NY Harbor: You'd Get a Charge Out of that Turtle




Playing Trivial Pursuit it might be a bit of a challenge to answer the question, what does the first American submersible and Abraham Lincoln have in common? Sitting at the Beer Garden

at Battery Park lower Manhattan, though, sipping a Headwater Pale Ale

the answer would lay sunken out in the historic waters of the Hudson Bay.

Only a few blocks away from the Fraunces Tavern – meeting point for the Sons of Liberty – Battery Park, named after the fort walls and artillery stations created there during the American Revolution, looks out over that all-important port waterway which was the true target of capture for the British during the war.  If the port could be taken, the strategy had gone, then New England could literally be starved of its vital supply line and would come to surrender.  To help do his small part in defending against this dire outcome, David Bushnell, a freshman at Yale, invented a one-man submersible which carried a device able to bore a hole in the hull of a ship and to set a timed underwater explosive.

The Turtle, as it was named for its shell and shape, was sealed in a wood frame, tarred, stripped in metal, topped with six pieces of small glass for natural light, and filled with enough oxygen for a mere thirty minutes. Hand cranks, believe it or not, served as the source of propeller energy.  A ballast system at the bottom of the vessel drained or filled depending on the needed depth.  This was a similar floating system that a young Abraham Lincoln, a midwest patent attorney before becoming president, would later himself invent and patent for riverboats that he was tired of getting snagged.

On Sept. 6 1776 Gen. Washington commissioned a launching of the Turtle against General Howe's flagship HMS Eagle. In what would make for some pretty darn good cinema, (right up there with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) Ezra Lee propelled by hand through tide and current for two hours to reach the Eagle but was unable to bore through a hull fortified by metal.

Lee tried again, but no luck. The story goes that British soldiers stationed at Governor's Island saw something unusual that night bobbing in the Hudson and rowed out into open water to check it out.  Lee released his torpedo hoping the British might inspect it and find a very explosive surprise.  The British rowers, leery of the floating object, retreated and the torpedo went off in the East River.  A month later the Turtle was sunk on what was called its 'tender' vessel at the now historically familiar Fort Lee, New Jersey.  Washington said of Lee's failed attempt at the Eagle that it was "an effort of genius," but that "a combination of too many things was requisite" for such an attempt to succeed.  Bushnell reported salvaging the vessel, but its final fate is unknown.