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:
They write hear one Cornelius’ son Hath made the Hollanders an invisible eel To swim the haven at Dunkirk and sink all The shipping there.
I’ll show you, sir, It is an automa, runs under water With a snug nose, and has a nimble tail Made like an auger, with which tail she wriggles Betwixt the costs of a ship and sinks it straight.
From a right hand I assure you. The eel-boats here, that lie before Queen-hythe Came out of Holland.
A most brave device To murder their flat bottoms.
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]