If you had been in London in the year 1624, and had gone to the theater to see “The Staple of News,” a new and very dull comedy by Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson, you would have heard, in act III, scene i, the following dialogue about submarines:

The idea of submarine navigation is much older than 1624. Crude diving bells, and primitive leather diving helmets, with bladders to keep the upper end of the air tube afloat on the surface of the water, were used as early as the fourteenth century. William Bourne, an Englishman who published a book on “Inventions or Devices” in 1578, suggested the military value of a boat that could be sailed just below the surface of the water, with a hollow mast for a ventilator. John Napier, Laird of Merchiston, the great Scotch mathematician who invented logarithms, wrote in 1596 about his proposed “Devices of sailing under the water, with divers other devices and stratagems for the burning of enemies.”

But the first man actually to build and navigate a submarine was a Dutchman: the learned Doctor Cornelius Van Drebel.1 He was “a native of Alkmaar, a very fair and handsome man, and of very gentle manners.” Both his pleasing personality and his knowledge of science—which caused many to suspect him of being a magician—made the Netherlander an honored guest at the court of his most pedantic Majesty, King James I of England.

Van Drebel was walking along the banks of the Thames, one pleasant evening in the year 1620, when he “noticed some sailors dragging behind their barques baskets full of fish; he saw that the barques were weighed down in the water, but that they rose a little when the baskets allowed the ropes which held them to slacken a little. The idea occurred to him that a ship could be held under water by a somewhat similar method and could be propelled by oars and poles.”2

Lodged by the king in Eltham Palace, and supplied with funds from the royal treasury, Van Drebel designed and built three submarine boats, between 1620 and 1624. They were simply large wooden rowboats, decked over and made water-tight by a covering of thick, well-greased leather. Harsdoffer, a chronicler of the period, declared that

“King James himself journeyed in one of them on the Thames. There were on this occasion twelve rowers besides the passengers, and the vessel during several hours was kept at a depth of twelve to fifteen feet below the surface.”

Another contemporary historian, Cornelius Van der Wonde, of Van Drebel’s home town, said of him:

“He built a ship in which one could row and navigate under water from Westminster to Greenwich, the distance of two Dutch miles; even five or six miles or as far as one pleased. In this boat a person could see under the surface of the water and without candle-light, as much as he needed to read in the Bible or any other book. Not long ago this remarkable ship was yet to be seen lying in the Thames or London river.”

The glow of phosphorescent bodies, suggested by the monk Mersenne for illuminating the interior of a submarine, later in the seventeenth century and actually so used by Bushnell in the eighteenth, might have furnished sufficient light for Bible-and compass-reading on this voyage. But how did King James—the first and last monarch to venture on an underwater voyage—the other passengers, and the twelve rowers get enough air?

“That deservedly Famous Mechanician and Chymist, Cornelius Drebell ... conceived, that ’tis not only the whole body of the air but a certain Quintessence (as Chymists speake) or spirituous part that makes it fit for respiration ... so that (for aught I could gather) besides the Mechanicall contrivance of his vessel he had a Chymicall liquor, which he accounted the chief secret of his Submarine Navigation. For when from time to time he perceived that the finer and purer part of the air was consumed or over-clogged by the respiration and steames of those that went in his ship, he would, by unstopping a vessel full of liquor speedily restore to the troubled air such a proportion of vital parts as would make it again for a good while fit for Respiration.”3

Did Van Drebel anticipate by one hundred and fifty years the discovery of oxygen: the life-giving “Quintessence” of air? Even if he did, it is incredible that he should have found a liquid, utterly unknown to modern chemistry, capable of giving off that gas so freely that a few gallons would restore the oxygen to a confined body of air as fast as fifteen or twenty men could consume it by breathing. Perhaps his “Chymicall liquor” instead of producing oxygen directly, increased the proportion of it in the atmosphere by absorbing the carbonic acid gas.

