Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [96]
Yesterday afternoon there was a private trial of the Pacific Pearl Company’s Sub Marine Explorer, in the dock foot of North third-street, Eastern District… Julius H. Kroehl, engineer, with Frederick Michaels, August Getz and John Tanner, entered the explorer through her man-hole, which being finally dosed and the signal given the boat was submerged, and for an hour and a half she traversed the bed of the dock. During the submersion the friends of those onboard the boat exhibited considerable anxiety for their safety, but then at last when she rose to the surface… they gave vent to their feelings in repeated cheers. These were again and again repeated, when the engineer held up a pail of mud which he had gathered at the bottom of the dock, showing conclusively the success of the experiment.
But even if the end of the war had not ended the Navy’s interest in submarines, then the failure of its own great wartime experiment, the submarine Intelligent Whale, decisively closed the door. After three years of work, the shipyard finally launched Intelligent Whale just a month before Kroehl’s highly publicized demonstration of Sub Marine Explorer. Unlike Kroehl’s boat, Intelligent Whale was not a success, reportedly killing dozens of crewmen in various trials and tests. Renamed “Disastrous Jonah” by wags, Intelligent Whale ended her days laid up, unused. Thirty-one years would pass before the U.S. Navy acquired another submarine, in 1897. Another seventeen years would pass until a submarine again sank an enemy vessel in wartime, when the German U-21 sent HMS Kent to the bottom of the North Sea, an act that heralded the opening of a new and far deadlier campaign of submarine warfare and that changed the way war was fought at sea.
TO PANAMA AND OBLIVION
After the demonstrations of Kroehl’s submarine, both he and his invention left New York. Sometime that fall, or early the following year, the Pacific Pearl Company shipped Sub Marine Explorer to the Pacific coast of Panama. There, it worked for a while, according to a report published in a company prospectus published in or around 1867, and a 1902 article reported that at Panama, Sub Marine Explorer “was successfully used, and Mr. Kroehl said, the divers employed in the boat enjoyed better health than the other divers… The bottom of the boat could be opened or closed as desired. When exploring in considerable depths the bottom was closed, to save the crew from the heavy pressures.” But at some stage the submarine was abandoned, perhaps as early as the fall of 1869. Kroehl was not around then. He had died of the “fever” in Panama two years earlier.
Why there and when? Just off the beach where Explorer now rests is a large pearl bed in about 100 feet of water, and it was there that the submarine was working in 1869 in the last known contemporary mention in print. Perhaps Explorer was left on the beach after something broke, or perhaps the pearl bed was fished out. Perhaps, without Julius Kroehl around to care for his invention, no one else could. We may never know. Someone did try to salvage the wreck at some distant time, because the conning tower is wrapped with wire cable, and the tower and the hull around it are slightly deformed from torquing from an offshore direction, as if someone had tried to pull it off the beach and failed. And some features are missing from the submarine—the propeller and the conning tower hatch are gone, stripped for salvage.
Julius Kroehl’s Sub Marine Explorer, now abandoned on a little-known island off Panama, was the only successful “Union” Civil War submarine, the brainchild of an undersea pioneer whose service in the war was relegated, along with his magnificent invention, to the backwaters of history. History is often dominated by “what if?” What if Kroehl had invented his submarine earlier and sent it into combat against the Confederacy? What if, on one of those missions, Sub Marine Explorer had sunk,