Who invented the first boat which was capable of being propelled beneath the water? Opinions differ as to the correct answer to this question. David Bushnell’s boat (_circa_ 1773) is the first of which we have any definite record, but William Bourne (1580), Magnus Pegelius (1605), and Cornelius Van Drebbel (1620) have all been credited with having constructed under-water vessels. In the previous chapter it has been shown that the earliest form of submarine attack was carried out by divers. The prototype of the submarine boat was undoubtedly the diving bell, the history of which contrivance, although presenting many points of interest, it will be impossible to relate here. According to some writers to William Bourne, the English mathematician, belongs the credit (in 1580), of operating the first submarine boat as such, in contradistinction to a diving-bell, but there is nothing to show that Bourne did more than discuss the question, as did also Magnus Pegelius, although the latter is reported to have built a small submarine vessel in the year 1605. [Sidenote: Drebbel’s Reputed Submarine.] The Dictionary of National Biography credits Cornelius Drebbel, who was born in 1572, in the town of Alkmaar, in Holland, and who died in London in 1634, with the invention of a submarine boat “which was navigable without the use of artificial light, from Westminster to Greenwich.” We have spent some time in endeavouring to verify this assertion, but the references to the boat are vague and unsatisfactory. However, as Drebbel is by some accounted the “Father of Submarine Navigation,” it seems scarcely fitting to dismiss him without further thought. In that curious old volume entitled “New Experiments Physico-mechanical touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects,” by the “Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq.,” mention is made of Drebbel’s boat, and it may be interesting to transcribe the passage. It occurs, on p. 188 of the second edition, published at Oxford in 1662. [Illustration: THE EARLIEST KNOWN PICTURE OF AN UNDER-WATER VESSEL. ]