Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 408 - The Fenian Ram

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys?vanity=user PRE ORDER JOE'S BOOK https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3O97YGHOXJRP4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.kBj_XRfH3_GHTnQkYjzECwIddNedvlE4-RCHBWgHXlUErgqNYWgOwY1KYsA7yZvLQTviQGOF346h8IITpO3cNvuwWz7a7NR6wkpDazqkiZ81Klbpu5C-MrbANkkKB0_S4RLO_WvFNKmY8dykmuSv38BFZOwVzb95iFq65uWaHolnpmmeCvadgtqgMwbO_-ixcUjAojfLba2sN_LO48EwZZkCCte9AbJivDEvvYwEeNw.7XuiOakliB9sCJdyw_OJA0I-Ul5yjB2E2RrFAUbPM_w&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+highlands+burn&qid=1775307842&sprefix=%2Caps%2C179&sr=8-1 PRE ORDER SECOND HOME'S DEBUT ALBUM: https://secondhomes.bandcamp.com/album/find-a-way-to-hate-it LIVE SHOW TICKETS: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-tickets-1985443952308 LIVE STREAM TICKETS: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-2026-tickets-1985444086710 A half-blind Irish immigrant to the US freelance develops the first modern submarine with funds from the Fenian Brotherhood. This leads to a lot of arguments and a late-night submarine jacking. SOURCES: Davies, R. Nautilus: The Story of Man Under the Sea Lyons, Chuck. The Holland Submarine. Military Heritage. August 2008. Vol 10, no. 1 Devoy Tells Story of First Submarine: Holland Warship Purchased for Clan-na-Gael, The Original Owners, by Harry Cunningham”, The Gaelic American, New York, 09 July 1927 https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1935/august/fenian-ram https://www.millrivertrail.com/learn/famous-stolen-submarine https://web.archive.org/web/20121021174106/http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_19/holland2.htm

Hey everyone, Joe here. Me, Tom, and Nate are all going to be live May 29th in London at the Rich Mix. So get your tickets and come down and see us. It's going to be a great show. We're going to have some new merch, some shirts, some pins, maybe some book stuff because it coincides the launch of my book, The Highlands Burn. And if you can't make it, that's okay. We're going to be live streaming it. Check out our show notes. Make sure you click on the right link for live show and live stream tickets, whichever one you need, and get your tickets now. The Highlands Burn. My debut fantasy novel releases May 29th and is now available for digital pre-order. You can find the link in the show notes wherever it is you're listening to this. Just like this show, this book is a

completely independent production. To the crack of rifles and the acrid stench of sports, we're sorcery, a sudden invasion sweeps through the highlands of the Confederation, and Syatt's peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A sole survivor amid the smoking ruins of all that he held dear, Siyah must make a choice. Is pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him worth becoming one himself? As escape pushes him to the gruff embrace of the foundling brigade, he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for destruction and the new responsibilities of his soldiers life. Even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle force him to confront the terrible

cost of his oath. Before long, the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt, while the stuff of legend seems as clear as day, and Syatt finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict that he could possibly imagine. Hello and welcome to the... Lions and Vi-Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire known world. I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate. Fellas, how are we doing?

I'm doing good. I'm currently oozing right now because I got a tattoo on Sunday. So my leg is crusty and moist at the same time. I love the combo of getting a new tattoo and you kind of feel greasy and itchy at the same time. Yep, I'm going to go for a couple of drinks later on because it's currently St. Patrick's Day, the most Irish of all days. And I'm going to be oozing all over the place. Yeah, it's interesting having the world's most colorful scab. Like you said, ooze, pain, but wrapped up. I don't know. We typically would, when I got mine, you would, like at least the first 24 hours, you wrapped it up in Suran Wrap. But I was thinking about what you're saying. It's beautiful spring day. It is so dry in winter here, particularly. And like, it's nice to live in a, a part. that's insulated and well heated and has like the ventilation stuff for you know etc however it is so dry that I've had to work into like a like a hand care routine of like three different fucking lotions to include like petroleum jelly on top of lotion because it's gotten so

bad that despite using lotion like good lotion multiple times a day my hands have gotten so dry that I can't use the fingerprint reader on my computer with my index finger because it doesn't recognize it they're getting into Korean hand skin care sorry Tim Cook please let me cream my hands Once I had to use a password and add another fingerprint on a not fucked up finger because for some like this finger I actually, I mean, it wasn't severe, but I got like a mild burn while I was cooking with oil and it like, you know, I put lotion on it or whatever. But like it's kind of cracked and now it doesn't recognize my thing. Because if I look at it, I'm like, it's got straight up like fucking, you know, canals of Mars shit going on there. Like it doesn't recognize my fingerprint anymore. That's the level of dryness on. Whereas I go back to England and it goes away because everything's just damp all the time. You could be one of two ways. You can be oozing or dry. This is why to counteract the dryness, I simply move to the Netherlands where you can never be dry ever. But fellas, I'm doing great. Do you want to know why? Because my first military fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn, is finished and available for digital pre-order.

So you can find that link in the show notes. I'm really happy with it. I think of all of the books I've written. It is the one I am the most proud of. So pre-order it comes up May 29th. Hopefully it doesn't suck. absolute segue king that's right i was definitely not involved me and me and ri definitely were not involved there was definitely no anti-heterosexuality axion with a k going on with editing this book

yeah uh i was not involved at all uh making my books woke yeah exactly if you get the text from the kindle or e-pub and invert the colors of the text there's actually loads of subliminal messages yeah you have to play the the the audiobook in reverse if you invert the text it all it just says is the first Florence and the machine album is actually quite good over and over again the entire book

no it basically tells you because I have better taste than that you do that it's going to tell you what song on Deer Hunter's Halcyon Digest you should be playing to get the right mood feel for that scene of the book all right now that we've mentioned a band I've never heard of

boys I have a question for you now for a military device we've never heard of have you ever heard of Have you ever heard of the Fenian ram? Oh. You did this because you do what day we were going to be recording on? I wish that was true, Tom. I am going to let Nate take this one.

I have no idea. I have no idea, genuinely. But I do find it funny that you're wearing a striped shirt on the video call, which the listener can't see because you've gone into sort of like, you know, European agents of chaos mode. You've become like a French mime. You're miming throwing of smoke. grenade out of us. So a long

time ago, we talked about a strange episode of American, Canadian, British, and Irish history known as the Fenian raids, where a bunch of Irish and Irish American Civil War veterans plotted to invade and conquer portions of Canada and hold it in ransom in exchange

for a free Ireland. This ended in a horribly lopsided battlefield defeat, as well as a bunch of dudes just getting arrested and having to ask their wives to come and bail them out of jail. But today's episode, brings us back to the Fienian Brotherhood, about a decade after they truly became Americans, and by that I mean invaded Canada and got their asses kicked in the great northern bond spiel.

I thought you were going to take it a different way when they finally became Americans, a.k. started legally beating up black people. I feel like they're already doing that in Boston, Tom. That's because today's story is about the Fenian Ram, or that time that a bunch of Irish Republicans kind of sort of constructed the world's first practical submarine. Yes, I have so...

Thank you so much, Joe, for picking this episode of all, or this topic of all topics to do on St. Patrick's Day. Well, we're recording it on St. Patrick's Day. We're not releasing it on St. Patrick's Day, so the vibe is going to be missing. Also, I did not know today with St. Patrick's Day at all.

It's the same day every year. And I never know what day it is any year because it does not matter to me at all. It's so offensive to my culture. I'm fine with that. Do you celebrate Armenian Independence Day? I doubt it. Yeah, I do. I go and buy a new phone case every year.

