Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/245

1917-18] Britain already controlled the sea, the new type of war craft was superfluous to her. In the hands of a weak naval power, however, which had everything to gain and nothing to lose, if might supply the means of overthrowing the British Empire. Could one submarine destroy another, it would present no particular menace, for then, in order to control the sea, it would merely be necessary to build a larger under-water fleet than that of any prospective enemy: but how could vessels which spent all their time under the water, in the dark, ever get a chance to come to blows ? From these considerations it seemed apparent to St. Vincent and other British experts of his time that the best interests of the British Empire would be served, not by developing the submarine, but by suppressing it. Fulton's biographer intimates that the British Government offered Fulton a considerable amount of money to take his submarine back to America and forget about it; and there is a letter of Fulton's to Lord Granville, saying that "not for 20,000 a year would I do what you suggest." But there seemed to be no market for his invention, and Fulton therefore returned to America and subsequently gave all his time to exploiting the steamboat. On the defensive powers of the under-water vessel he also expressed the prevailing idea. "Submarine," he said, "cannot fight submarine."

The man who designed the type of submarine which has become the standard in all modern navies, John P. Holland, similarly advocated it as the only means of destroying the British navy. Holland was an American of Irish origin; he was a member of the Fenian brotherhood, and it was his idea that his vessel could be used to destroy the British navy, blockade the British coast, and, as an inevitable consequence, secure freedom for Ireland. This is the reason why his first successful boat was known as the Fenian Ram, despite the fact that it was not a "ram" at all. And the point on which Holland always insisted was that the submarine vessel was a unique vessel in naval warfare, because there was no "answer" to it. "There is nothing that you can send against it," he gleefully exclaimed, " not even itself."

Parliamentary debates in the late nineties indicated that British naval leaders entertained this same idea. In 1900, Viscount Goschen, who was then the First Lord of