Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo Read Free Page A

explosions with gunpowder. He was perhaps the first in history to devise and build a powder-filled container that had a clockwork timer capable of being exploded underwater. Not content simply to allow his mines to float against enemy vessels, which he accomplished successfully by blowing up a British schooner and a smaller boat whose crew made the mistake of trying to pull one of the mines aboard, he decided the only effective way to sink a warship was to come up with a means of placing the mine directly against the hull.
    His solution was the Turtle, a technological marvel of the time. In a barn next to the house where he lived with his brother Ezra, the brothers constructed a submarine that looked like two turtle shells standing on end. The hull was carved out of solid wood and actually resembled a child’s toy top, set on a flattened lower point. David and Ezra designed a ball type of snorkel valve for air, a vertical-bladed propeller to pull the craft toward the surface, as well as a larger propeller in front for forward motion, an innovation that was seen on ships for fifty years. For submersion, they crafted water ballast tanks as well as detachable ballast weights.
    The pilot entered and exited through a raised brass hatch and sat inside in an upright position. He steered with a stern rudder while he turned the forward horizontal propeller. The torpedo, a container with 150 pounds of gunpowder, a flintlock for detonation, and a clockwork mechanism that delayed the explosion until the Turtle had backed away for safety, was connected to the upper section of the submarine by a detachable twist lever that turned a screw that was supposed to penetrate the copper sheathing on the hull of an enemy ship. Once the screw penetrated the sheathing and the gunpowder container was gripped in place, the pilot frantically reversed his forward motion with the hand crank to make his escape.
    A soldier from George Washington’s army by the name of Ezra Lee volunteered to become the first man in history to attack a submarine against a warship. The target was British Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship, the frigate Eagle, which was lying in the Hudson River off Manhattan Island. The Turtle worked flawlessly. Lee gave it his best shot and came within a hair of becoming the first submarine to sink a warship, but, unable to see underwater at night, he failed to deploy the explosive device properly. Its attaching screw struck an iron bracket holding the rudder instead of the soft copper nailed to the hull. Unable to attach the gunpowder container, Lee aborted the mission.
    A second attempt was made, but Lee dove too deep, and the current was too strong for him to make headway. The third and final effort failed when the British sentries fired on the craft as it escaped. A week later, a British sloop fired on and sank the sloop carrying the Turtle up the Hudson River. The British failed to recognize the Turtle as an advanced instrument of war and left it aboard the half-sunken sloop.
    In a letter written by Bushnell to Thomas Jefferson, he stated that he had raised the Turtle but, in his words, “was unable to prosecute the design any further.” Bushnell then experimented with floating mines in the Delaware River, with little success. After the war, he entered medicine and became a physician, practicing while teaching at an academy in Georgia. He died in 1824 at the ripe old age of eighty-five, without leaving a clue as to what he did with the Turtle.
    After he recovered it from the Hudson River, did he take it back to Saybrook and scuttle it in the Connecticut River, or did he simply chop it up into firewood and burn it to keep it out of British hands? Neither he nor his brother Ezra left any mention in their correspondences regarding the fate of the famed Turtle.
    And so the world’s first practical submarine became lost in the mists of time.
    Well aware that it was an exercise in futility, we decided to make a search of the Connecticut