Jesus Christ. But first, the Irish Republican context. The Fenian Brotherhood was an Irish Republican organization founded in the United States in the aftermath of the failed so-called young Irelander rebellion of 18. Its founders moved from Paris to New York City in 1858 and just kind of simultaneously formed their sister organizations of the Irish Republican Brotherhood back at home. The goal for the American side of the operation was to support the homeland operations with both money, material, and eventually general uprisings like an invasion of Canada, with the ultimate

goal of supporting a free Ireland. However, the two organizations spent most of their time screaming at one another over a collection of growing beefs, starting from petty personal grievances, all the way to have actual meaningful disagreements over the future governance of Ireland and how to fight the British. For more on inter-Phenian beefs, go listen to our episode on the Fenian raids, or arguably our episode on the Troubles. That brings us to the star of today's show, John Philip Holland. Holland was born in 1848 in County Clare on the shores of Laskinner Bay, so I looked up the bay so you can just kind of better understand the location of it. Maybe there's something interesting

to write about it. The one truly amazing thing that I found was this particular explanation on where exactly this bay is located. Hagshead provides a northern border for the bay and Cream Point is the southern boundary. You can thank the British for all of this. They stole our language and anglicized everything to the point where it doesn't mean anything. Yeah, before it said Hagshead and Cream's Point in Irish, which sounds less weird. Shut up. Your language is a series of squiggles. That's unfair. It's mostly W's and U's. And lowercase ours.

No, your natural language only contains the letters D, you, and I. There's one thing, Tom, that our languages have in common. And that is, thanks to an outside force, neither of us can speak it. And similarly, if you want to conjure up the sense of something sinister happening. You can just have people speaking them or writing them. It's like, if I want to convey witchcraft, Armenian, if I want to convey an evil that knows no bounds of time that's existed before humanity will exist forever, Irish. Yeah, if you're anyone who is writing slop fantasy books in the vein of J.R.

Token, you just also hate the Irish as well. Is J.R. Token catching strays here? Yeah, J.R. Token based the orcs on Irish people. well, did they have really big heads? Yeah, the Urukai are like based on Irish people. He had a weird thing about Irish people. Yeah, but depending on who you talk to, they'll insist that they're based on someone else.

Yeah, if you're writing a fantasy book and you want to like make the enemy faction just plainly evil, just make them like vaguely characteristically Irish, like that terrible acatarcy. Yeah, I mean, I guess the kind of, it makes sense. It's like, yeah, I've always wondered where Irish people came from and now you've told me you just dig each other out of the mud. There you have it. We spawn through the mycelium like orcs and 40K. Yeah. Yeah, you're space Irish. Anyway, as you can imagine, from the year he was born, you know, a short time after the beginning of the great famine, Holland's youth is unspeakably horrible.

By 1848, close to a million people have died from the famine. He is from an Irish Catholic household. He speaks Irish. His father knows English, but he learned English just so he could work as a stringer for the British Coast Guard, which I know sounds kind of nefarious in the modern context, but being an Irish person working for the British Coast Guard in the mid-1800, so it's quite literally walking up and down the coast to see if anybody has washed up. Oh, yeah. Any boats out there? Yeah, it's quite literally the coast. guard. You don't even have a boat. See, they're trying to

stop the creation of the myth of the quote unquote black Irish because the Spanish Armada didn't actually really land in Ireland. So they're just preventing the perfidious Iberian mixing with the hibernos. Your strange

interregional beefs in Ireland remind me of being online recently playing a video game and someone called my friend Croatian as an insult. confirmed Bosnian based gamer Yeah like this isn't

only an insult for like three different kinds of guy and you all live next to each other that is the most counterstrikes insult ever It was squad actually I'm just envisioning yeah like if you're able to create

a sort of hybrid culture between the Irish and the Spanish it's like you can find the one person who thinks pepper is the spiciest thing on the planet like the two cultures that are most afraid of anything that doesn't have, I don't know, melted cheese in it. Actually, I don't know about

Irish food to make a funny joke. I definitely know about Spanish food. But with Irish food, I'm just like, I'm going to say something. You're like, actually, that's English, you fucking cunt. It's going to be over. So, I mean, Irish food, lots of vegetables, lots of beef, pork, chicken, lots of fish. Not a lot of seasoning, but a lot of flavor, lots of dairy as well. You just let the sky rain on it. That's pretty much seasoning. The thing about seasoning is it oftentimes it needs to be dry enough for stuff to dry out to be made into like preserve spices. that just doesn't really seem to happen in Ireland very often. The Irish are simply too wet for seasoning.

Hey, listen, one of my brothers lives in Ireland, it rains for like 230 days a year. At least it's green, I assume. Listen, Ireland would be the most beautiful country in the world if we could put a roof over it. Yeah, from my experience in Ireland, I'd have to agree. I look forward to going back and getting rained on a third time. Yeah, you can see a great sodden Joe. A picture I'll post it later. That's just me where I live now though

It's just like the Ireland is just more beautiful Netherlands Like Netherlands rains constantly It's always grey Ireland that looks at least looks nice while doing it It's the Netherlands with less Protestants Well no it's like but the roof wouldn't help Because it would still be rainy and grey What you need is like for Ireland to invent fusion power

And just put in a bunch of huge fans To blow all the clouds away Hey listen if we if humanity ever invents the Dyson sphere It's going to be built by the Irish Type 3 civilization and were all Irish. Holland's mother and siblings only language was Irish in the household.

And that was until the family eventually sent him to a national school, which Tom, I'm sure you're very familiar with these. At the time, these schools were supposed to be interfaith. This is after the time where Catholicism was technically outlawed. But of course, they

were not. The Church of Ireland was pretty much controlling everything, speaking Irish within the schools forbidden, and students were taught English through the scope of embracing their Protestantism, as well as a heaping helping of physical abuse. Yeah, for anyone who's confused, the Church of Ireland is the Protestant one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, also, yeah, getting beaten by your teachers, I didn't change that much in the intervening 150 years from this until when I went to school.

Holland's family was Catholic, but like a lot of Catholic families, they were left with really no other choice if they want their children to get an education, you know, which is kind of the point of the whole venture. Namely, young Holland and his parents wanted their son to get a job with just about the only industry in town, the shipyard. Namely, he wanted to be on ships, uh, through some capacity. Small problem, though, despite doing very well in school, Holland had absolutely terrible eyesight. So he was immediately rejected from working there. Of course, he had glasses, but this is the era where like eyesight only counted for uncorrected eyesight. Yep.

So like despite the fact he could see perfectly fine with glasses, they're like, nope, you can't work here at those fancy face glasses. Get out of here, you fucking nerd. You can't be on the boat. That's the work of the devil like being a kid dog, you know, riding with your left hand. You know, they'll beat it out. They'll beat the good eyesight into you. Yeah.

Thankfully, he was qualified for what other job being on this podcast as we've all established. Hey, listen, you know, the Church of Ireland catching strays were beating kids in school. Listen, the Catholic Church was no much better. No, of course that. Famously. So, yeah. With nowhere left to turn, his family dropped him off at the Irish Christian Brothers School. If you want to get beat, you go to the CBS.

Yeah. He loved it. No, he didn't. This is for secondary education. And once there, he became friends. and eventually co-workers with two of the brothers, namely Bernard O'Brien

and another Dominic Burke. They end up being those rare teachers who actually take an interest in what their student is interested in when they're not busy beating this shit out of him. Yeah, a little known fact about Dominic Burke as he comes from a long line of lineage of people who love standing outside the school

until they get arrested. Also, anyone who listens to this podcast who's like an Irish. man over the age of 40 winced when you said the Christian brothers. I had to look them up because I knew they were going to be cursed. Like, there's no such thing as a religious order that runs schools. It isn't just, they don't have skeletons in the closet. They have a mass grave.

Bro, I went to, where I went to secondary school used to be a seminary. That place is haunted as fuck with the ills of the past. I believe you. Burke is also considered the father of vocational training in Ireland. So other than beating the living dog shit out of all of his pupils, he was a good teacher outside of that, which I assume is finding a piece of cord and a pile of shit. And throughout all of this, Holland was swearing to everyone that he would take to the sea. When he was 14, he passed his navigator's exam, but it didn't really matter because you can't study so hard you fix your eyesight. Otherwise, my shit would be great by now.

