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conceived upon the extremely dubious operational premise that they would approach an enemy ship undetected, laboriously augering a hole or plunging a harpoon into its wooden hull below the waterline to affix a charge, then retreat a safe distance, again undetected, before finally yanking a lanyard to set off the explosion. In everything from their basic sailing properties to their purported military utility they depended as much on the sheer daredeviltry of their pilots as on the technological ingenuity that went into their conception. Their hand-powered screws and cranks and valves looked more like something out of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks of the fifteenth century than the naval architecture of the nineteenth.
    The first of these hand-cranked, barely submersibles to carry out a successful attack on an enemy warship was the Confederate
H. L. Hunley
in the American Civil War, but at a terrible cost to her own crewmen. Thirteen men were killed in initial training mishaps, the men drowning or suffocating when the boat twice sank to the bottom of Charleston harbor. Shortly after her third set of volunteers managed to attach and detonate an explosive mine that sent the Union steamship
Housatonic
to the bottom on February 17, 1864, the
Hunley
sank for the third and last time, perhaps when the oxygen inside the crew compartment was exhausted. All eight men on board died.
    But in the thirty-six years that Bauer’s
Plongeur
lay in the mud beneath Kiel harbor, everything changed: the modern submarine was born. Much of the credit went to another man whom it would have been easy to mistake for just another crank. John P. Holland was an Irish schoolteacher and music instructor with a high school education, poor eyesight, frail health, and improbable dreams of building both a flying machine and a submarine. In 1873, aged thirty-two, he took passage by steerage to America. His two brothers, who had joined the Irish independence movement, had preceded him, fleeing the British authorities. In February 1875, now teaching at a parochial school in Paterson, New Jersey, Holland sent the U.S. Navy Department a plan for a one-man, pedal-powered submarine. The navy dismissed his design as impractical.
    If the navy wasn’t interested, it was exactly the kind of idea to appeal to the militant fringe of Irish Americans who since the 1860s had been hatching increasingly wild and daring schemes to strike British interests around the world in the cause of Irish independence. A few hundred members of the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret society founded in New York City in 1857, had launched a comic-opera “invasion” of British Canada at the end of the American Civil War with the idea of holding the territory hostage in exchange for Irish freedom; the U.S. government in the end paid their train fare home in return for their promise to invade no more foreign countries from American soil. More serious was the raid carried out by the Fenians on the British penal colony at Freemantle, Australia, in the summer of 1876; the arrival in New York on August 19, 1876, of six Irish political prisoners freed in that coup—the men had all been sentenced to penal servitude for life—made headlines around the world. 8
    Over the next four years the Clan na Gael, the organization that had since largely succeeded the Fenian Brotherhood, collected more than $90,000 incontributions to its “Skirmishing Fund,” intended to support a campaign of terror against the British. It was at this time that Holland, probably through his militant brother Michael, made contact with the fund’s trustees. In early 1877 at Coney Island he demonstrated a small working model of a powered submarine. The Fenians agreed to support his experiments, and just over a year later, on June 6, 1878, the 14-foot-long
Holland No. 1
, its balky engine temporarily powered by a jury-rigged steam line run from an accompanying launch, set out from its dock on the Passaic River, ran along the surface