Why are our submarines called boats?
Historical Highlights
A series by LEUT Tom Lewis
July 24, 2000
Submarines
and submariners seem to attract a variety of interesting names. Perhaps
some of that stems from being a "service apart". Why is a submarine called a "boat"?
One reason might be that because the submarine was known as a boat from the earliest conception of something that could travel beneath the surface. A German poem of around 1200 - Salman and Morolf - mentions a diving boat built of leather with a long tube supplying air, and an Englishman, William Bourne, in a 1578 treatise entitled Inventions and Devices describes: "It is possible to make a shippe or boate that may goe under the water unto the bottome".
Bourne's boat solved the problem of achieving negative buoyancy - that is, making the submarine sink - by allowing water valves to fill leather bags. A mast let in air and when the boat needed to ascend the operator squeezed out the bags, thus expelling the water.
Cornelius van Drebbel, a Dutch physician, amazed London in 1620 by submerging to 12 feet in an "oar-powered boat" and rowing it across the Thames. He did not know of Bourne's technique, however, and had problems making the boat stay down. Despite this he managed to persuade King James VI to come for a ride.
The Turtle, a US vessel used in an underwater attack against the British during the American War of Independence, was described as a boat in letters of the time. She was shaped rather like a pineapple and her designer, David Bushnell, equipped her with a snorkel, a depth gauge and a detachable explosive with a fuse. A valiant attempt was made by her commander Ezra Lee to manoeuver her underneath a British ship. This failed due to propulsion difficulties and Lee was detected. In his escape he cut loose the explosive and it went off causing the British fleet to take some alarm at the first attempt at submarine warfare.
Perhaps, therefore, the first submarines were called boats because they were small. Some descriptions say that a boat is a vessel that is routinely removed from the water. A ship is one that usually stays in the water, except for unusual occasions: dry-docking, careening, running up on a sandbar etc. Another interpretation is that a boat is any vessel that can be placed on another vessel.
Like ship's boats early submarines and diving bells were often stowed ashore or on the deck of a ship and they were indeed very small. The Turtle, for example, was a single-man craft. Fulton's submersibles of the Napoleonic era were no larger than a ship's launch. The Hunley, a submarine of the US Civil War, and the first to sink another ship - the Housatonic - carried a crew of nine. All were boats but not ships.
Although many designs were tried and tested in the following years by various navies the designs of John Holland proved the most successful. Working alone and supported by Irish Fenian money Holland designed and built a small submarine powered by a steam engine. His idea was successful largely because it solved the problems of buoyancy and stability which had plagued other designers. Known as a "wrecking boat" the first was followed by another but then the backers lost interest and Holland faded from the scene, although his memory lives on in the organisation that bought him out - the Electric Boat Company.
By the start of WWI subs were quite big - AE1 and AE2, the Australian WWI boats, were 181 feet long - but many were smaller and therefore about the same size as small warships, most of which were also called boats - torpedo boats and gun boats, for example.
The submarine service of WWI was a new branch of navies and it sought to develop its own traditions much as the air forces of WWI did. One of these may have been the term "boat", a difference to be jealously guarded, along with submariners' slang, jokes and customs - such as flying the Jolly Roger, the skull and crossbones, when returning from a patrol that had seen a "kill". This custom might have arisen from the condemnation submarines had received when they first became conceived of as weapons of war. Leonardo da Vinci, who had once claimed to have developed an idea for a submarine, is said to have left no notes on the subject - as he did for other inventions such as the aeroplane - because he thought "I do not publish or divulge on account of the evil nature of men who practise assassination at the bottom of the sea". Interestingly, the Hague Convention of 1899 which had set up some rules of warfare had not included submarines and the ensuing conflict certainly saw submarines carry forward new ideas of "total war" by ambushing merchantmen.
Submarines were known during WWI and beyond also as "pig boats". Perhaps a reference to the dolphin sometimes known as a sea-pig. This may well have been because a submarine needed to surface often in the type's early days, partly for air and partly for a periscope sighting. Some more unkind references give the origins of "pig boat" as relating to the smell of submarines: a combination of diesel, battery fumes, sweat, cooking and more - all in unventilated compartments.
By WWII submarines had increased in size to several hundred feet and after the war with the development of nuclear power submarines became even bigger. Many modern submarines have been designed to the extent where their tonnage can now dwarf that of destroyers and even aircraft carriers - the American Ohio-class, for example, has a displacement of 18, 750 imperial tons.
It has been argued that the term "ship" has replaced "boat", especially given the size and destructive power of many modern submarines, especially the "boomers" - the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile submarine. However, it seems that in the world of submariners the old term is still the preferred one.
by LEUT Tom Lewis