ed
torpedo to enter special compartments at the very moment of the
discharge.

The _Holland No. 9_ was built at Lewis Nixon's shipyards at
Elizabethport, New Jersey, and was launched early in 1898, just
previous to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Although
numerous requests were made to the United States Government by her
inventor and builder, John P. Holland, for permission to take her
into Santiago harbour in an attempt to torpedo Cervera's fleet, the
navy authorities at Washington refused this permission. Why?
Presumably through navy hostility to the submarine idea. When the
_Monitor_ whipped the _Merrimac_ in 1862 the former ship belonged to
her inventor, not to the United States Government. It would have
been interesting had Holland at his own expense destroyed the
Spanish ships.

John P. Holland at the time when he achieved his success was
fifty-eight years old, Irish by birth and an early immigrant to the
United States. He had been deeply interested for many years in
mechanical problems and especially in those connected with
navigation. The change from the old wooden battleships to the new
ironclads and the rapidly increasing development of steam-engines
acted as a strong stimulus to the young Irishman's experiments. It
is claimed that his interest in submarine navigation was due
primarily to his desire to find a weapon strong enough to destroy or
at least dominate the British navy; for at that time Holland was
strongly anti-British, because he, like many other educated Irishmen
of that period, desired before everything else to free Ireland. His
plans for doing this by supplying to the proposed Irish Republic a
means for overcoming the British navy found little support and a
great deal of ridicule on the part of his Irish friends. In spite of
this he kept on with his work and in 1875 he built and launched his
first submarine boat at Paterson. This boat was far from being very
revolutionary. She was only sixteen feet long and two feet in
diameter, shaped like a cigar but with both ends sharply pointed. In
many respects except in appearance she was similar to Bushnell's
_Turtle_. Room for only one operator was provided and the latter was
to turn the propeller by means of pedals to be worked by his feet.
She accomplished little beyond giving an opportunity to her inventor
and builder to gather experience in actual underwater navigation.

Two years later in 1877 the _Holland No. 2_ was built. In spite o