Yeah, Dominic Burke is the reason why we essentially have Boston Irish Tony Soprano just runs the entire carpentry game and obviously a friend of the show shocks is his lawyer Union lawyer, it's different So at 16, rather than leaving the CBS He ends up becoming a teacher within its system Because this is once a job that a 16 year old could have But by all accounts, he didn't really care about teaching, and virtually every second of his free time he was sketching out inventions, mostly ships, but also in airship at one point, which I suppose is just a different kind of ship.

The man loves ships. He just like me for real, except when I was like 12, I was drawing my own Mortal Kombat characters in my copy books. Oh, hell yeah. At 17, he found his true obsession, though. Submarines. Uh-oh. He drew up something that looked an awful lot like a modern submarine, but ran into it. a pretty common problem that we've certainly talked about whenever anybody else dip their toes

into pre-1900 submarine design. How the fuck do we power this thing? Unlike Bushnell and his turtle and a few other designs we've talked about, Holland didn't want to create a one-man power death tube. He knew that like a hand crank powered submarine would always be pointless. So he chucked a design into a trunk and went about his life, though Brother Burke specifically told him to not abandon his idea because he thought he was on to something. Something Burke might know something about because he himself was working on how to make electricity work in underwater propulsion. This is the weirdest Christian school I've ever heard of.

Just so many potatoes all linked up with electrodes. Irish Edison. He's, yeah, he's doing the light bulb plugged into the top of potatoes things and and studiously taking notes, wiring them all together until he can kill a man. I mean, to be fair, it's what, the 1860s, there wasn't a huge amount of potatoes in Ireland. So maybe that's what the English tried to actually do by exporting all of our exit, all of our food was prevent a Irish Nicola Tesla from coming into being the potato coil. I mean, we get taught to make potato batteries, you know, like they already had the building blocks here. You could have gone further than that.

The potato combustion engine. Yeah, exactly. This is just a further layer to my personal job. of being an Irish HOTEP that we like built the pyramids is actually instead of aliens using levitation technology, we created levitation technology with like wiring up potatoes to levitate all those blocks. You had basically like a huge battery arrays and it was just nothing but potatoes, just one after another. It was like, looked like a miniature version of the matrix pods. But there's no trace of that that remains because the English got rid of it. They didn't want people to know how advanced

it was. And a long enough timeline, you have created potato fission and you have a potato reactor. Yeah, explain the... Sputnoble. Explain fish into Irish. Once again, we can get Jared Harris to play one of the leading roles when it eventually has a meltdown and just completely decimates the entire county of Galway. When Sput Noble melts out, it just deep fries?

Problem solved. That's how Tato invented flavored crisps. But you just explain the concept of nuclear fish into Irish people. It's like if you smash so many potatoes together, the inside gets hotter than the sun. Hell yeah. What is really interesting here is why exactly he fell in love with submarines. Holland wrote that he read about the rise of Ironclad ships during the ongoing U.S. Civil War.

We've done an episode about those in the past, go and listen to it. And he knew that it was only a matter of time before the British adopted them and dominated the world even harder. So as a teenager, he saw submarines as the only real way to counter the coming era of be even more powerful Royal Navy. I'd also posit that he's Irish, so it means he grew up with like 19 siblings in one room and in a submarine is the

one place you could get peace and quiet. It's like, I can go under the ocean and no one's going to fucking chat bullshit to me right now. I can just be quiet. He's going out to the fields. He's taking notes, looking at the potatoes. It's like potatoes go under the dirt. What if a ship would under the water? Actually, no,

growing up with like 19 siblings in a one room cottage is actually the perfect training for being a submariner. That is true. I mean, you got to do it as a one-person thing, like a submersible. You're right, though. You're like, if you actually crew in a real submarine, it's like everyone else is having nervous breakdowns.

And he's like, hey, no one's beating me with a belt right now. This is great. Growing up in the 1850s version of Dasboud. I always used to joke that one of the reasons why I was so comfortable in a tank, even though I am as large as I am, is that I had to share one single room with all of my siblings growing up. Like, I'm used to this. This is fine.

This is just tactical bunk beds. Yeah. but your bunk beds couldn't go approximately four miles an hour and weigh like 350 tons. Hey, I wasn't in World War I. The M. I'm what Abrams could go fast as fuck, Nate. Yeah, until it causes every road on earth to collapse. That's correct.

And then it goes to the bottom of the Euphrates or whatever. And the engine occasionally bursts randomly into flames. Yeah. Now, he teaches for another 15 years, mostly math and science in Christian brother schools across Ireland. But then in 1873, he leaves. the Christian brother, citing ill health. But that seems to be something of an excuse.

The real reason why he leaves is, per Christian brother tradition, you have to take your final vows into the brotherhood when you turn 30 years old. Holland had just turned 30 and probably figured he didn't want to spend the rest of his life being a Catholic school teacher and bailed. Yeah, he wanted a bust. You can't bust if you're a Christian brother. God, just his whole forehead full of veins. It's like nobody just even so far as graze me.

see it's coming from a great lineage of you know inventors trying to create you know potato electricity the submarine this is adding further credence to like why irish people have such big heads it's because they're so full of ideas that obviously immediately after he got on a boat and immigrated to the united states landing where else but boston why did you say that with a southern accent i don't know i can't do a boston exit i just can't boston uh he then gets a job with an engineering firm, something he always wanted to do. He wanted to get down to actually working

on ships and things like that. However, he would never get the chance because one day while walking to the public library to look at papers related to submarines, he slipped on some ice and shattered his fucking leg. This would land up in bed for months because it's the

1800s. This is a legitimate life-threatening injury. Yeah, you get like bone marrow poisoning and die the next day or whatever. So with nothing better to do, he turns back to his submarine design from years earlier and begins messing around with them again. And it's not like he has a job to go back to. He's in America now, baby. He got sick, couldn't go to work, so he got fired. He's laid up in bed with a broken leg looking at the design of his submarine, like that one meme of a, you know, Wolverine looking at the Gene Gray.

But his leg eventually heals. He goes back to work teaching at a nearby Catholic school in Patterson, New Jersey. But Through that and other connections, he eventually meets other engineers who are working on designing a submarine for the U.S. Navy. Now, at the time, the U.S. does not have any functioning submarines. Really, nobody does. And everyone else was starting to look into them. Remember, the Confederates had fueled a submarine during the Civil War, the CSS Hunley, that killed way more of its own men than any enemies. We did an episode about that as well.

Go listen to it. But submarines were still seen in the United States in the context of this episode, but pretty much everywhere, as little more than a curiosity. Because they were just missing something. They were hand cranked. They had shitty engines. People kept sinking them. You know, the not on purpose kind of sinking. You suffocate in them.

That also happens. Or it's like, the turtle requires the world's most fittest man to try to get it somewhere. Submarines pretty much have been a massive failure. mostly of the catastrophic nature, but people are really beginning to look into them as something serious. Holland, while not working on that specific U.S. Navy design, followed it very closely.

What came out of the process was a submarine known wonderfully as the intelligent whale. What? The submarine was called the intelligent whale. Whales are pretty intelligent, so that's odd, but... Maybe the only whale that that guy in meth time was kind of stupid.

Yeah, I've only ever met dumbass whales before. So like, what if a whale was smart? Every whale I have met has been a fucking podcaster. That just came out of nowhere. And I was just reminded, there's a effects processing pedal that I've used for stuff with music that it's by Canadian company. And it's called shallow water. But they make another pedal called the unpleasant surprise.

And I was sort of like, what? Ah, yes. The newspaper headline of the day of my birth. When you just said, the intelligent whale, I was thinking of, of, yeah, I did, uh, what was it called,

uh, Fairfield Cirquetry's unpleasant surprise. It's odd combination of words right there. I'm pitching an idea for a T-shirt. That's the design of, of a subbreed. It's just called dumb-ass whale. Well,

it's kind of like like animal plus adjective that you're not expecting. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong, but you're not expecting. I don't know. Uh, the truculent zebra. Uh, you know,

the dyspeptic hamster. Like, thick-ass antelope. Yeah. I mean, obviously you don't want it to be, you know, it can get funnier if you take it in a weirder direction. I don't know, the sensual camel or something like that, but that starts to fire up the imagination.

