CELTIC
CORNER
Some stories about the Irish Immigrants
An Irishman named John P. Holland, a schoolteacher in Paterson, NJ uses his
spare time to invent a submarine or, at the very least, to put it on track to
becoming a practical-indeed, deadly- weapon of war.
Holland was
born in Liscannor Bay in County Clare in 1842. He was educated at the Limerick
Christian Brothers School, and he originally intended to be a Christian
Brother, to which end he took vows in 1858 and over the years taught in a
number of different places. He also wanted to go to sea, but his poor eyesight
prevented him from doing so.
In 1872 the
family emigrated to the states, but before leaving Holland was released from
his vows.
Holland, the
son of a coastguardsman in Ireland, had no formal engineering education, but he
started educating himself in engineering and drafting when he was very young
and showed a brilliant aptitude for it. He had always been interested in
submarines. After all, at the time the British navy was formidable, and Holland
looked on the sub as a way of sneaking up unseen and sinking its ships.
In 1874 and
1875, when Holland was trying to first interest the U.S. Navy in his submarine,
the idea was not new. Indeed, using a submarine to sink a warship had been
demonstrated in the Civil War by the Confederate sub Hulney, which had
succeeded in its attack on a warship but sunk in the process. And one hundred
years before that a submarine invented by a man named David Bushnell had tried
to sink a British ship during the Revolutionary War.
The navy
thought the idea a bit preposterous, in part because Holland was not a sailor;
this idea, of course, was also preposterous, as if only a sailor could invent a
seagoing craft.
But the
Fenians were interested. Though they had been dealt a serious blow in the war
against England because of their defeat in Canada in 1866, a number of them had
reassembled, and Holland presented his idea to them. He impressed them enough
to invest some sixty thousand pounds from their “skirmishing fund” for him to
build the real thing. He did, and one day the Fenians and Holland assembled on
the banks of the Passaic River and the fourteen foot craft was launched.
It didn’t
even float, quickly filling up with water and sinking to the bottom. But it was
raised, and after an examination it was discovered that one of the workman had
failed to install a pair of screws, which had left an opening for the water to
pour in through.
The
submarine was drained, the screws were installed, and Holland himself too it
out. It floated, it dived and surely much to the relief and joy of Holland, it
resurfaced.
Holland set
about fine tuning the craft. The plan for mounting an attack against British
ships was already settled. Holland was well aware of the power of their ships,
which made a direct confrontation foolhardy. Sneakiness would be the key. His
plan involved launching the sub from a trapdoor in the side of an innocent
looking ship that would anchor near the British craft. It was a plan, indeed,
that modern navies would use over and over again.
Then, in
1883, the Fenian organization abruptly started to deteriorate. One night a
group of Fenians took the sub, which was anchored in New Jersey, hauled it up
to New Haven, Connecticut, and tried to launch it. They didn’t succeed, and
they abandoned the craft at a nearby brass factory. Holland was incensed, and
the great scheme was abandoned. Holland and the Fenians never communicated
again.
Holland was
truly ahead of his time. His theory about the submarine was that the best
possible shape would be that of a cigar. But the soundness of this idea did not
emerge until the 1950s, long after Holland was gone.
He never
made any money from the submarine, and as time went by he started to be deeply
concerned about the havoc a sub could wreak. The validity of his concerns were
borne out particularly in World War II, when German “wolf packs” roamed he
Atlantic, sending thousands of tons of materials and thousands of people, many
of them civilians, to the bottom of the ocean.
Erin
Go Bragh
Frank
Darcy
