CHAPTER II
DAVID BUSHNELL’S “TURTLE”
In the first week of September, 1776, the American army defending New York still held Manhattan Island, but nothing more. Hastily improvised, badly equipped, and worse disciplined, it had been easily defeated by a superior invading force of British regulars and German mercenaries in the battle of Long Island. Brooklyn had fallen; from Montauk Point to the East River, all was the enemy’s country. Staten Island, too, was an armed and hostile land. After the fall of the forts on both sides of the Narrows, the British fleet had entered the Upper Bay, and even landed marines and infantry on Governor’s Island. Grimly guarding the crowded transports, the ship-of-the-line Asia and the frigate Eagle lay a little above Staten Island, with their broadsides trained on the doomed city.
In the mouth of the North River, not a biscuit-toss from the Battery, floated the brass conning-tower of an American submarine.
It was the only submarine in the world and its inventor called it the Turtle. He called it that because it looked like one: a turtle floating with its tail down and a conning-tower for a head. It has also been compared to a modern soldier’s canteen with an extra-large mouthpiece, or a hardshell clam wearing a silk hat. It was deeper than it was long and not much longer than it was broad. It had no periscope, torpedo tubes, or cage of white mice. But the Turtle was a submarine, for all that.
Its inventor was a Connecticut Yankee, Mr. David Bushnell, later Captain Bushnell of the corps of sappers and miners and in the opinion of his Excellency General Washington “a man of great mechanical powers, fertile in invention and master of execution.” Bushnell was born in Saybrook and educated at Yale, where he graduated with the class of 1775. During his four years as an undergraduate, he spent most of his spare time solving the problem of exploding gunpowder under water. A water-tight case would keep his powder dry, but how could he get a spark inside to explode it? Percussion caps had not yet been invented, but Bushnell took the flintlock from a musket and had it snapped by clockwork that could be wound up and set for any desired length of time.
The Submarine of 1776.
(As described by its operator.)
“The first experiment I made,” wrote Bushnell in a letter to Thomas Jefferson when the latter was American minister to France in 1789, “was with about 2 ounces of powder, which I exploded 4 feet under water, to prove to some of the first personages in Connecticut that powder would take fire under water.
“The second experiment was made with 2 lb. of powder enclosed in a wooden bottle and fixed under a hogshead, with a 2-inch oak plank between the hogshead and the powder. The hogshead was loaded with stones as deep as it could swim; a wooden pipe, descending through the lower head of the hogshead and through the plank into the bottle, was primed with powder. A match put to the priming exploded the powder, which produced a very great effect, rending the plank into pieces, demolishing the hogshead, and casting the stones and the ruins of the hogshead, with a body of water, many feet into the air, to the astonishment of the spectators. This experiment was likewise made for the satisfaction of the gentlemen above mentioned.”
Governor Trumbull of Connecticut was among the “first personages” present at these experiments, which so impressed him and his council that they appropriated enough money for Bushnell to build the Turtle. The Nutmeg State was thus the first “world-power” to have a submarine in its navy.[4]