Reproduced from “Submarine Navigation, Past and Present” by Alan H. Burgoyne, by permission of E. P. Dutton & Company. ]
Lodged by the king in Eltham Palace, and supplied with funds from the royal treasury, Van Drebel designed and built three submarine boats, between 1620 and 1624. They were simply large wooden rowboats, decked over and made water-tight by a covering of thick, well-greased leather. Harsdoffer, a chronicler of the period, declared that
“King James himself journeyed in one of them on the Thames. There were on this occasion twelve rowers besides the passengers, and the vessel during several hours was kept at a depth of twelve to fifteen feet below the surface.”
Another contemporary historian, Cornelius Van der Wonde, of Van Drebel’s home town, said of him:
“He built a ship in which one could row and navigate under water from Westminster to Greenwich, the distance of two Dutch miles; even five or six miles or as far as one pleased. In this boat a person could see under the surface of the water and without candle-light, as much as he needed to read in the Bible or any other book. Not long ago this remarkable ship was yet to be seen lying in the Thames or London river.”
The glow of phosphorescent bodies, suggested by the monk Mersenne for illuminating the interior of a submarine, later in the seventeenth century and actually so used by Bushnell in the eighteenth, might have furnished sufficient light for Bible- and compass-reading on this voyage. But how did King James--the first and last monarch to venture on an underwater voyage--the other passengers, and the twelve rowers get enough air?
“That deservedly Famous Mechanician and Chymist, Cornelius Drebell ... conceived, that ’tis not only the whole body of the air but a certain Quintessence (as Chymists speake) or spirituous part that makes it fit for respiration ... so that (for aught I could gather) besides the Mechanicall contrivance of his vessel he had a Chymicall liquor, which he accounted the chief secret of his Submarine Navigation. For when from time to time he perceived that the finer and purer part of the air was consumed or over-clogged by the respiration and steames of those that went in his ship, he would, by unstopping a vessel full of liquor speedily restore to the troubled air such a proportion of vital parts as would make it again for a good while fit for Respiration.”[3]