Wait, hold on. Have you ever met a non-sensual camel, Tom? Nate? If you're into spitting and getting trampled, then yes, camels are sensual. Otherwise, no. I love camel play. Everyone in Berlin loves camels, but no one else does.

I'm excited to announce the name for my upcoming submarine design, the chumesson frog. Oh, that's gross. Like everything before the intelligent whale, it was powered by a hand crank. And its offensive capabilities were limited to

getting really close to something in planning a bomb. Who will crank in the intelligent whale? Yeah, I need you to get inside the intelligent whale and crank like your life depended on it. Crank that whale. I mean, it's a soldier boy lyric if he was aquatic based. That was just what

he used to get into his bunk at the Christian brother's school cranking his whale the Navy declined to accept the intelligent whale for service and since the government actually paying for the submarine was dependent on them accepting it

they didn't pay anybody for the work like the intelligent whale was that a blueprint they built this thing with the money out of their pockets and Holland saw these failures as this same as all the other old submarines. It needed some kind of propulsion system to make it quick, and he thought it was really stupid to build this finely engineered piece of machinery

only for it to get really close to something to plant a bomb. Like it puts it directly in harm's way, which is 100% true, and he believed it needed a weapon that could attack from a distance, i.e. like a torpedo, something that Holland had drawn in his first design, dating back to what he was 70. years old. So digging out his old plans, he approaches the U.S. Navy and tries to pitch them on his submarine. He's immediately shot down. He thought this was a combination of old school

Navy types lacking in imagination, which is true, but also because how the U.S. Navy functioned back then. Was it that like, oh, we really like this design will give you money to build it? It's like, no, you go out and build it. If you like it, we'll buy it from you. Like, he's just presenting this And also as well, like, if I remember correctly, he went to school in Limerick and his accent was kind of weird. So it's like him presenting this idea to all these like military types who talk like they have mouthfuls of cotton and he just sounds like blind by a bow club. Hello, you wonderful piss witches. I have this incredible idea here for a submarine. This is also the air that the second someone heard an Irish accent, they immediately began spouting slurs.

Yeah. So he figured if he, you know, managed to get funding and build the submarine himself, the US Navy would have had no choice but to buy it from him because it would just be so good. But Holland had no money. However, thanks to his constant employment throughout his entire adult life at Irish Catholic schools, he did have connections, specifically connections to the Fenian Brotherhood. Yes. The Fenian Brotherhood is like the American contemporary of the Irish Republican Brotherhood at the time, which would up until like the independence would be the kind of social groundwork movement for the Irish Republican Army. Not that IRA, the other IRA. The first IRA. Yeah, not that other other IRA. We're talking about the OG IRA. Yeah, like the real IRA, but not the, but not the real IRA. So the Fenian Brotherhood was like a Essentially like a networking group for support Both raising funds for you know activities in Ireland But also as like a way to keep the community together in America Like even well into the 20th century

The groups that kind of spawn out of this were like Super influential in like funding arms being sent to Northern Ireland Yeah, it's like a Republican militant LinkedIn. Yep. My 17 child died of starvation. Here's what it taught me about B2B sales. I mean, I was just going to say that, like, of all the things that if you were a student in an American Irish Catholic school in the 19th century, of all the things that your

instructors could have a weird fixation about, submarine seems like the most harmless. I mean, arguably, you would be true. And normally when we start a story of like this strange Irish man from a fishing village had a dream to create a subrate, it ends up at a place where people don't end up dying. But, but we are definitely crossing that line during this episode. Now, in tellings of this story, Holland's friends in like newspaper articles of the day are often referred to as his Irish associates, which is the most mob-ass way to refer to them as. And this is all very interesting because despite Holland being an Irish Catholic and like most people who come from a group of people have been conquered by another, could certainly be considered a nationalist and not in the cursed way. But he was never a member of any Republican organization. He was not a member of the Fenians. Despite the fact that he wrote that a submarine could easily be used to counter British naval influence, he wasn't really a militant.

Some of this could be chocked up to further the cause of Irish independence. Sure, I'm sure that was at least part of it. But Holland wrote way more about how much he really loved submarines that he ever did about a longing for a free motherland. I love getting like a weird, obsessive guy to build a massive weapon under the auspices of like, yeah, we might use this weapon to obliterate the British, but you know, you get to work away in your little room and like design your submarines and do the things. you love. That's kind of what it boiled down to because remember, his first pitch this was not to the Fenians or any other organization. His first pitch was to the United States. And all of our parents, I will say that autism didn't exist back in the day. I mean, I'm just laughing because

it's like thinking of a modern analog for this, like what could be a thing in which someone's like, I really, really, really need to, I don't care what the political cause is. I don't know. I'm going to draw Fursuit manga. But like, I will draw Fursuit manga for ICE. I will also draw for the exact opposite of ISIS. I don't care, but it's got to be fur suit manga. I mean, nothing to do with fur suits, which is a sentence I just said. But the closest modern example of that is like the giant cannon guy.

He would end up working for Saddam Hussein. Like, he really wanted to build giant fucking cannons, specifically giant cannons to fire things into space. And Saddam Hussein was the guy who'd pay him to do it. So even though he was Canadian and was a moment. certainly assassinated by the Mossad. He really wanted to build big old cannons to fire things into space. And Saddam was the guy who'd pay him to do it.

I lost my mind because in the day of recording, I was just reviewing T.F. episode before it went out and they were talking with Joseph Burton about this, that apparently this is an Israeli startup. It's like, we're going to build a rail gun to launch stuff into space for like, which is kind of a problem in the sense that like, you know, most things that are precise that you would want for space stuff is going to get damaged by being shot from a rail gun. It's was like, yeah, it's fucked up. Because, like, there was one guy who could have done this, but Israel killed him already. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know if his canons would have, well, he built a fine canon, I guess. A perfectly fine canon. Perfectly fine canon. It does seem like Holland would have built a submarine for anyone who was willing to give him the time and money to give it a shot. He was in it for the love of the submarine game. It just so happened to line up that he was Irish in America in the mid-1800s. And most people didn't like Irish people.

America back then, so he ended up working for Irish people. Yeah, and everyone like who he was like pitching this to who wasn't Irish was just like looking at him with the disgust of like seeing the fish people from Shadow Over Insmouth. I'm also thinking like what other weird causes might he have been able to devote his to donate his talents towards. Yeah, he would have ended up being an Armenian nationalist, but we didn't have a C for him to build a suburb. We've built you a submarine for Lake Vaughn. The early days of the women's Christian temperance union, they basically, he built a submarine so they can do like, you know, the submarine equivalent of dropping people out of helicopters

if they get caught drinking alcohol. It's like they could use that to, you know, we could prevent the advent of the Kennedys by killing bootleggers crossing the Great Lakes with a submarine. Never mind. Would you go back in time and kill baby Hitler? Would you go back in time and kill baby Jane? Yeah, would you kill Joseph Kennedy? You could have stopped Carlin Busset Kennedy wearing those folk ass toward a shell head palms. I'm suddenly just very in favor of a Michigan or nationalist group getting a homemade submarine.

