In 1879, a photograph was taken of three men and a child posing on top of a rocket-shaped vessel, resting on a wheeled carriage beside Birkenhead Docks. Few onlookers at the time, even those familiar with the writings of Jules Verne, could have guessed the function of such a mysterious contraption. It even had a perplexing name, The Resurgam. However, those able to translate this Latin expression would have been immediately enlightened. Resurgam – ‘I will rise again’ – the brainchild of a Manchester clergyman, was Britain’s first true submarine.
Nearly all early submersibles were the engineering products of wartime exigencies. For example, David Bushnell’s hand-cranked, acorn-shaped ‘Turtle’ was built to attack Royal Navy ships during the American War of Independence, while Robert Fulton’s ‘Nautilus’, a human and sail-powered, cigar-shaped vessel designed to attach explosive mines the hulls of surface warships, was offered without success to both the French and British governments during the Revolutionary Wars. Nautilus was the first submersible equipped with ballast tanks and diving planes. However, perhaps the most famous submersible of a pre-industrial design was the ‘H. L. Hunley‘, which launched the world’s first successful submarine attack against the Union warship Housatonic on February 17th 1864, its entire Confederate crew unfortunately being drowned in the process.
A year before the demise of the hand-cranked Hunley, the world’s first submarine not to rely on human power had been launched at Rochfort in France. The ‘Plongeur’ (Diver) relied on a 60w compressed-air engine to propel the vessel at 4kn. Compressed air was also used to empty her ballast tanks. The bulkiness of her air tanks meant the Plongeur was a large boat, displacing more than 400t and measuring 45m in length. The reinforced ram bow was desinged to be fitted with a spar torpedo that carried an electrically activated charge at the end of a pole. Trials of the Plongeur at La Rochelle in 1864 were problematic. Its length made diving difficult and the absence of horizontal diving planes made her unstable underwater. In spite of these practical obstacles, Plongeur was regarded of sufficient potential for a model of the vessel to be exhibited at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where it was famously scrutinised by Jules Verne.
Born in the seaport of Nantes, Verne had already published one nautically-themed story called The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. The submarine conjured up by Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which he named ‘Nautilus’, was externally not unlike Plongeur, being ‘an elongated cylinder with conical ends… its curves prolonged enough, to allow the water to slide off easily, and oppose no obstacle to its passage.’ Nautilus was also envisaged as an offensive ram. Internally, however, they differed. The engine of Verne’s fictional submarine was driven by electricity provided by sodium-mercury batteries. ‘A masterpiece containing masterpieces’, Nautilus exhibited other innovative features that would become standard in modern submersibles – the double hull, watertight compartmentalization, and hydroplanes.
Ironically, it was another clergyman, the Reverent Lewis Page Mercier (1820-1875), who published the first English translation of Verne’s most enduring novel in 1873. Mercier was an Oxford-educated Latin scholar of French Huguenot ancestry, who in later life became chaplain of the Foundling Hospital chapel in London. George William Littler Garrett (1852-1902) was in contrast Manchester born and of Irish stock, and educated in mechanics at Trinity College Dublin. Sharing an equal interest in theology, Garrett was made a curate the same year Mercier’s translation of 20,000 Leagues was published, and it is quite possible he read it.
Garrett was certainly aware of other recent developments in submarine technology. This included the work of Spanish engineer Narcis Monturiol (1819-1885), who in 1867 had invented an air-independent engine for his experimental submarine ‘Ictineo II‘, using heat generated by a reaction of zinc, manganese dioxide and potassium chlorate. Constructed of olive wood, oak and copper, and controlled underwater by means of a weight attached to a longitudinal rail, Ictineo II made one successful dive in Barcelona harbor before Monturiol ran out of money, the vessel soon after being sold off and scrapped.
The possibilities of underwater warfare were becoming clearer in the 1870s with Robert Whitehead and Giovani Luppi’s development of the self-propelled torpedo, to which the Royal Navy swiftly acquired the manufacturing rights. On 16th January 1878, a Turkish merchant ship reportedly became the first victim of this new technology when she was sunk by a Russian torpedo boat. This and other incidents during the Russo-Turkish War convinced Garrett that the ideal means of attacking modern warships was underwater.
By this time, Garrett had already experimented with underwater diving suits, which he’d demonstrated to French officials in the River Seine. Another of his inventions, the ‘pneumataphore’, was a crude device for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of enclosed spaces, apparently envisaged for use in underground mines. In the spring of 1878, with the help of several Mancunian businessmen, he formed the Garrett Submarine Navigation and Pneumataphore Company and set about constructing his first prototype submersible. The first ‘Resurgam’ was a hand-cranked, single-occupancy, purely experimental craft, weighing 4 tons and measuring only 14 ft. Garrett was sufficiently buoyed after tests of this diminutive vessel to begin work on a more ambitious subaqueous vessel.
Resurgam II was ordered from Cochran & Co, a manufacturer of boilers and small steamers at Birkenhead. The firm was located in Duke Street close to the Great Float, a body of water artificially created from a tidal inlet of the River Mersey. Garrett’s decision to power the Resurgam II using steam required a substantially larger vessel to accommodate a boiler, and extra crew to operate it. The chosen boiler was evidently a type of ‘fireless engine’ first developed by French-born American inventor Emile Lamm. The Lamm engine relied on a pre-heated reservoir of super-heated steam to drive the submarine’s propeller. This theoretically allowed the submersible to travel submerged without producing emissions. However, underwater endurance was limited to around 10 miles, after which it was necessary to reheat the engine on the surface. Moreover, storing a large amount of super-heated steam within the hull made conditions unbearably hot, though Garrett was evidently able to reduce the carbon dioxide content through the use of his pneumataphore.
Another shortcoming of Resurgam II was the inability to generate positive and negative buoyancy. Rather than controlling its descent and ascent by means of ballast tanks and compressed air, Garrett sought to drive his craft underwater using hydroplanes. As a result, unless the vessel was travelling at sufficient speed, its innate buoyancy would cause her to ‘rise again’ and again. The steady lightening of the vessel’s coal store to reheat the steam engine during a voyage further compromised her stability.
Unsurprisingly, the Great Float was where Garrett chose to begin tests his submarine towards the end of 1879. Reputedly, thirty Shire Horses had to be requisitioned to drag the 30-ton, 45ft-long vessel from the Cochran & Co works to the launch site, where a 50-ton crane conveyed her into the water. The trials of the ‘Garrett Submarine Torpedo Boat’ were closely followed by the local Liverpool Mercury, and even featured in the national press; The Graphic Newspaper including a lithographic illustration of the unusual craft with its three-man crew. The above photograph, the first ever taken of a submarine, shows Garrett flanked by his two associates; George Price, and Captain W. E. Jackson. The presence of Garrett’s young child suggests the launch was a family occasion.
Initial trials of the Resurgam II were evidently successful, Garrett claiming he’d reached a depth of 150ft at a speed of 2kts. The clergyman was sufficiently confident of his vessel’s capabilities to take her directly to sea for further testing, with the ultimate aim of reaching Portsmouth under her own steam. There, it was hoped the Royal Navy heads would be suitably impressed to invest in the submarine’s further development.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 