The AbbÉ de Hautefeullie, who wrote in 1680 on “Methods of breathing under water,” made the following shrewd guess at the nature of the apparatus:

“Drebel’s secret was probably the machine which I had imagined, consisting of a bellows with two valves and two tubes resting on the surface of the water, the one bringing down air and the other sending it back. By speaking of a volatile essence which restored the nitrous parts consumed by respiration, Drebel evidently wished to disguise his invention and prevent others from finding out its real nature.”

It is a very great pity that we know no more about these earliest submarines. Cornelius Van Drebel died in 1634, at the age of sixty-two, without leaving any written notes or oral descriptions. We must not think too hardly of this inventor of three centuries ago, unguarded by patent laws, for making a mystery of his discoveries. He had to be a showman as well as a scientist, or his noble patrons would have lost all interest in his “ingenious machines,” and mystery is half of the showman’s game. Besides his “eel-boats,” Van Drebel is said to have invented a wonderful globe with which he imitated perpetual motion and illustrated the course of the sun, moon, and stars; an incubator, a refrigerator, “Virginals that played of themselves,” and other marvels too numerous to mention. Half scientist, half charlatan, wholly medieval in appearance, with his long furred gown and long, fair beard, Cornelius Van Drebel marches picturesquely at the head of the procession of inventors who have made possible the modern submarine.

Eighteen years after Van Drebel’s death, a Frenchman named Le Son built a submarine at Rotterdam. This craft, which is usually referred to as the Rotterdam Boat, was 72 feet long, 12 feet high, and of 8 foot beam. It was built of wood, with sharply tapering ends, and had a superstructure whose sloping sides were designed to deflect cannon balls that might be fired at the boat while traveling on the surface, while iron-shod legs protected the hull when resting on the sea bottom. A single paddle-wheel amidships was to propel the boat,—just how, the inventor never revealed. Like so many other submarines, the Rotterdam Boat was built primarily to be used against the British fleet. But it failed to interest either the Dutch or French minister of marine, and never went into action.

The earliest known contemporary picture of a submarine vessel appeared in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” in 1747. It showed a cross section of an underwater boat built and navigated on the Thames by one Symons. This was a decked-over row-boat, propelled by four pairs of oars working in water-tight joints of greased leather. To submerge his vessel, Symons admitted water into a number of large leather bottles, placed inside the hull with their open mouth passing through holes in the bottom. When he wished to rise, he would squeeze out the water with a lever and bind up the neck of each emptied bottle with string. This ingenious device was not original with Mr. Symons, but was invented by a Frenchman named Borelli in 1680.

Submarine navigation was a century and a half old before it claimed its first victim. J. Day, an English mechanic, rebuilt a small boat so that he was able to submerge it in thirty feet of water, with himself on board, and remain there for twenty-four hours with no ill effect. At the end of this time, Day rose to the surface, absolutely certain of his ability to repeat the experiment at any depth. But how could he turn this to practical account?

It was an age of betting, when gentlemen could always be found to risk money on any wager, however fantastic. Day found a financial backer in a Mr. Blake, who advanced him the money to buy a fifty-ton sloop and fit it with a strong water-tight compartment amidships. Ten tons of ballast were placed in the hold and twenty more hung outside the hull by four iron rods passing through the passenger’s compartment. When the rest of the boat was filled with water, it would sink to the bottom, to rise again when the man inside released the twenty tons of outer ballast.

Shut in the water-tight compartment of this boat, Day sank to the bottom of Plymouth Harbor, at 2 P.M., Tuesday, June 28, 1774, to decide a bet that he could remain twelve hours at a depth of twenty-two fathoms (132 feet). When, at the expiration of this time, the submarine failed to reappear, Mr. Blake called on the captain of a near-by frigate for help. Bluejackets from the warship and workmen from the dockyard were set to work immediately to grapple for the sunken craft and raise her to the surface, but to no avail. The great pressure of water at that depth—150 feet is the limit of safety for many modern submarines—must have crushed in the walls of the water-tight compartment without giving Day time enough to release the outer ballast and rise to safety.