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But even if the end of the war had not ended the Navy’s interest in submarines, then the failure of its own great wartime experiment, the submarine Intelligent Whale, decisively closed the door. After three years of work, the shipyard finally launched Intelligent Whale just a month before Kroehl’s highly publicized demonstration of Sub Marine Explorer. Unlike Kroehl’s boat, Intelligent Whale was not a success, reportedly killing dozens of crewmen in various trials and tests. Renamed “Disastrous Jonah” by wags, Intelligent Whale ended her days laid up, unused. Thirty-one years would pass before the U.S. Navy acquired another submarine, in 1897. Another seventeen years would pass until a submarine again sank an enemy vessel in wartime, when the German U-21 sent HMS Kent to the bottom of the North Sea, an act that heralded the opening of a new and far deadlier campaign of submarine warfare and that changed the way war was fought at sea.
After the demonstrations of Kroehl’s submarine, both he and his invention left New York. Sometime that fall, or early the following year, the Pacific Pearl Company shipped Sub Marine Explorer to the Pacific coast of Panama. There, it worked for a while, according to a report published in a company prospectus published in or around 1867, and a 1902 article reported that at Panama, Sub Marine Explorer “was successfully used, and Mr. Kroehl said, the divers employed in the boat enjoyed better health than the other divers… The bottom of the boat could be opened or closed as desired. When exploring in considerable depths the bottom was closed, to save the crew from the heavy pressures.” But at some stage the submarine was abandoned, perhaps as early as the fall of 1869. Kroehl was not around then. He had died of the “fever” in Panama two years earlier.
Why there and when? Just off the beach where Explorer now rests is a large pearl bed in about 100 feet of water, and it was there that the submarine was working in 1869 in the last known contemporary mention in print. Perhaps Explorer was left on the beach after something broke, or perhaps the pearl bed was fished out. Perhaps, without Julius Kroehl around to care for his invention, no one else could. We may never know. Someone did try to salvage the wreck at some distant time, because the co
Julius Kroehl’s Sub Marine Explorer, now abandoned on a little-known island off Panama, was the only successful “Union” Civil War submarine, the brainchild of an undersea pioneer whose service in the war was relegated, along with his magnificent invention, to the backwaters of history. History is often dominated by “what if?” What if Kroehl had invented his submarine earlier and sent it into combat against the Confederacy? What if, on one of those missions, Sub Marine Explorer had sunk, carrying vessel and crew into the honored halls of wartime sacrifice like H.I. Hunley? There would have been two Civil War submarines, forever linked in history. But events didn’t work that way, and Sub Marine Explorer had a more peaceful career, far from home, where the memory of her location and identity faded with time, to be resurrected only by chance by a vacationing archeologist.
CONCLUSION
WHAT’S NEXT?
What’s next? It’s a big ocean full of wrecks, and as I write this, The Sea Hunters team is pla
We will also journey to the coast of Vietnam to explore the history-rich waters off the ancient city of Hoi An. Located at the silted mouth of a river, Hoi An was a port of the seafaring Cham empire. The Cham, an Indo-Asiatic people, were traders who built magnificent cities of brick, which rivaled nearby Angkor Wat, up the rivers in the heart of Southeast Asia. The Cham empire ultimately fell in the late fifteenth century as a result of warfare with the people of Angkor and the rising power of the Da Viet people of the North, but Hoi An lived on. In the sixteenth century, Hoi An served as Vietnam’s major port. Centuries later, trade shifted to a nearby bay just off the port city of Danang.
As a result of the centuries of trade, storms and warfare, the waters off Hoi An and Danang are filled with shipwrecks. Medieval wrecks laden with trade goods — mostly pottery — have been discovered by fishermen. Unfortunately, some of the wrecks have been salvaged and their artifacts sold to feed the voracious international antiquities market. Our trip to Vietnam has more than one purpose. We will work on the wrecks of Hoi An to find a suitable site for scientific excavation so that its contents and story can form the basis of a new maritime museum there. Operated by the Vietnamese, the new museum, we hope, will become a centre for Vietnamese archeologists to work to study and recover their country’s rich underwater heritage, and not let it be taken away and sold. Our partner in this new venture is George Belcher, the discoverer of the U.S. brig Somers, who has created the Asia Maritime Foundation to fund the museum and the training of Vietnamese archeologists.
Then we’re off to the coast of Normandy, where, in June 1944, the greatest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare breached the walls of Hitler’s Fortress Europa on D-Day. Colleagues from the U.S. Navy and Texas A&M University’s Institute of Nautical Archeology have surveyed the wrecks of D-Day’s Omaha beach, site of the American landings. We’ll go there to complete the survey at Juno beach, where Canadian troops poured ashore under heavy fire on “the longest day.” Earlier surveys have found sunken ships, landing craft and tanks just offshore, and we expect to find even more — fallen warriors who never made it to the beach sixty years ago, in a battle that literally changed the face of history. All the more significant is the fact that in the waters of the English Cha
In the years to come, there will be many more adventures and many more encounters with shipwrecks and the relics of the events that shaped the world we live in. But as I write, I think of one particular dive with The Sea Hunters. We were surveying the depths of Lake Ontario, on the Canadian side near Point Petre, a graveyard of ships. It is also the site of a 1950s Canadian missile range, where the rocket-launched Avro Arrow test models we were hunting for had been shot out over the lake. A sonar survey of the lake bed by Mike Fletcher’s friend, Dave Gartshore, had discovered a rocket and a two-masted wreck.