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 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

The hull of the Turtle was not made of copper, as is sometimes stated, but was “built of oak, in the strongest manner possible, corked and tarred.”5 The conning-tower was of brass and also served as a hatch-cover. The hatchway was barely big enough for the one man who made up the entire crew to squeeze through. Once inside, the operator could screw the cover down tight, and look out through “three round doors, one directly in front and one on each side, large enough to put the hand through. When open they admitted fresh air.” On top of the conning-tower were two air-pipes “so constructed that they shut themselves whenever the water rose near their tops, so that no water could enter through them and opened themselves immediately after they rose above the water.

“The vessel was chiefly ballasted with lead fixed to its bottom; when this was not sufficient a quantity was placed within, more or less according to the weight of the operator; its ballast made it so stiff that there was no danger of oversetting. The vessel, with all its appendages and the operator, was of sufficient weight to settle it very low in the water. About 200 lb. of lead at the bottom for ballast could be let down 40 or 50 feet below the vessel; this enabled the operator to rise instantly to the surface of the water in case of accident.”

The operator sat on an oaken brace that kept the two sides of the boat from being crushed in by the water-pressure, and did things with his hands and feet. He must have been as busy as a cathedral organist on Easter morning. With one foot he opened a brass valve that let water into the ballast tanks, with the other he worked a force pump to drive it out. When he had reached an approximate equilibrium, he could move the submarine up or down, or hold it at any desired depth, by cranking a small vertical-acting propellor placed just forward of the conning-tower on the deck above. Before him was the crank of another propellor, or rather tractor, for it drew, not pushed, the vessel forward. Behind him was the rudder, which the operator controlled with a long curved tiller stuck under one arm.

Bushnell, in his letter to Jefferson, calls each of these propellors “an oar, formed upon the principle of the screw,” and the best-known picture of the Turtle shows a bearded gentleman in nineteenth-century clothes boring his way through the water with two big gimlets. But Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Connecticut Line, who did the actual operating, described the submarine’s forward propellor (he makes no mention of the other) as having two wooden blades or “oars, of about 12 inches in length and 4 or 5 in width, shaped like the arms of a windmill.” Except in size, this device must have looked very much like the wooden-bladed tractor of a modern aeroplane.

“These oars,” noted Judge Griswold on the letter before forwarding it to General Humphrey, “were fixed on the end of a shaft like windmill arms projected out forward, and turned at right angles with the course of the machine; and upon the same principles that wind-mill arms are turned by the wind, these oars, when put in motion as the writer describes, draw the machine slowly after it. This moving power is small, and every attendant circumstance must coÖperate with it to answer the purpose—calm waters and no current.”

“With hard labor,” said Lee, “the machine might be impelled at the rate of ‘3 nots’ an hour for a short time.”

Sergeant Lee volunteered “to learn the ways and mystery of this new machine” because the original operator, Bushnell’s brother, “was taken sick in the campaign of 1776 at New York before he had an opportunity to make use of his skill, and never recovered his health sufficiently afterwards.” While Lee was still struggling with the “mystery” in practice trips on Long Island Sound, the British fleet entered New York Harbor. The submarine was at once hurried to New Rochelle, carted overland to the Hudson, and towed down to the city.

At slack tide on the first calm night after his arrival, Lee screwed down the conning-tower of the Turtle above his head and set out to attack the British fleet.6 Two whaleboats towed him as near as they dared and then cast off. Running awash, with not more than six or seven inches of the conning-tower exposed, the submarine crept, silent and unseen, down the bay and up under the towering stern of his Britannic Majesty’s 64-gun frigate Eagle.

“When I rowed under the stern of the ship,” wrote Sergeant Lee in after years, “I could see the men on deck and hear them talk. I then shut down all the doors, sunk down and came under the bottom of the ship.”

Up through the top of the submarine ran a long sharp gimlet, not for boring a hole through the bottom of a ship, but to be screwed into the wooden hull and left there, to serve as an anchor for a mine. Tied to the screw and carried on the after-deck of the Turtle was an egg-shaped “magazine,” made of two hollowed-out pieces of oak and containing one hundred and fifty pounds of gunpowder, with a clockwork time-fuse that would begin to run as soon as the operator cast off the magazine after making fast the screw. Everything seemed ready for Sergeant Lee to anticipate Lieutenant Commander Von Weddigen by one hundred and thirty-eight years.

But no matter how hard the strong-wristed sergeant turned the handle, he could not drive the screw into the frigate’s hull. The Eagle was copper-sheathed!7

“I pulled along to try another place,” said Lee, “but deviated a little to one side and immediately rose with great velocity and came above the surface 2 or 3 feet, between the ship and the daylight, then sunk again like a porpoise. I hove about to try again, but on further thought I gave out, knowing that as soon as it was light the ships’ boats would be rowing in all directions, and I thought the best generalship was to retreat as fast as I could, as I had 4 miles to go before passing Governor’s Island. So I jogg’d on as fast as I could.”

