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at 3½ knots, dove to 12 feet, then dove again and stayed down an hour before resurfacing. The impressed Irish patriots promptly offered Holland a further $20,000 to construct a full-size version that might be capable of striking an actual blow against British tyranny.
    Despite efforts to keep the construction of the new boat a secret, word of Holland’s experiments spread quickly as soon as he began test runs in the Morris Canal Basin, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, in June 1881. A reporter from the
New York Sun
showed up soon thereafter, tried and failed to persuade Holland to give him a story about the submarine, then went ahead and wrote his story the next day anyway. Among other things he inventively asserted that the vessel was called the
Fenian Ram
. The name, woefully inaccurate but unimpeachable as publicity, stuck.
    The whole enterprise was ludicrous: a self-taught inventor, shadowy revolutionaries, a secret war chest, incoherent conspiracies. Except that Holland had, quite simply, invented the modern submarine there on the shores of the Hudson. His new boat was powered by a 17-horsepower petroleum engine that drove the screw as well as two compressors that supplied compressed air to keep the balance tanks trimmed; by partially blowing out the water in the tanks, small changes in the boat’s weight as fuel was expended and projectiles fired could be compensated for. The problem of longitudinal stability—the tendency of a submarine underwater to rock back and forth along its length like a seesaw—had bedeviled all earlier inventors and would continue to plague Holland’s rival designers even for years to come. Holland ingeniously solved it by maintaining a fixed center of gravity and positive buoyancy: centrally located seawater ballast tanks together with compressed air reservoirs in the bow and stern stabilized the boat. Instead of relying on ballast to make the boat sink on an even keel like a lead weight (or, worse, employing awkward and not very effective contrivances like vertically projecting screws to propel the boat up and down), Holland’s design used the dynamic force of the boat’s forward motion, acting on divingplanes at the stern, to drive it underwater even while preserving a small positive buoyancy. Being able to dive and surface “like a porpoise” in this fashion, Holland explained, allowed for quick dives to evade an enemy and also kept the boat maneuverable underwater, instead of wallowing like a waterlogged drum. It was the principle of all successful submarines since.
    The boat was equipped with an air-powered gun that could fire a 100-pound charge of dynamite 50 yards underwater or 300 yards through the air. The
Fenian Ram
made 9 miles an hour on the surface, and probably almost as much submerged with its engine breathing a supply of stored compressed air. “There is scarcely anything required of a good submarine boat that this one did not do well enough, or fairly well,” Holland later wrote. 9 It was not an idle boast: in its essentials—propulsion, balance, weaponry—the
Fenian Ram
had all the working ingredients of a true submarine.
    Meanwhile, the Fenians were falling out among themselves. There were accusations of misuse of the Skirmishing Fund and demands for accounting from some discontented members, with others objecting that so much had been spent on this speculative “salt water enterprise” at all. Fenian leader John Devoy was accused in a front-page article in a rival New York Irish newspaper of disrespecting “the intent of the donors” to the fund who were expecting more immediate and visible results. (Devoy shot back, “England always gets her dirty work done among Irishmen by ardent ‘patriots’ who want value for their money and ten cents worth of revolution every week, or an Englishman killed every once in a while, and the breed is with us yet.”) 10 In November 1883, with a court case pending in New York that threatened to tie up the