But in the 1800s where that sentence is a nearly as curse as it would be today. There would be like an exponential increase in the numbers of Edmonds Fitzgerald at the bottom of the great place. Hey, hey, hey, never forget. Never forget. If you did not now, the only Michiganers who would fund it would be the one percenters. We have our own. They're called. Michigan militia. They really wish they had enough time or they really wish they took time off from fucking their cousins to build a submarine. So this is where the Fenians meet Holland. And they look at his submarine blueprints, which he had dubbed the Holland One. They vote to

fund submarine construction using what they call their skirmishing fund. Now the skirmishing fund, according to the book, the wonderfully titled The Dynamiters, was developed by O'Donovan Rasa in a responds to open warfare against the British just not working. So the skirmishing fund was to bankroll, effectively guerrilla warfare projects. In this case, a whole ass submarine. Yeah, there's like a huge kind of schism in like people who are like interested in like Irish nationalism and like the history of Irish nationalism in like the difference between like Daniel O'Connell, who wanted a more peaceful transition to independence and Donovan Rossel who was like, no, we're going fucking blow up everything. Both of them just died poor in America. I love the idea that one of them

led them down to, yeah, we'll privately fund a submarine. Why not? I mean, I think the thing about it is, is that like a submarine is not the first thing that comes to mind when you envision something. Especially back then. Employed for guerrilla warfare in the sense that like guerrilla warfare often is that one is plausibly a civilian until one is conducting an attack and you're like, oh, by the way, we built the closest thing to a mecca that you could have at the 19th century. is the Irish Gundam. This is the Irish Gondon. Also correction. Daniel O'Connell died in Genoa. Well, I mean, at least you knew the food was slapping better than in America. Christ sakes. They're about eating gababagool. You might be wondering how a submarine falls

into the category of guerrilla warfare. But Holland pitched this submarine as being different than what they thought a submarine was. As much as anybody understood what a submarine was at this point in history, right? He's pre-visiting Maoism. He's just like, yeah, The gorilla swims in the sea of people, you know what I mean? In a big metal boat, fucking swimming completely inconspicuously. And much like Maoism, I'm building this bitch in my backyard. So making a submarine exclusively out of pig iron that I've acquired from Fenshin. He wanted to build a submarine that could be docked inside of a fishing boat that could act as a mothership.

The mothership would then deploy into open seas, spit out the submarine, in this case, obviously the Holland One. hit British ships and then be recovered by the mothership. And since this is, again, the 1800s, this effectively makes this a stealth submarine. Well, I suppose out of every submarine back, that's a stealth submarine, but still. Okay, hypothetically speaking, let's say that this works,

that they're, you know, it's able to be deployed and recovered successfully and that, you know, they don't know loss of crew, it can navigate, it can be recovered, all these things. Mm-hmm. What is the plausible explanation for, like, oh, the ship's just kind of fucking exploded?

what do you think the British are going to do? Like, you know what I mean here? Like, that's not even you can't even chalk that up to sabotage. Like sabotage. Sometimes ships just do. Sometimes ships just do that. I was going to say, I mean. I mean, that is true.

That does happen from time to time. We have discussed this multiple times. Yeah, we do that. No, I mean, 100%. But it's just one of those things where it's like, I feel as though, like, to me, when I think of the submarine uses guerrilla warfare, it's like, right, I think it's like a thing for infiltrating, exaltrating people or supplies that makes total sense. But being used as an attack vehicle, it's like, well, people are going to figure it like, hey, at night, where there's this random fishing boats around, all of a sudden, shit just explodes.

It's like, I wonder what it could be. I don't know. Let's kill all of them. That's typically what the British would do. Yeah, I mean, I don't think they thought that far. Holland certainly didn't. I don't think Holland cares. He just wanted to build a fucking submarine. Yeah, the man just wanted to build a submarine. I'll build a submarine for Satan. I'll build a submarine for like 19th century pole pot. I don't care. I don't want to spoil the end of here, but he kind of does. but hold that thought for later. So what is it? Does he become like the official submarine consultant to King Leopold or something?

Okay, I don't want to say who he built a submarine for is worse or better. I'll let you be the judge of that. We have discovered Irish Oppenheimer. I mean, that is just the actor who played Oppenheimer. Obviously, since

nothing like this had been built before, the Fenians were a little suspicious of Holland. So Holland builds a small scale model power to be a clockwork, which is arguably even more complicated than building a functioning underwater propulsion system. Hey, listen, Irish people have a long and storied career as horologists. You know, this guy building something that works like clockwork, guys in Belfast in the 70s taking a great infant interesting clocks. Someone's going to look up his design and say like

1970, like, guys, I have an idea. He showed the Fenians as it, you know, tooled around Coney Island, like see, it works. And the Fenian seeing this guy was at minimum, not a madman was actually an engineer, that the Brotherhood voted to fund the real thing. This was the Holland one. And this was still not the full thing that he wanted to build. Holland's real plan was a powered three-man submarine with a pneumatic air gun that could fire a early version of a torpedo.

So yes, he did in fact invent a combat potato gun. Piloted by three guys called Pat Patrick and Paddy. It's the only strange like submarine that is bulbous on top so all their heads can fit in. This whole thing just feels like the setup for a really, really elaborate like Paddy Irishman, Patty Scotsman and Patty Englishman joke. Yeah, exactly. Actually, hold that thought. Fuck you. Yeah, exactly.

port holes for them to look out of and it looks like you stuffed chickpeas into a recorder. Like they're just stuck in the little fucking vents. You got them in, but now you can't get them out. Their heads are in there forever. You have to cut the submarine around it. However, Holland knew the Fenians wanted results and fast. And since he was

effectively building something from the ground up that had never been built before, he knew he already had one hell of a mountain to climb. The Holland one was 14 feet long, crewed by a single man and constructed in New York City before being shipped down to New Jersey.

This was a prototype for Holland as much as it was for the Fenians, because he was still trying to get the kinks out of the engine specifically. He thought he had found

a new kind of gasoline engine that would work, but when it was shipped to him, he found out that he had in fact been ripped off and instead been sent

a much inferior steam engine that he could not fit inside his submarine. Every time you tighten the bolts on the engine and just goes, uh,

fuck off. That's really uncomfortable. I was just, I was thinking, The sensual engine. They sold you an engine. The problem is it can't fit. And also I'm just laughing too.

It's like, the problem is with any kind of internal combustion when you are under the water is that presumably one has to airlock this correct. Even if you're just, okay, submarines and those things, if I understand correctly, like it typically wasn't deep diving. It was like just, it was like a big metal snorkel, basically. We'll get into how his submarine works and how it effectively paved the way for how all submarines still work. to this day. But first he had to deal with this really shitty steam engine. So he kind of rigged it together with a four horsepower gasoline engine, connected it with hoses to the steam engine, and then in turn connected that with hoses to the submarine. But now this is all so big. It had to be towed behind the submarine on like a launch platform. It would also have to be launched

from a horse-drawn carriage, which is a submarine in a horse-drawn carriage. Not exactly two technologies you want to be working together, really co-existing, you know? It's not normally good. But the submarine is tiny on the inside. And Holland was a very small man.

And he was just about the only guy small enough to fit inside and actually use it. Even that, he was, he barely had enough space to move his hands enough to operate it. Yeah, it's because you have to expend so much material. building it with such a head hide so an Irish person can actually fit in it.

Instead of the submarine being long as it's going through the water, it's just straight up and down. We built the tall submarine. We should change the measurement for the height of horses from hands to Irish foreheads. So he showed this to the Fenians even slapped together that it did work. Though they were suspicious of how long a man could remain underwater inside of it. So Holland locks himself inside, submerges and stays under the river for hours.

Though on the second test, someone had forgotten to put the hull plugs in the submarine, and it started flooding, and he nearly died. While he personally saw the Holland won as a failure, it did impress the Brotherhood enough to fund the Holland too, his real, full-sized plan in 1878. That funding, by the way, was summer between $14,000 and $16,000, and when adjusted for inflation, it's about a half million dollars in today, books.

which does sound like a lot of money until you remember that he's building a fucking submarine with torpedo capabilities. Like that's pretty cheap, honestly. And because he's building a submarine, there's no way he can keep this thing a secret. Just about the only thing that wasn't public about what he was doing was who was funding it. While Holland refused interviews and wouldn't allow journalists to climb inside of the submarine, they were still welding the Holland two together in an open shipyard. So it doesn't take long for people to see that whatever the fuck it is he is building is unlike any ship anyone has ever seen before, seemingly has some kind of torpedo tube and is 30 feet long.

