Mystery Ship: The Long, Strange Odyssey of Submarine S-49 is, at long last, coming out from McFarland Press. I’ve sent them the corrected galleys and the index. The listed publication date is April 7, 2026.
The S-49 came from an era when they didn’t give submarines names – only alphanumeric designations. She had the weirdest history of any submarine I’ve ever read about. You can find references to her online, but virtually every account is incomplete or has errors in it. Which is too bad, because the story is wild.
She was one of the last four submarines ever built by the Simon Lake Torpedo Boat Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. “Type IV S-boats”, they were called, or “Sugar Boats”. They were the biggest ones the Lake company put out. Launched in 1921, the S-49 spent most of its career patrolling the waters of New England and Long Island Sound. She also tested new submarine hardware, including a lower aerial that allowed her to dive faster, a searchlight, and a unique submarine net cutting apparatus that used high voltage to MELT its way through the steel nets. That sounds like someone’s unworkable pipe dream – high voltage in SEA water? But they built it, and successfully tested it just off the Portsmouth Navy Yard in New Hampshire, and the damned thing worked. It was just so big and heavy (and a drain on the electrical system) that the sub couldn’t carry both the net cutter AND torpedoes, so the Navy gave up on it and tried to “sell” the idea to shipyards as a way to do underwater welding. Not surprisingly, they had no takers.
The S-49 and her sister ship, the S-50 were the first US Navy vessels to be fitted with true piezoelectric SONAR, and it was because of the successful tests they ran off the DRy Tortugas that the Navy kept up development of SONAR (called “supersonics” at the time)
Not long after this, the S-49 and S-50 were put into storage until funds could be appropriated to update both subs. But before that could happen, the London Naval Treaty of 1930 was signed, and as a result a huge number of Navy surface ships and whole classes of submarines were consigned to the scrapyard. Most were actually disassembled by Navy personnel, but the S-49 actually went up for bids and was sold to Boston Iron and Steel (which was actually in Baltimore). But the next day it was purchased from them by two Massachusetts politicians – literally rescued from the scrapyard at the last minute.
William Martin Keevey and Francis J. Chrestensen were friends and politicians from Revere, Massachusetts. They weren’t rich, but they finagled some creative bookkeeping and bought the hulk (the S-49 had had its deck gun, torpedoes, dive batteries, and periscopes removed, her diving gear locked, and her diesel engines disabled – she was basically a submarine-shaped steel float) and had it towed to Boston. They removed some inner bulkheads, took out her torpedo loading hatches and replaced them with staircases, and polished and painted her, then towed her to Point of Pines in Revere and hauled her up on the beach next to the Yacht Club that Keevey was an officer at. They charged people twenty five cents apiece to tour her. Ten cents for kids.
A year and a half later they did some more creative financing, hired powerful tugboat, and hauled the S-49 up the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes to Chicago for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition, where she was a huge hit. After the Fair, they towed her from port to port on the Lakes, exhibiting her for several days before moving on. By the terms of the London Treaty, she was supposed to be scuttled by 1936, but they found a loophole and talked their way out of that, exhibiting her at the 1936-7 Great Lakes Expo in Cleveland. They even managed to have new diesel engines installed, so that she could travel under her own power.
Going back down the St. Lawrence, she went back into the Atlantic and toured the East Coast until WWII broke out. After that it wasn’;t healthy to be sailing a submarine around in the ocean. They were almost fired on (by the Allies). They also couldn’t get manpower, diesel fuel, or a safe escort, and were trapped in inland waterways and a handful of ports. Once they exhausted local interest, no one wanted to tour the sub anymore, but the dockage fees continued to mount, turning her into a liability. They tried to give her back to the Navy as a training vessel (one of her other sister ships, the S-48, survived, and was being used that way), but the Nav y wasn’t interested – she’d been too heavily altered, and hadn’t dived in a dozen years. They DID accept her as scrap, though, so she was towed back to Boston Iron and Steel (who bought her the first time) in Baltimore to be scrapped…..
……and was rescued at the last minute a second time! Someone at Naval Research Lab said “We can use that,” and diverted her to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she was fitted out to dive again. A lot of sources say that she foundered while being towed by the Navy on December 16, 1942. But on that date she was at the Navy Yard. She was eventually towed to the Patuxent River, where she was used by the naval mine and torpedo testing grounds to test magnetostriction proximity fuzes in depth charges. She dove, but unmanned. Until one day when she didn’t come back up. It was felt to be too expensive to raise her, and she didn’t constitute a hazard to navigation, so they left her there. She’s still there, off Point Patience. (The testing they did was successful, by the way, although the report didn’t come out until after the end of the war.)
There’s a lot more to it. Chrestensen, who eventually bought out Keevey’s share of the business, loved sailing the S-49, dressed in his uniform that looked exactly like a US Navy Captain’s uniform (and which outraged actual Naval officers who visited). He was also litigious, and got the S-49 involved in legal disputes, one of which went all the way to the US Supreme Court, and established precedent. On another occasion, Chrestensen sailed into port to find his wife waiting there with a lawyer. She wanted a divorce, and was claiming the S-49 as alimony. It was the only tangible asset Chrestensen owned.
There’s plenty more in the book. You can read more about it at www.mystery-ship.net