Robert Fulton and the Submarine
9781465648907
208 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“... I am now busy winding up everything and will leave London about the 23rd inst. for Falmouth from whence I shall sail in the packet the first week in October and be with you, I hope, in November, perhaps about the 14th, my birthday, so you must have a roast goose ready. The packet, being well manned and provided will be more commodious and safe for an autumn passage, and I think there will be little or no risk; at least I prefer taking all the risk there is to idling here a winter. But although there is not much risk, yet accidents may happen, and that the produce of my studies and experience may not be lost to my country, I have made out a complete set of drawings and descriptions of my whole system of submarine attack.... These with my will, I shall put in a tin cylinder, sealed and leave them in the care of General Lyman, not to be opened unless I am lost. Should such an event happen, I have left you the means to publish these works, with engravings, in a handsome manner, and to which you will add your own ideas—showing how the liberty of the seas may be gained by such means.” Thus Robert Fulton wrote to Joel Barlow who had been his close friend and faithful guide since his arrival in Paris in 1797. The letter of which the above is but an extract is dated London, September, 1806, and was written, as the context shows, on the eve of his final departure from England, after a residence abroad of nearly twenty years. General Lyman to whom he referred had been appointed American Consul in London in 1805, in which capacity he served until he died in 1811. Joel Barlow was in his day a person of considerable importance. Born in 1754, in Connecticut, educated at Dartmouth and Yale, he first studied theology and then law. Though he practised these professions in turn for a short time, he retired from both to devote himself to literature. In 1788, he went to London and Paris to market some lands in Ohio, an unfortunate undertaking. While in Europe, he became interested in liberal politics, even to the extent of standing as a candidate for election to the French Convention of 1793. After having acquired a competence in commerce, and after a short but highly creditable service as American Consul at Algiers, he returned to Paris and resumed his literary life, his principal production being a poem entitled, “The Columbiad.” In 1805, he returned to America, remaining there until 1811, when he was appointed American Commissioner to Emperor Napoleon. He joined the latter at Vilna in 1812, during the Russian campaign and, as the result of exposure to inclement conditions on the disastrous retreat from Moscow in the same year, died in Poland on Christmas eve. Barlow was enough older than Fulton to be accepted not only as a friend, but as a counsellor, while his character, experience and views on world questions appealed to the enthusiastic younger American in whom there was curiously blended a high development of an artistic temperament and scientific genius, and who was in thorough sympathy with the extreme liberal movement of the period that Barlow to some extent approved. When Fulton arrived in Paris in 1797, he at once called on Barlow. The two men were mutually attracted and there soon sprang up an intimacy that was to develop into the most affectionate friendship. This intimacy has been compared to that existing between father and son, or rather between parents and son because Mrs. Barlow joined with her husband in taking Fulton into their lives. This they did the more readily as they had no children of their own. As evidence of the relation, they gave Fulton the nickname of “Toot.”
