Underwater-works: voyages and visions of the submarine

What did it mean to go under water in the early modern period? Diving bells had been employed since antiquity, but in the late seventeenth century spectacular recoveries from sunken Caribbean treasure ships prompted renewed innovation. Edmond Halley's diving engine of the 1690s tried to make the depths amenable to the human senses and practical manipulation. This striking attempt to create a dry world under water was part of a larger Baroque culture of the submarine that delighted in astonishing transformations between wet and dry.