Discouraged by this stand of the French government, Fulton removed to England, where he succeeded in interesting the prime-minister, William Pitt, in his novel boat. A commission was appointed consisting of a number of prominent men, including Mr. Pitt, and Fulton was requested to demonstrate what could be done in actual practice by his submarine. On October 15, 1805, an old brig detailed for the purpose was destroyed by Fulton by the explosion of a torpedo containing one hundred and seventy pounds of powder. Yet in the face of this remarkable demonstration the commission remained unfavorable to Fulton's scheme, although Mr. Pitt to the last retained his faith in the possibilities of such boats. Recognizing that further attempts in England would be fruitless, Fulton returned to the United States. Here, in 1810, Congress became sufficiently interested to appropriate five thousand dollars to assist him in his work, and as a final test of the boat he had built, the naval authorities prepared the brig _Argus_ to resist an attack by the submarine. This preparation consisted in surrounding her with protecting booms of logs, supporting strong netting, and held a distance from the hull by spars. In fact all possible means short of actually building a wall about the _Argus_ were taken to defeat the attack. It is probable that the brig, when her preparations for defense were completed, would have been invulnerable even to a modern torpedo, and it is not surprising, therefore, that Fulton's attack upon her utterly failed. Commenting upon this failure and the means taken by the authorities to protect the _Argus_, Fulton significantly remarked that the very fact that a war vessel was obliged to make use of such means to protect herself against a system of attack then in its infancy, spoke volumes for the possibilities of this method of attacking when it should be more fully developed. But although this failure to destroy the _Argus_ caused Congress to withdraw its aid for future experiments in submarine warfare, Fulton himself never lost faith in the importance of his work. Even after his successful invention of the steamboat, for surface navigation, he is said to have remarked that, while this invention was important, it could in no wise compare with the revolutionary effects upon navigation that would eventually be produced by submarine boats. And despite his failure to convince the government of the possibilities of his diving boats, he continued his experiments with them. How nearly he succeeded in making a practical submarine was shown in the second war with England that followed soon after.