Sub Marine Explorer is a submersible built between 1863 and 1866 by Julius H. Kroehl and Ariel Patterson in Brooklyn, New York for the Pacific Pearl Company. It was hand powered and had an interconnected system of a high-pressure air chamber or compartment, a pressurized working chamber for the crew, and water ballast tanks. Problems with decompression sickness and overfishing of the pearl beds led to the abandonment of Sub Marine Explorer in Panama in 1869 despite publicized plans to shift the craft to the pearl beds of Baja California.

Ariel Patterson, was a 19th-century American shipbuilder. He apprenticed under shipbuilder Perrine, Patterson, and Stack in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Patterson had his own shipyard, building and designing for 40 years some of the finest steamships. The most notable were the steamer Ericsson, which had the first Hot air engine invented by John Ericsson and the three-masted side-wheel SS Yankee Blade, one of the first steamships to trade between to New York and San Francisco. In 1863, Patterson bought property at the foot of North Third Street, where he started a shipbuilding, dockage and a sawing and planing mill. He died in Brooklyn, New York in 1877.