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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 i
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 co
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 Co
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 Co
After our routine consultation with local historians, who were as much in the dark as anyone else about what Bushnell had done with the Turtle, we studied a working replica of the submarine that had been re-created by Frederic Frese and Joseph Leary at the Co
We swept the entire river a good mile in either direction from the Bushnells’ construction site. But the sonar recorded nothing that remotely resembled the Turtle. If Bushnell did indeed scuttle the Turtle off his old workshop — and that is a very big if — it could lie under a four-acre swamp that is impenetrable to man or boat, or it could be covered over with silt. Should that be the case, every target recorded by the magnetometer, no matter how small, would have to be dredged. It’s not an impossible situation, but it is costly and most inconvenient.
Once again, we chalked one up to disappointment. As we are so fond of saying in the shipwreck business, “We still don’t know where it is, but we well know where it ain’t.”
Those are the defeats, and they’re pretty frustrating. It’s the occasional successes that inspire us to sail onward.
Some of them we described in the first Sea Hunters, and some of them are in this book (though they’re not all successes, as you’ll see). But probably the most satisfying one of all was the discovery of the Confederate submarine Hunley and her heroic crew, hidden in the silt off Charleston, South Carolina. I was convinced she had to be there, even though several NUMA search expeditions had failed to find her, and I simply refused to give up.
The story of her discovery was told in the first Sea Hunters. After ru
If we hadn’t found it in May of 1995, I’d still be out looking for it.
What couldn’t be told then is what happened afterward. Due to the efforts of South Carolina state senator Gle
The day she was lifted from her watery shroud of 28 feet and saw the sun for the first time in 136 years, no one present will ever forget.
The recovery team, the true unsung heroes in the drama, labored for months in round-the-clock shifts, excavating and building a truss around the hull so it could be lifted onto a barge. This was no easy feat, especially when it was found that the sub was filled with silt that quadrupled its weight. The international salvage companies that performed the magnificent recovery effort and directed the lift were Oceaneering and the Titan Corporation.
When the moment came, the lifting cables became taut, and the little submarine began to rise from the silt where she had lain for so long. There was hushed expectation from the divers, the engineers, and the thousands of people who had gathered in hundreds of boats for the landmark event. Every eye was on the huge crane that stood on the great salvage barge, its own great pilings driven into the sea bottom. When the sub’s dripping hull, supported by the truss and foam cushions, appeared under a cloudless blue sky, cheers, whistles, and air horns shattered the early-morning calm, while the stars and bars of the Confederacy flew from a forest of masts.