At the onset of the American Revolution, the British expected to
quell the rebellion quickly with a show of overwhelming force. In an experiment
in asymmetric warfare, David Bushnell created the first submarine vessel
designed specifically “for the destruction of vessels of war.” On a quiet
September night in 1776, sergeant Ezra Lee maneuvered Bushnell’s strange little
craft out from Manhattan and into the midst of the greatest naval fleet
ever assembled in the Americas. Lee’s goal was to sink the
British flagship HMS Eagle by attaching a powerful explosive to its hull.
Although the mission was unsuccessful, Bushnell’s concept of submarine warfare
was considered by George Washington to have been “an effort of
genius.”
David Bushnell was raised in the town of Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. More than two centuries later, another
Turtle would be launched into the same river within sight of Bushnell’s first
forays with his vessel during the summer of 1775. Under the direction of
technical arts teacher Frederic J. Frese, students at Old Saybrook
High School created a working replica
of Bushnell’s submarine, facilitated through an education partnership with
the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode
Island, where Roy R. Manstan was a mechanical engineer
and Navy trained diver. With twenty-first century submariners at the helm, the
Turtle replica was subjected to a series of operational tests at the
Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut. In Turtle: David Bushnell’s
Revolutionary Vessel, the authors provide new insight into Bushnell’s “engine of
devastation,” tracing the history of undersea warfare before Bushnell and the
origin of the many innovations Bushnell understood would be necessary for
conducting a covert submarine attack. The knowledge gained from testing the
Turtle replica enabled the authors to speculate as to what America’s first submariner Ezra Lee
experienced that September night and what may have caused the attack to
fail.
