Stealth Journeys with the Steam Mapper

Chapter 39: Impressing the Professor

Although the professor was getting up there in years, he knew just the man to help Sir Steven reach his destinations.  Having survived their perilous voyage with "Captain Nemo", Aronnax and Ned Land had become life-long friends, always searching for new ideas in sea exploration.  To have someone approach them with such novel ideas was a dream come true.

The professor's success in writing books of scientific knowledge allowed him to consider financing explorations that could make him wealthier and, provide new material to write about "to boot".   Ned Land could be counted on to help with navigation and captaining their secret voyages.   And, Sir Steven had the maps and steam mapper to make it all happen.  They toasted their new contract with, "All for one and one for all", and declared themselves the "Three Musketeers of the Ocean Floors" and set out to make plans for their first of hopefully many voyages.

Stef had been spending weeks of thought in pondering how Sir Steven Payne and Ned Land and Professor Arronax could have pulled off their stealthy exploits.   Having heard "MYKA" tell such a riveting  Cousteau story, Stef tried to imagine how the Payne Arronax Land  (PAL)  team could have so long ago succeeded in a con worthy of an "Oceans Eleven" movie script.   It was fun to imagine.

The year 1904 would end with their first journey commencing from France and headed towards Australia, headed to Perth, where the small stolen submersible was safely hidden away, weeks earlier.  Sir Steven knew of a few indebted "friends", happy to store it underneath the old abandoned gaol, where they had spent their youth.

Not everyone in Perth appreciated the stuffy upper crust who had been transplanted from jolly old England.  Some recalled being rounded up and sent over as indebted colonists, laboring to provide roads and bridges and railways to be enjoyed by the elite, and then housed in sad institutions away from their loved ones.  Some were only too happy to steal something that had promised to make the rich citizens and government agents even richer.

Sir Steven promised them that their help in hiding the submersible would be repaid with riches found from under the sea, and they accepted his word without question.   What did they have to lose?   And, what fun to be up to mischief at the expense of the Lords and Ladies!   Little did they know what Sir Steven hoped to find.

The submersible, actually called a submarine, was a design of a United States citizen named George Baker.   It had a novel feature: a clutch between the steam engine and an electric motor. This allowed the electric motor to function as a dynamo, to recharge the batteries.   Baker entered a design contest and was miffed when another scientist's design won the competition. Not having the funds to continue with his experimentation of designs, he sold his designs to an anonymous Brit who created the actual submersible secretly brought to Perth.

Steam powered submarines were the way to go at the end of the nineteenth century, but attempts in using gasoline engines tried and failed.  The heat created by both steam engines and gasoline engines made staying onboard within the vessels unbearable.  The British inventor, using Baker's designs succeeded in designing air tubes that also allowed for a primitive cooling system.   And then the move to diesel fuel for use only during the time when traveling on the surface waters and electric battery alone for undersea travel, solved the most dangerous of conditions.

The one problem that had not been solved was creating a design that could go to great depths along the ocean floor.  Many forces at work needed to be solved.  The iron-clad outside surface of the submarine could not withstand the extreme compressive loads below a mere 200 meters in depth.   Neither could the humans onboard.

The mysterious British entrepreneur had engaged scientists to help with this problem.  They had studied the scientific journals of Humphry Davy who almost a century earlier made discoveries with aluminum- iron alloys, leading to the advancement of aluminum products.  They had tested ship hull designs and created glass products that could be made flexible and wound many times over the new alloys, creating a very strong protective casing more than 6 inches thick.  The newly improved design of George Baker's small wooden submarine, with air cooling ventilation worked out in secret, was the most wonderful, futuristic design imaginable.

Still, it was not the spacious futuristic Nautilus owned by "Captain Nemo" and described by Jules Verne.   The new design was even smaller than U. S. submarines described by Marcus Goodrich in his novel Delilah.   In his book, Goodrich had described small vessels that could hold only one dozen men, which was still ten more traveling aboard the vessel used by Steven and Ned.