With many a tug and pull and hearty heave-ho, the Turtle was hoisted up the bank and safely drawn into the seine-house. The door was locked, and Lady Fenwick’s tomb gave forth no sound that night.
Doctor Franklin went his way to Boston. Doctor Gale returned to Killingworth and his waiting patients, and the Bushnells, father, mother and sons, having put the two gentlemen on the Saybrook shore, went down the river into the Sound, along its edge, and up the small Pochaug to their own home by the sycamore tree.
Mr. Bushnell and Ezra did the rowing that night. David’s white hands had, somehow, a new radiance in them for his father’s eyes, and did not seem exactly fitted for rowing just a common boat and every-day oars.
The young man sat in the stern, beside his mother, one arm around her waist, and the other 94 clasped closely between her little palms, while, now and then, her finding eyes would penetrate his consciousness with a glance that seemed to say, “I always believed in you, David.”
If you go to-day and stand upon the site of the old fort, built at the mouth of the Connecticut River, in the year 1635, by Lion Gardiner, once engineer in the service of the Prince of Orange, and search the waters up and down for the island on which David Bushnell built the American Turtle in 1775, you will not find it.
If you seek the oldest inhabitant of Saybrook, and ask him to point out its locality, he will say, with boyhood’s fondness for olden play-grounds in his tone:
“Ah, yes! It is Poverty Island that you mean. It used to be there, but spring freshets and beating storms have washed it away.”
The unexpected visit of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, to see the machine David Bushnell was building, gave new force to that young gentleman’s confidence in his own powers of invention.
He worked with increased energy and hope to perfect boat and magazine, that he might do good service with them before winter should fall on the waters of the Massachusetts Bay, where the hostile ships were lying.