Also, it's clear that it's not for the U.S. Navy because that would happen at one of their own shipyards. Everyone knew Holland was Irish and suspicious men who also happened to be Irish, certainly hung around the shipyard day and night. Before long, people began calling the Holland 2 the Fenian ram. This was just such incredible fodder for like the New York Gazette at the time.

And it's not that long removed from when the Fenian Brother had formed a private army and invaded Canada. Everyone was aware at this point who the Fenian Brotherhood were. And while the US government did help the Fenians invade Canada in some capacity,

they were not helping them anymore. And diplomatically, they were kind of a huge pain in the ass to have kicking around in your country when we're friends with the British again. Despite this, the government also seemingly did not care that Holland was building them a warship just at the port. Hey, they're just like he's not going to point it out us. Why do we care? Someone pulling their suspenders out like, well, actually, I'm a strict Second Amendment originalist and I believe that a submarine can be used for self-defense. here at York Atomatowns

We have hired an incredible man Called Holland to build a new Type of tubular ship I mean it does boil down to the fact that Technically there was no Rule saying a man couldn't privately Owned a warship Exactly

Is there a law now that says you can't build a Worship? Someone ride in and let us know No there's not The only regulations that would be on it is of the specific kinds of guns, and depending on what kind of tax stamp you get, those can be machine guns in America. I think we should forego getting paid for a while to build the world's first podcast ship. I'll take it out of your pay. I'm fine with that. I'm also laughing too because it's like, well, that means you could not notionally have a privately owned warship and have to have

an unregulated weapon so you can get the Canadian guy to build you the super gun on your boat at the U.S. government can't do shit about it because there's nothing in those like airbud. There's nothing in the rulebook. This is a dog can't play basketball. There's nothing in the rulebook that says, I can't have the space gun. I can't have Saddam Hussein space gun on my boat. I mean, that's effectively all SpaceX is, right? It's just a freebooter NASA, which now has, you know, controls most government funding for space. So I say we freeboot a Navy. Why not?

No, I agree. I agree. But we have to put it someplace where Mossad will never get us. where is that, where could that be? I actually don't know. It would be really funny if I have a really good example, but where's the place that Mossad is the most afraid of? Ireland. Ireland. It's just parked outside of Dublin.

Holland, however, was very much obsessed with his submarine. And while the Fenian Brotherhood probably thought it would take him maybe a year for construction, an idea that Holland did not give them, but certainly did not talk them out of, soon timelines stretched out and more and more money was spent as Holland attempted to finish his, admittedly, revolutionary design. Almost every part of this had never been done before.

And this wasn't because Holland was some kind of grifter or something like that. Admittedly, that would be even funnier. But he wasn't taking any of this money for himself. In fact, he was actually spending his own money on it too because the Fenians weren't giving them enough money. Rather, he was a man designing a submarine by himself and trying to make it not kill three dudes inside. For example, he tried to come up with air purifiers before, you know, kind of finding them

impractical instead deciding that a constant supply of pressurized air would be good enough to keep breathing air for three days. And it's not like he wasn't testing these things. He was testing them on himself. So, like, this is a man who fully believed in what he was doing. I mean, it's really interesting to think of convincing people that, like, this is the key to, you know, like turning the tide against the British, like Irish nationalists. like, hey guys, we've got this thing built for you.

And it's like the absolute like skeleton key to achieving all of our aims. And it's like, it's a metal tube that goes underwater. It's like, yo, man, I got you a one way ticket to the city of Ganja. And you're like, hell yeah. Then it's like, actually, you're going to Azerbaijan. Now, the position of the torpedo tube is moved from the top of the submarine to the very front, which is, again, very modern. And then he had come up with a very complex series of different inventions to actually make

the air-powered torpedo tube work, but most importantly be able to be reloaded while the submarine was underwater. Because, you know, if any single step of that failed, submarine floods and you die. So, and again, he was one who tested all of these. He also had to order a gasoline engine that could be re-tled to fit inside and work in the submarine. And he did order one from the exact same company that ripped him off the time before because they were the only ones that manufactured the specific kind of engine that he was looking for, but this time they sent him the right engine. And Nate, going back to what you were saying, the submarine would work pretty much just like submarines would work all the way up until someone stuck a nuclear power plant inside one of them.

The gasoline engine would propel the submarine while on its surface, and while doing so would charge a collection of batteries. The batteries would then power the submarine while it was submerged, while the gas engine can no longer be used. he effectively invented how submarines would work until we split the atom. I mean, that's really impressive,

quite frankly. I mean, like, there's some other stuff we've talked about with submarines. It's always just sort of like, it's the move the crank machine

from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but underwater. And this is, yeah, this is a legitimate advance. This is cool. Now, this is the Irish Houteps in action.

It's like, we are the fathers of modernity. We invented like flavored crisps in the submarine. Yep. Yeah. Quite honestly, the invention of the modern

every 100% does belong to Ireland and one specific shipyard to New York City and also specifically Irish Republicans not even Ireland it just belongs

to militant Irish Republicans So you hear that Protestants don't take fucking any credit for the fuck you Yeah exactly What you got to do is advanced society

by having a I don't know like off label shipyards I do it a little a little backyard metallurgy a little a little kicking money up

to Salvatore big pussy bump Pincereo just so the cops don't come around. Every now and again, I mean, what he's really saying is that like the way that you know you're a legit inventor is test everything on yourself. And if you don't die it, it works, then it's going to change human history. And if it does work. Yeah, the suicide bomber only tested it once, but he got it right. Well, yeah. And if you get it wrong, you're going to be like that. What is it? The state center for Montana who was like, I don't need antibiotics. I can just

drink colloidal silver. He turned into a spurs. Or like the Dilbert guy who took horse medicine to cure his cancer and died. Yeah, he did. Yeah, you know, and someone's trying to make an AI version of Scott Adams that can live in perpetuity. And his family is trying to sue them to stop. But they're like, no, Scott Adams said he wanted this. And it's like, as I said, why pick Scott Adams when obviously what the world demands is the fucking AI John McAfee? Like half him out in the wild, that'll at least be entertaining.

This is from the article the Holland submarine, quote, An operator sat above the engine and worked two joystick levers. The left controlled the rudder, the right, the diving planes. An engineer regulated the valves, observed the various gauges, and was able to blow the fixed ballast tanks if an emergency required it. The third member was the gunner who operated the submarine's pneumatic gun, an 11-foot-long 9-inch diameter tube that ran through the Ford ballast tank and compressed air compartment and fired a 6-foot-long torpedo

with a 400-pound burst of compressed air. Now, you might be wondering how it got the nickname the Fienie. and ram. They just kind of gave it to it. Mm-hmm. Because ramming ships back then was a common form of naval warfare. They couldn't see any obvious guns on the thing, so they assumed it was supposed to ram into things. But it turned out the ram as a nickname was an apt one for the Holland submarine. It could be used as a ram, but that was not part of Holland's original design.

Rather, he discovered that capability by accidentally crashing it into a pier one day during testing. The sub demolished the pier, but barely damaged the subbrates. So Holland decided, you know what, fuck it. In a pinch, you could totally ram a ship with this if you wanted to. As you can imagine, it's taking Holland years to iron out all the complications that come with this new machine. But by 1881, it was pretty much done and working.

This is from the article the Funian Ram. Quote, Holland clearly demonstrated that the boat was practical. He made numerous descends to 60 feet to not operate successfully on the surface and below it. He fired projectiles from his torpedo tube, the projectiles being loaned by Captain Erickson, the designer of the USS Monitor. He frightened fishermen and small boating parties on Long Island Sound by suddenly appearing beneath the waves, and apparently thoroughly enjoyed himself with his first real submarine. Much good for the whole Irish people are the children of Daygone. I love that.

