flora and fauna of the sea, will be greatly assisted by bottom-creeping submarines. Fitted with powerful searchlights and moving-picture cameras, actual sea-bottom conditions may be reproduced up to depths of one thousand feet or more. The author, in 1898, succeeded in taking photographs through the windows of the Argonaut by means of an ordinary kodak, and last year the Williamson brothers showed in moving-picture houses throughout the country some wonderful submarine moving pictures they had secured by the use of their collapsible submarine tube.
One of the greatest pleasures in life so far denied to most men is to witness the constantly changing scenery of under-sea life in tropical waters. It has been one of the great desires of my life to explore the bottom of the southern seas. All of my submarine work has been in the more northern waters, covering the Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound, on the Atlantic coast north of Virginia Beach, and in the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland. The range of vision in any of these waters did not exceed forty feet, but that has been sufficient to create a zest for more. The beauties of under-sea life can be described only by a poet. It is impossible for me to convey to the imagination the wonderful beauty of some of the under-sea gardens when seen through the windows of a submarine automobile. Imagine, if you can, these under-sea gardens with masses of vegetation, swaying to the current and waves of the sea, of a great variety of form and color and with myriads of many beautiful and variously colored fishes swimming among them, with perhaps a background of a wonderful coral reef of fantastic shapes, with the octopus, or devil-fish, lurking at the mouths of dark caverns, and the long, gray man-eating shark, like a ghost now and then flitting within one's range of vision. Instead of the sky above you, you see a scintillating mirror which reflects the sun's rays as they penetrate the clear blue waters and strike the white sands and are reflected back to this under surface of the water and are then re-reflected back in multitudinous rainbows of color.
Such sights await the tourist of the future who visits some of the southern seas, with the further privilege of seeing some of the old wrecks, many of which have been lost since the days of the Spanish galleons by striking on some of these same coral reefs, and whose skeletons now lie at their base. I have built for my own use a combination house-boat and exploring submarine automobile, and hope in the near future to explore some of the southern waters along the Florida coast and in the Caribbean Sea; also, later to build larger submarine automobiles to enable "sight-seeing" parties to see some of the beauties of "Davy Jones' locker."