In Rhode Island: Rapture of the Shallows

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The Aquatic, a noisy, diesel-driven 40-ft. private sub tender chugs out of Warwick Cove into a gray Rhode Island day. Past rows of boats with names like Many-Ha-Ha's, Daddy's Girl, Lucy M and Gyp Sea. Past a dock where burlap sacks of clams are bought and sold —the seller getting 55¢ per lb. for littlenecks, as high as 80¢ for big quahogs. Past a sandbar where a tourist drowned yesterday clamming in 3 ft. of water. Past the big shingled mansions that trim the shoreline at fashionable Warwick Neck. And so into Narragansett Bay, a body of water variously ravished by long-handled rakes, progress and history.

Just up the bay at Gaspee Point, Rhode Islanders each year burn a vessel in effigy to celebrate the burning, in 1772, of the revenue schooner Gaspee, an early warning about Yankee distaste for King and custom's duties. Last year the rusty old fishing boat Dorchester turned up in the bay with six tons of marijuana hidden aboard, then departed leaving a web of mystery, gangland murder and suicide that narcotics agents have yet to unravel. Westward, the old naval air station at Quonset Point is now the sprawling headquarters for oil-drill teams working the Baltimore Canyon.

It is perfectly fitting, then, that Warwick Cove is the only place in the world where the man who has everything can get lessons in how to handle America's latest aquatic tool (or toy). Sitting on a special launching ramp at the back end of Aquatic, the machine in question suggests a curious cross between a wind-up bathtub toy and a James Bond movie. It is a lemon-hued, one-man submarine, the S 250, a 12-ft.-long, 2,250-lb. vessel that can be run by just about anybody, dive safely to 250 ft., stay submerged for an hour at a time and costs (at $12,000 without extras) less than a Cadillac Seville. The man to see about lessons in the S 250 is Harold Jacobson, a balding but still visibly ginger-haired professional diver based in Warwick. He got the sub, and the Aquatic too, from Designer-Builder George Kittredge, a retired Navy sub commander who produces the world's only line of cheap simple-to-operate baby subs in Warren, Me. Last summer Kittredge did the teaching himself. But the success of his subs took so much of his time that this year he turned the schooling over to Jacobson.

Undersea exploration and oil searches go on apace. Oceanographers, environ mental experts and futurists freely predict that man will not only soon put vast tracts of seabed under cultivation but may eventually be commuting back and forth to shallow, Atlantis-like undersea apartment clusters. It is tempting to see the baby sub not just as a prototype toy for the rich in Florida and California but as a seagoing Model T Ford, a future flivver of the deep, or like the Curtiss Jenny biplane, some kind of ur-machine that may usher in a new age of travel. In that perspective Kittredge and Jacobson, like early aviation nuts who paid for their rickety planes by giving flying lessons or built them on a financial shoestring in barns and attics, can be regarded as American visionaries, gambling on the hope that history will catch up with their private enthusiasm.