Let me tell you the story of the mysterious submarine that was found at one of the islands west of the Panama Canal. It involves a submersible with lots of soul, history and bad breaks. 

Every day the tides uncover the football-shaped iron hulk left to rot just off the beach of a deserted island near Panama. The locals call it a death machine; indeed the ebb and flow of the Pacific create the ghostly illusion that it is endlessly diving and re-surfacing.

When the maritime archaeologist James Delgado arrived in Panama on a cruise ship in 2001, locals told him about the submarine, claiming it was a Japanese sub abandoned after World War II. Faced with the prospect of another boring bird-watching tour, he hired a boat to the remote island for a peek. There, in the surf of Isla San Talmo, Delgado found a forgotten chapter in submarine history, a Civil War-era cousin of the H.L. Hunley.

"It looked like something our of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," Delgado said. "At first I thought it looked like a Holland submarine, but it was much smaller." Delgado climbed around the sub, and was struck by the strange construction. Some of its design elements appeared to date to 1900, but the strange iron bars between its two hulls seemed like they'd been forged in the 1850s.

A few years later, Delgado got his answers. He has identified the wreck as the Submarine Explorer, a submersible built in New York in the waning days of the Civil War. Turned down by the US Nay, its builder took the sub to Central America to make a fortune in pearl diving. Before it was over, the sub's builder made another important - and deadly - discovery about deep-water diving.

Degado says the submarine, which in some ways is even more advanced than the Hunley, is a unique maritime treasure that should be saved. Now he's looking for a way to rescue the fallen fish-boat from the waters of Central America. Ideally, he says, the Explorer should be brought tot the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, where it could benefit from the cutting-edge technology being used to save the Hunley. "I can't imagine a better place for it," Delgado said after a tour of the North Charleston lab earlier this week. "If the funding could be found, it would be a great fit." Delgado could not get the sub out of his mind.

After returning to Canada, where he is executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum, he sent photos of the boat to every maritime historian he knew, and the knows a lot of them. Delgado, co-host with Clive Cussler of National Geographic International's "The Sea Hunters," has been in the shipwreck business for decades, and as formerly maritime historian for the US National Park Service. For a long while, however, none of this contacts could offer much advice about the fat little sub. One friend mentioned it looked like the Intelligent Whale, a Civil War-era sub, and that made Delgado think: Could it be that old?

Then, one day last year, Rich Wills, a Navy archaeologist, said the sub resembled drawings he'd seen of the Submarine Explorer, built for the US Navy during the Civil War by a German Immigrant and engineering whiz kid named Julius Kroehl. Delgado got the drawings and any doubt he had melted away. He had his sub. The final confirmation was found in the article accompanying the drawings in the 1902 journal. It said the sub had been abandoned off Panama in 1869.

Kroehl immigrated to America in 1838, where he studied to become an engineer. He took to the work like a duck to water, and by 1845 had patented a flange-bending machine for ironwork. More than a decade later, while blasting away at a reef causing problems for ships in the East River channel, Kroehl hired Van Buren Ryerson, who had crafted a pressured diving bell, to help. Kroehl would remember the bell and its name, Sub Marine Explorer.

In 1861 Kroehl became the first inventor to offer the US Navy a submarine to sneak into Southern ports and attack from beneath the surface. Officials instead chose to go with Brutus de Villeroi, who eventually built the USS Alligator, the Navy's firs submarine. Kroejl instead spent most of the war as an underwater explosives expert for the Union, working the Mississippi River circuit until he was discharged with malaria.

While recuperating, he came up with the idea of a submarine that divers could get in and out of underwater and from which they could set charges and disarm enemy torpedoes. Delgado says Kroehl was smart and knew the Navy wouldn't pay for the construction of such an experimental boat. So he joined up with the Pacific Pearl Company, which was itching to mine the pearl beds off the Central American coast.

The submersible, which Kroehl called the Sub Marine Explorer, was 36 feet long and 10 feet wide and could carry six to eight men. It was notable for its odd elliptical shape, its flat bottom and its separate chamber for pressurized air, which could be pumped into the crew compartment to equalize the pressure enough so the hatches could be opened under water. It was the first self-propelled "lock out" dive chamber, an invention most historians have thought didn't come along until the 20th century.

While Kroehl was building his submarine in early 1864, the "shot heard around the world" in the underwater arms race was fired off Charleston. The privateer H.L. Hunley had sunk the USS Housatonic four miles offshore.

By the time the Explorer sailed, the Civil War was just about over. The Navy still had no interest, but the Pacific Pearl Co. was ready for business. They tested the sub in the East River to attract investors. The New York Times covered one such demonstration in May 1866, when Kroehl took the sub down for an hour and a half, leaving the people on the dock afraid that he had perished beneath the surface. Then Kroehl popped out of the hatch smoking a Meerschaum pipe, holding a bucket of mud scooped off the bottom of the channel. Soon after that the Pacific Pearl Company shipped the Explorer to Panama, where it gathered pearls successfully for almost three years.

Kroehl did not make it so long. After one dive, Kroehl became ill. The locals said he had the "fever" and died shortly thereafter. Delgado believed there is more to the story. In 1869, according to some accounts, the Explorer was abandoned in Panama Bay after a stint of heavy use. For ten straight days, divers were taking sub to a nearby pearl bed 100 feet below the surface, working for four hours and then returning to the surface. To some degree, all of them fell deathly ill. Reading of Kroehl's symptoms, Delgado says he doesn't believe the engineer had a relapse of his malaria. His symptoms sounded like those of the other workers who got sick in the sub, much more like the bends. "They didn't know about decompression," he said. "It was unknown until workers on the Brooklyn Bridge started getting caisson's disease, and that wasn't known as the bends until years later. I think Julius Kroehl may have died of the first recorded case of the bends."

Five years after the Explorer was built, Jules Verne wrote the famous story "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Some believe that the French writer would have read about the sub's specifications. The Nautilus (commanded by Captain Nemo) was larger but had similar features to the real sub we saw.  

"If Jules Verne was researching the relatively new world of submersible vessels, he would probably have heard of the Explorer's lock-out system," says Wyn Davies, a noted British maritime heritage expert. "Submarine inventors were keen to sell their products so there would have been none of today's secrecy and technologies would have been keenly scrutinized on both sides of the Atlantic. As far as I'm aware the Explorer possessed the world's first lock-out system and its very uniqueness might have stimulated Verne's imagination. The cigar shape is also a clue that Verne might have borrowed his concept from the Explorer because other submersibles of this era came in a variety of shapes."

And so there it lies, rotting in the surf, waiting for someone to come up with the desire and funding to selvage this piece of US history.