Two things about this passage. One, he just hooked up with the inventor of an ironclad. He was like, yo, could you spot me in a nerd torpedo that I can fire? And then just using it to scare the shit out of fishermen. And having the most fun he's ever had this one. I mean, he's been trying about this since he was a kid. Can you imagine? It'd be like, when I was 11, I remember being like, I'm going to design a Magitech

armor from Final Fantasy 6, but it's going to fly. Imagine if I'd actually done that, but it was like decades later. and I was just like whipping ass around, I don't know, Geneva in what effectively amounts to like a flying mecca. That would be awesome. That would be sick. I would have so much fun. Two things.

If you like flying Magitech armor, there's a game called Chained Echoes out there for you. And two, I kind of got to experience this because like any person who becomes a tank crewman in the U.S. military, I assume any military that doesn't have conscription. I was fucking obsessed with tanks. And then, you know, when I was 17, I go to basic one station unit training at Knox. and I get to drive one, easily win the coolest moments of my life.

It's all been downhill since then. And then firing the main gun. I think that's the closest have ever come to mentally coming. Well, look at you. It's like the Arnold scene from pumping iron. He says he's coming at the gym. He's coming when he's posing. Isn't life great?

Every time I get the pump, I feel like I'm coming. Yeah, he's like, you know, I'm coming at home. I'm coming at the gym. Yeah. Well, no, the designers understood this. That's what they called it, the auto loader. Exactly. But each time he tested it, he found that something else needs a little work.

This is a submarine after all. If something, virtually anything fails, you die. There's no room for air. But this isn't good enough for the Fenians. They were getting pissed that Holland was taking so goddamn long and spending way more money than they originally intended. Furthermore, Holland was designing a third submarine for them and getting money for that as well. And again, this is not like a not. against Holland. This is like the first time that anybody on this show has ever gone above

budget and they were right to do so. Holland was also complaining to the Brotherhood that they were not actually giving him enough money. He was spending his own on top of the money that they were giving him. The Brotherhood countered saying that Holland was misusing funds and then filed a lawsuit against him. Now, this brings several serious problems to the Brotherhood. They were a secret organization secretly funding the construction of a weapon they were explicitly going to use against an American ally. Now, this was not public information.

However, Holland certainly knew this. And it was only a matter of time before as an individual. Like, they were not suing them as like, Fenian Brotherhood LLC or whatever. But also like firing a lawsuit this time in America and the legal system was like, you know, two guys with top hats go in front of a guy with an even bigger top hat.

And one guy's like, this man's a snake in the glass. So they're going to say, this man's a no good son of a bitch. And like, that's probably what it boiled down to as well. It's not like they're suing them as an organization. They would have a cover guy go and sue, but it would take about five seconds for any decent attorney to be like, yeah, they're the Fenian Brotherhood. And in that case, the government would at minimum impound their submarine. So they would lose all their money and lose their submarine.

Would it help if the representatives of the Fenian Brotherhood were overdubbed in court? I cannot stress enough how much everyone involved in this situation other than Holland is a fucking idiot. Let's sue this guy for stealing our money while we're building an illegal warship in his backyard. Eventually the Brotherhood's leadership decided, well, we can't do that. And the submarine is already built. Holland seems to already have it working. So, well, we don't need Holland anymore. And in 1882, a group of brotherhood goons

simply forged Holland's signature at a piece of paperwork, walked over to the pier, handed it to the security guard, and then stole it with a tugbone. I hate when the goons steal my bow. They then brought it to Connecticut to a safe house where they plan on using it against British shipping. Now, fellas, this boat never gets used against British shipping.

Do you want to guess why? Because none of these people probably knew how to fucking use it. Nailed it. Yeah, when you fucking take the boat But you don't take the manual of like how to use the first ever functional submarine You stole a submarine from the man who invented it effectively Didn't even take like Community College night course on how to use the goddamn thing There was definitely some con who was like with him was like

Oh yeah, listen, it's fine I'll know how to use it, it's fine How hard could it be? You just you put it in the water, you turn it on and it goes forward what, like how many levers is there going to be? Yeah, you just hit the big submarine on button. And if it doesn't work, you just get on 19th century YouTube and figure it out. That's exactly what happened. They all sat around and said,

fuck, none of us know how to use this thing. And if you pull on levers, it's like that scene in the Simpsons where Homer's trying to fly the plane, he just pulls the landing gear while they're on the tarmac and the plane collapses. We'll see, you know, if this had been American Protestants who were building this thing, they would have consulted the Bible in order to, like, divine how to use this infernal machine. But because

they're Irish Catholics, none of these people have ever read the Bible. I do like the idea that there is a gospel of submarine warfare in the Bible hidden somewhere. I mean, that's kind of the story of being swallowed by a whale, right? Technically, a submarine. It's an intelligent whale. You're right. Jonah was swallowed

by an intelligent whale, I guess. Ask Jonah. Go ask your local priest in America. I mean, like, hey, what does God say about the intelligent whale? would ask one here, but I think you just hit me. Yeah. And so after figuring out that, you know what? None of us know how to use the submarine. They did something somehow even dumber than stealing it in the first place.

They reached back out to Holland and say, hey, we'll pay you for lessons on the submarine we just stole from you. Yeah, look at my bad. I'm sorry, you know, I didn't mean it. Can you just like show me how to use it at least? And remember, they still hadn't paid. him so he was like, you didn't, you already didn't pay me. And you stole my shit. So he told them, no, and said famously, quote, I'll let her rot in their hands. So the brotherhood eventually

hauled the submarine ashore and stuck it in a shed to be forgotten. It became one piece of property amongst many that the brotherhood would bicker over and the time to come. The engine eventually got parted out, but the submarine itself stayed in that shed, forgotten, until someone found it in 1927. Fucking putting the submarine up on blocks, man. Holland, however, just kept on working. He kept designing submarines and pneumatic guns and pitched multiple ideas to the US Navy over the years

that won multiple design competitions. Yeah, this isn't like really short sight on the, on the Fienian Brotherhood because it's like, yes, you can steal this submarine from this guy. You have one submarine. He can just make another one. And boy, does he. The problem is he keeps winning design competitions,

but each time the Navy backs out on actually funding the submarine designs. At one point he got pissed. He swears off submarines and attempts to build a flying machine and enters like the same race to flight that the Wright brothers eventually win. So after failing to beat those assholes from Ohio, he founds the Holland torpedo boat company, which is what he's calling submarines with help and funding from Lewis Nixon, and they begin constructing the Holland Four in 1896.

Now, fun fact about Lewis Nixon, we've kind of already talked about him before. He was the main designer behind the Indiana class battleship from our episode in the USS Massachusetts. Though I should point out that he is actually good at his job when he doesn't have a whole bunch of politicians telling him, you know what, just make the guns bigger over and over and over again. And he's also fantastically wealthy.

So within four years, the Holland Four is completed. and is shown to the U.S. Navy. They purchased it for $150,000, making the USS Holland the first ever officially commissioned submarine of the U.S. Navy. Holland made $0 from this sale, not because his business partner fucked him over,

but rather because the submarine had cost three times more to build than the government had paid for it. But rather than a warship, the USS Holland was a proof of concept, the next evolutionary step for submarines, the US Navy, but the entire

world. The basic design of the Holland 4, which was just a modified version of the Fenian Ram, became the international standard for submarines. The British, ironically, created an entire class of Holland submarines.

Their first submarine was the HMS Holland, which he did not like, I should point out. Much like I am going to have to interact with so many drunk English cons tonight who have expropriated Guinness as an identity from Irish people.

The British expropriated the Holland class submarine. And here's the interesting part. Holland would go on to build the first submarines for a different navy. The Imperial Japanese Navy. Yeah. All right. Now you're talking. He just like me for real, obsessed with Japan. And then he lived long enough to see them be used during the Russo-Japanese War and

destroy the Russian Navy. for his efforts the Emperor Meiji awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun I need to see if there's a photo of Holland and a kimono There's not I looked

One presumes he had to go live in Japan So he probably spoke rudimentary Japanese To people who didn't speak English In the manner of Sean Connery and Rising Sun Holland is literally the final boss Of random Irish man appears

In every conflict in the world It's called the Shembourg pie and a Kuhai relationship. Konichua, what hushuwa, John Peterp Holland. Though Holland was a designer, he was not much of a businessman. He eventually left his own company in 1904 over patent-related arguments.

