A one-man submarine drifts toward Howe's flagship in the dark
By September 1776, HMS Eagle sat anchored off Governors Island as the flagship of Admiral Richard Howe's blockade, the anchor of Britain's naval presence in New York Harbor. Just after 11 p.m. on September 7, Sergeant Ezra Lee climbed into David Bushnell's Turtle, a one-man oak submarine, and spent two hours fighting strong currents to reach the Eagle's hull. His drill likely struck an iron plate near the rudder hinge; the copper sheathing itself, though a popular misconception blamed for his failure, was too thin to have stopped him. With British soldiers rowing out to investigate, Lee cut the charge loose; it drifted off and exploded violently in the East River, throwing water and wood debris into the air.
Washington authorized the mission himself, and though it failed, he later called Bushnell's invention "an effort of genius" in a letter to Jefferson. That endorsement from the nation's top general gave submarine warfare an early American stamp of legitimacy, however small the mission itself had been.
QHow much air did Ezra Lee actually have inside the Turtle?
Bushnell built the Turtle to hold roughly 30 minutes of breathable air, but Lee's mission consumed far more time than that cushion allowed. Just reaching HMS Eagle took two full hours of hand-cranking against the current, meaning Lee was operating on borrowed air long before he ever got his drill against the hull. The submarine had no resupply option underwater. That tight margin, combined with the failed drilling attempt, meant Lee had almost no room left to improvise once the iron plate stopped him. He had almost no air left to spare while he searched for a soft spot on the Eagle's hull.
QWhat did the Turtle actually look like from the outside?
Bushnell shaped the hull like "the two upper shells of a Tortoise joined together," a rounded oak shell reinforced with iron hoops and pierced by six small glass portholes to let in light. At roughly 10 feet long, it was small enough for one man to operate alone but required him to work a hand-cranked propeller for forward motion and a separate pedal-powered propeller for depth, all while steering. A 200-pound lead weight served as ballast, meant to be dropped if the pilot needed emergency buoyancy. The design was unlike anything else afloat in 1776, an odd wooden egg built to slip beneath a warship unseen.
QWhose letter first hinted the Turtle might change naval warfare before it ever launched?
A year before Lee's mission, in 1775, Connecticut physician Benjamin Gale wrote to fellow patriot Silas Deane about Bushnell's still-untested invention, predicting "what astonishment it will produce and what advantages may be made... if it succeeds, more easy for you to conceive than for me to describe." Gale had no combat data to go on, only Bushnell's early experiments, yet his letter shows the submarine was generating excitement among American officials well before Washington ever authorized an attack. That early buzz set expectations Lee's actual mission against the Eagle could not fully meet.
