The United States navy tests each new submarine built for it by actually lowering the boat, with no one in it, to a depth of 200 feet. We have no Laurenti dock, no _Vulcan_, no sea-going salvage dock of any kind. The tender _Fulton_ has a powerful crane, but she cannot be on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the Far East, simultaneously.
“The difficulties encountered in raising the sunken British submarine _A-3_,” wrote Mr. R. G. Skerrett in the “Scientific American” some years ago, “have in them a note of warning for us. We are steadily adding to our flotilla of under-water boats, and yet we have no proper facilities in the government service for the prompt salvage of any of these boats should they be carried suddenly to the bottom. We have been fortunate so far in escaping serious accidents, but that is no reason for assuming that we are any more likely to be immune from disaster than any other naval service. We should profit by the catastrophes which have befallen England, Russia, France, Germany, and Japan, and no longer continue unprepared for kindred mishaps.”[19]
We refused to profit and we continued unprepared. Then came a brief official cablegram from Hawaii, “Honolulu, March 25, 1915. U. S. submarine _F-4_ left tender at 9 A.M. for submerged run. Failed to return to surface.”
The other two submarines on the station and motor-boats from the tender _Alert_ cruised about till they found the spot where oil and air-bubbles were coming to the surface. Two tugs then swept the bottom with a two-thousand foot sweep of chains and wire cables, which caught early the next morning on what proved to be the lost submarine, in three hundred feet of water, about a mile and a half outside the entrance to Honolulu Harbor.
For twenty-four hours or so the navy department held out the hope that the men on board her were still alive and might be rescued. But there was nothing ready to rescue them with. Three weeks were spent in building the windlasses for an improvised salvage-dock made out of two mud scows. In the meanwhile, a detachment of the department’s most skilled divers were sent out from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. With their aid, strong wire cables were passed under the submarine’s hull. While engaged on this work, one of the divers, Chief Gunner’s Mate Frank Crilley, broke all deep submergence records by descending to a depth of 288 feet. As a result, his lungs were severely injured and he soon afterwards developed pneumonia.