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The Modern Submarine 73 even his most frenzied friends refused to listen to him. They considered him crazy, and his under- water vessel merely the figment of a disordered brain. After two years’ heartless endeavour to stir up his compatriots to co-operation, he shook the dust of Ireland from his feet in disgust. He would go to America, where the Irish plotters were more energetic and enterprising. But misfortune appeared to cling to him even in the land from which he expected so much. Shortly after landing at Boston he met with an accident, which necessitated a sojourn in hospital. Here he whiled away his tedium upon the improve- ment of his ideas and designs. It became noised abroad that a newly arrived young Irishman had invented a submarine, and naturally he became the quest of the newspaper men. They listened quietly to his fervid stories, admired his inflammatory and unquenchable hatred of Britain, and inspected his designs with sympathetic interest. But they did not announce him to the world as an inventor whose ideas would revolutionise the whole trend of naval science! They merely ridiculed him mercilessly. Yet this attitude left Holland unmoved. He had supreme confidence in his great idea, and would not be dissuaded from its further prosecution by ridicule, indifference, or even antagonism. Every spare hour was devoted to perfection of details in the drawings, while he lost no opportunity to canvass for practical sympathy in the form of funds wherewith to build such a boat. But the American Irishmen appeared to be as unimaginative as his countryfolk in County Clare.