To enable him to steer a course when submerged, Lee had before him a compass, most ingeniously illuminated with phosphorescent pieces of rotten wood. But for some reason this proved to be of no use.

“I was obliged to rise up every few minutes to see that I sailed in the right direction, and for this purpose keeping the machine on the surface of the water and the doors open. I was much afraid of getting aground on the island, as the tide of the flood set on the north point.

“While on my passage up to the city, my course, owing to the above circumstances, was very crooked and zig-zag, and the enemy’s attention was drawn towards me from Governor’s Island. When I was abreast of the fort on the island, 3 or 400 men got upon the parapet to observe me; at length a number came down to the shore, shoved off a 12 oar’d barge with 5 or 6 sitters and pulled for me. I eyed them, and when they had got within 50 or 60 yards of me I let loose the magazine in hopes that if they should take me they would likewise pick up the magazine, and then we should all be blown up together. But as kind Providence would have it, they took fright and returned to the island to my infinite joy. I then weathered the island, and our people seeing me, came off with a whaleboat and towed me in. The magazine, after getting a little past the island, went off with a tremendous explosion, throwing up large bodies of water to an immense height.”

A few days afterwards, the British forces landed on Manhattan Island at what is now the foot of East Thirty-fourth Street, and Washington’s army hastily withdrew to the Harlem Heights, above One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. A British frigate sailed up the Hudson and anchored off Bloomingdale, or between Seventy-second and One Hundred and Tenth Streets, in the same waters where our Atlantic fleet lies whenever it comes to town. Here Sergeant Lee in the Turtle made two more attempts. But the first time he was discovered by the watch, and when he approached again, submerged, the phosphorus-painted cork that served as an indicator in his crude but ingenious depth-gage, got caught and deceived him so that he dived completely under the warship without touching her. Shortly after this, the frigate came up the river, overhauled the sloop on which the Turtle was being transported, and sent it to the bottom, submarine and all.

“Though I afterwards recovered the vessel,” Bushnell wrote to Jefferson, “I found it impossible at that time to prosecute the design any further. I had been in a bad state of health from the beginning of my undertaking, and was now very unwell; the situation of public affairs was such that I despaired of obtaining the public attention and the assistance necessary. I was unable to support myself and the persons I must have employed had I proceeded. Besides, I found it absolutely necessary that the operators should acquire more skill in the management of the vessel before I could expect success, which would have taken up some time, and no small additional expense. I therefore gave over the pursuit for that time and waited for a more favorable opportunity, which never arrived.

“In the year 1777 I made an attempt from a whaleboat against the Cerberus frigate, then lying at anchor between Connecticut River and New London, by drawing a machine against her side by means of a line. The machine was loaded with powder, to be exploded by a gun-lock, which was to be unpinioned by an apparatus to be turned by being brought alongside of the frigate. This machine fell in with a schooner at anchor astern of the frigate, and concealed from my sight. By some means or other it was fired, and demolished the schooner and three men, and blew the only one left alive overboard, who was taken up very much hurt.8 “After this I fixed several kegs under water, charged with powder, to explode upon touching anything as they floated along with the tide. I set them afloat in the Delaware, above the English shipping at Philadelphia, in December, 1777. I was unacquainted with the river, and obliged to depend upon a gentleman very imperfectly acquainted with that part of it, as I afterwards found. We went as near the shipping as we durst venture; I believe the darkness of the night greatly deceived him, as it did me. We set them adrift to fall with the ebb upon the shipping. Had we been within sixty rods I believe they must have fallen in with them immediately, as I designed; but, as I afterwards found, they were set adrift much too far distant, and did not arrive until, after being detained some time by frost, they advanced in the day-time in a dispersed situation and under great disadvantages. One of them blew up a boat with several persons in it who imprudently handled it too freely, and thus gave the British the alarm which brought on the battle of the kegs.”

The agitated redcoats lined the banks and blazed away at every bit of drifting wreckage in the river, as described by a sarcastic Revolutionary poet in “The Battle of the Kegs.”

David Bushnell was later captured by the British, who failed to recognize him and soon released him as a harmless civilian. After the Revolution he went to France, and then to Georgia, where disgusted with the Government’s neglect of himself and his invention he changed his name to “Dr. Bush.” He was eighty-four years old when he died in 1826. His identity was then revealed in his will.

Bushnell found the submarine boat a useless plaything and made it a formidable weapon. To him it owes the propellor, the conning-tower, and the first suggestion of the torpedo. The Turtle was not only the first American submarine but the forerunner of the undersea destroyer of to-day.

“I thought and still think that it was an effort of genius,” declared George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, “but that too many things were necessary to be combined to expect much against an enemy who are always on guard.”