He died in August 12th, 1914 of double pneumonia. Slightly over a month after his death, a German imperial U-boat would sink several British ships once World War I kicked off. Something, I think we all could agree that John Holland would have loved to see. The end. I think he would have been fairly like, yeah, maybe he hated the British, but this man loves submarines more.

He was in it for the love of the game. He was a submarine nationalist. You've got to build a submarine big enough that he's going to build his own version of Stargate Atlantis. Like, even though like the Brits named their class of submarines, the Holland and their first submarine, the HMS Holland, like, he was a little bit annoyed, but he didn't care. So, like, yeah, he cared more about submarines and anything else. They're like, yeah, Japan needs a submarine. Yeah, sure, fine. Russia need submarines, great.

Undersea metal tubes of no nation. Submarine anarchist. I bow to no king. I recognize no border. There is no border in the ocean. The only border is a border of the mine. Which could also be penetrated with submarines. I'm chilling in my submarine with Cthulhu.

Exactly. You know what? I don't care. If the dark lord wants to hire me on a contract, I'll build a submarine for him. It doesn't matter. You know what? If like the hidden Irish hodoolewold.

type civilization beneath Antarctica that drifted there and this is waiting, it's waiting for the time when humanity has fallen completely to come back and it can create the you know the the Irish pyramids like if they want a submarine, hell yeah. Shagoth is like entirely populated by Irish people who

live under the sea. Exactly. Arguably building submarines for the Imperial Japanese Navy is would 100% evil. Yeah. But like he didn't care. He just wanted to build submarines. I think I wish I loved anything as much as he loves submarines.

You know, like completely consumed his life. No borders, nothing else. This man only cared about submarines. Good for him. You absolutely have to respect it. Yeah. I respect the submarine-based hustle. But fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion.

If you like to ask us a question, you could support the show on Patreon and then use the Patreon messages or the Discord. You'll also have access to and ask us a question. You could put the message inside of a submarine. ram it into a dock in New York and we'll answer it on air. And today's question is, what dumb game did your friend group play growing up?

I assume that we all had something stupid that we did. We had cheese on the ceiling where you take like pre-not pre-packaged easy singles cheese. It's the fake plastic cheese that comes individually around. Yeah, like craft singles. Yeah. Yeah. And you like unwrap it and we did this in school

and you like throw it and stick it to the ceiling. And we could see how many we could stick to the ceiling in the space of an hour before the teacher came back in. I have a few. I mean, I think we all had the young boys punching each other in the dick. And we called it the tipper game. But we also had a version of that when we played in, I want to say middle school, probably died off by high school where we play hacky sack.

And then the person like in a circle and the person who failed to pass the sack along had to line up against the wall and have the hacky sack thrown at their dick and balls. hard as they could. Maybe this is why millennials are having less kids is because the entire generation was obsessed with hitting each other in the balls. Yeah. I genuinely don't remember, but I mean, these are all ringing true. I mean, like, I was trying to think of something specific and I don't really have anything that's coming up with it. But like, yeah, we definitely did the throw the cheese or throw bologna slices of bologna on the ceiling. I never did. I never did the food on the ceiling thing. I think it's because all of our ceilings

weren't like salt like though they were drop ceilings that they would stick to that it was hard to get stuff up there pencils up into yeah that's true we did that too yeah we used to um have this game called slaps where you put your two hands at the palms of your hands together and extend them and then two you're facing each other and you take turns

essentially like winding up and trying to slap each other's hands and you have to like dodge the slap but if you dodge prematurely you have to turn your hands horizontally and the person just slaps you as hard as possible. This wasn't really a game that was popular in school, but it was definitely a game that my friends and I played, which was,

we'd put on sweatshirts and stuff, and it would be, like, shooting each other with paintball guns. And it's like, who can last the longest? Like, each time you shoot each other, you take a step forward. And then it's like, like, when does the pain become too much that you stop? Oh, that is dumb. Yes.

We're shooting the body, not in the face, but yes, like, we got some monster welts from that shit. Fuck, yeah. They're painful as hell. We did paintball gun related things as well because my mom didn't see that as an issue of giving my brother and I paintball guns. This is more of a game between my brother and I. Yeah. Where we would put on like a hoodie or maybe a winter jacket and turn.

And you know, we're from Michigan. So the winter jacket is effectively kevler body armor at that point. We would go back to back, do 10 paces and turn and shoot. Yeah. The problem is you can't aim when you do that. And we weren't wearing like eye protection. how both of us have all of our eyes is a minor miracle. And then one of my closest childhood friends and I had a different game

that was pretty much the entire neighborhood. And this is before Airsoft was around, right? We just used BB guns. And we would fuck each other up with BB guns. And I stopped playing that when I was standing on, you know, we're both perfectly normal white trash youths in the greater Detroit area. Anybody from the area probably can,

and just closed their mind and picture us in their head. And he shot me in the foot at point blank rage with a pellet with a like when those pump pellet guns pumped like 10 times and it went straight through my foot

and into the deck. And that's when I decided I didn't want to hang out with him anymore. Oh my God. Yeah. It didn't hit any tendons or bones somehow. It just went to that space in between your toes.

Oh, God. Yeah, fucking sucked. You got a toe piercing. I have another really stupid one we used to play in school where it's called hockey and you put your knuckles flat against the table in a face and you take like a 50 cent coin and you're like on opposite ends of the table. Oh, we played this one! And you had to like flick it at each other as hard as possible in the first one to bleed

loses. Yep, I definitely played that one. Yeah, we called it hockey as well. One thing that we did that was just dumb as fuck was just me and some friends of mine was this is right after Metal Gear Solid One had come out and we had these like these goofy really cheap paintball guns and we didn't have paint balls or air in them. But we would pack them in our backpacks.

So we'd be like, I'd come over to my house or whatever. And then what we do is like sneak up on each other and be like stealth kill and stuff like that, which this was before Columbine. You were just playing the lacking game with paint balls. Yeah, 100%. We were doing this all. Like, my friend would come over.

Like he would get caught lacking up the streets. Where did you go? Like you were hanging out in the basement. When I come upstairs, then like he pops up from the doorway and points it at me, he's like stealth. And it's like, yeah, it was stupidest shit. But yes, it was, it was caught lacking. That's been reinvented with actual.

Yeah, the guys be like, you got your heat on you. Stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's getting caught lacking. Yeah. They did that in my high school, too, with real guns. I didn't play that game.

Oh my God. But fellas, that is a long history of how we're all very stupid children. But you host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts. I want to help. Way to Dad. Trash future. Kill James Bond.

No guys, no mayors. These are all shows I'm involved with some capacity. I've got some music coming out, too. I don't know when I can announce it because stuff's taking longer than I thought to get mastered, but it is happening. That's it. Tom. Blood work, a show about the economy of violence.

We, at the time this episode comes out, we'll have finished our four-part history of the AK-47. And beneath skin, show about the history of everything, told you the history of tattooing. And in a couple of weeks, I'll have something cool to announce that involves people possibly giving me money to use my services. So you're already listening to the only show that I host,

but I am plugging my book again. The Highlands Burn. It's gunpowder fantasy. If you have read Brian McClennon's, the powder mages, or Adrian Chikovsky's Guns of the Dawn, you might like this book. You can pre-order it digitally. Right now, it comes out May 29th. We will be working on the audiobook in the near future. But for now, digital e-book, available for pre-order. It comes out May 29. Buy it now. It's an e-book. It's not that expensive. Everybody, thank you so much for listening to the show. Until next time. Build a submarine in your backyard. If you beat kids enough in school, they will invent the new submarine.