TheTerrifying Turtle

The Terrifying Turtle

If anyone can drive away the 100-odd British ships blockading New York Harbor, it might be a shy Connecticut inventor who has devised a strange new weapon of maritime warfare. David Bushnell, 35, calls it a "submarine vessel," also known as the Turtle. Like that creature, it can dive under water and attack its enemies by surprise. It strikes them with an explosive device that its creator has named, after the electric ray, a torpedo.

Bushnell has had little training as an inventor. Reared on a farm near Saybrook, he was 30 before he could raise the money to enter Yale. He enrolled as a divinity student, but his chief interest was in natural philosophy and mechanics. He learned that Dutch Engineer Cornelius van Drebbel had devised a "sinkable boat" in the 1620s, and after his graduation last year, he finished building a similar craft on secluded Poverty Island in the Connecticut River.

But would this machine actually work? The inventor could find out only by risking his own life inside it. One moonlit night last summer, Bushnell and his younger brother Ezra stealthily took the Turtle out into Long Island Sound for its maiden cruise. Squeezing himself through the hatch (the oaken vessel is only 7 1/2 feet high), Bushnell seated himself on a horizontal beam, seized the tiller with one arm, let in water through a valve at his feet and slowly sank beneath the surface. He then maneuvered the ship forward by turning a crank that spins a two-bladed propeller (the propeller can also be turned backward). After about 20 minutes under water, Bushnell began to run out of air, but he was determined to continue as long as possible. For another 25 minutes, he cranked the Turtle through the dark waters, steering by a phosphorescent compass needle. Then, when he could stand no more, he released his lead ballast, pumped the water out of the vessel and emerged exhausted on the surface.

Bushnell has also made several tests of his torpedo. It is a watertight oaken container, shaped like an egg and large enough to hold 150 pounds of gunpowder. The explosive can be detonated by a gunlock connected to a clock. Bushnell's plan is to have the Turtle attach the torpedo to an enemy warship by night and then escape before the explosion. At one demonstration of a model torpedo for Connecticut officials, Bushnell reported that the explosion produced "a very great effect, rending planks into pieces and casting stones, with a body of water, many feet into the air."

Benjamin Franklin inspected the Turtle in Bushnell's workshop and praised it to General Washington, who later described it as "an effort of genius." But Bushnell has been having trouble with the vessel: the pump broke down and had to be replaced; the ventilator had to be altered to draw in fresh air through one tube and eject stale air through another. To help out, the Connecticut Council of Safety decided last February to award Bushnell -L-60 to carry on his work.

As of last week, the whereabouts of the Turtle was being kept secret, for although the British know of the vessel's existence, they do not know where or when it might strike. Asked Connecticut Congressional Delegate William Williams impatiently: "Where is Bushnell? Why don't he attempt something? When will or can be a more proper time than is or has been?" The answers might well become clear when General William Howe's brother, Admiral Richard Howe, arrives in New York with a reinforcing fleet later this month (see THE NATION). What could be a better target for the Turtle than the admiral's mighty flagship, the 64-gun Eagle?

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