The Anchors Aweigh series was placed in honor of the men of the
US Navy who have served in the defense of our country. Each cache
is dedicated to one of the warships involved in battle. If you find
all the caches in the series, you’ll reveal some nice GeoArt
on your cache map. These are not difficult caches to find. If you
cannot find a cache easily, it’s probably missing. Send me a
picture (by email, not in your log) of where you think the cache
should be, and I’ll accept the find and replace the
cache.
Because of the difficulty in finding suitable locations for some
of the caches, some puzzle caches were used (not this one) so that
the find icon could be in a location separate from the cache. You
should be able to solve the puzzles with information on this cache
page. I suggest you solve the puzzles before you make your cache
run, to help optimize the route.
Turtle
The Turtle (also called the American Turtle) was
the world's first submersible with a documented record of use in
combat. It was built in 1775 by American Patriot David Bushnell as
a means of attaching explosive charges to ships in a harbor.
Bushnell designed it for use against British Royal Navy vessels
occupying North American harbors during the American Revolutionary
War. Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull recommended the
invention to George Washington; although the commander-in-chief had
doubts, he provided funds and support for the development and
testing of the machine. Several attempts were made using the
Turtle to affix explosives to the undersides of British
warships in New York Harbor in 1776. All failed, and her transport
ship was sunk later that year by the British with the submarine
aboard. Bushnell claimed eventually to have recovered the machine,
but its final fate is unknown.
Turtle vs HMS Eagle
In the early 1770s, Yale College freshman David Bushnell began
experimenting with underwater explosives. By 1775, with tensions on
the rise between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain, Bushnell
had practically perfected these explosives. That year he also began
work on a small manned submersible craft that would be capable of
affixing such a charge to the hull of a ship. The charge would then
be detonated by a clockwork mechanism that released a musket firing
mechanism, probably a flintlock, that had been adapted for the
purpose.
Named for its shape, Turtle resembled a large clam as
much as a turtle; it was about 10 feet (3.0 m) long (according to
the original specifications), 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, and about 3 feet
(0.9 m) wide, and consisted of two wooden shells covered with tar
and reinforced with steel bands. It submerged by allowing water
into a bilge tank at the bottom of the vessel and ascended by
pushing water out through a hand pump. It was propelled vertically
and horizontally by hand-cranked propellers. It also had 200 pounds
(91 kg) of lead aboard, which could be released in a moment to
increase buoyancy. Manned and operated by one person, the vessel
contained enough air for about thirty minutes and had a speed in
calm water of about three miles per hour (5 km/h).
Late in the evening of September 6, Sergeant Ezra Lee, took the
Turtle out to attempt an attack on Admiral Richard Howe's
flagship HMS Eagle. She was moored off what is today called
Governors Island, which is due south of Manhattan. According to
Lee's account, she was towed by rowboats as close as was felt safe
to the British fleet. He then navigated for more than two hours
before slack tide made it possible to reach the Eagle. His first
attempt to attach the explosive failed because the screw struck a
metal impediment. A common misconception was that Lee failed
because he could not manage to bore through the copper-sheeted
hull. Bushnell believed that Lee's failure was probably due to an
iron plate connected to the ship's rudder hinge. When Lee attempted
another spot in the hull, he was unable to stay beneath the ship,
and eventually abandoned the attempt. Lee reported that British
soldiers on Governors Island spotted the submarine and rowed out to
investigate. He then released the charge (which he called a
"torpedo"), "expecting that they would seize that likewise, and
thus all would be blown to atoms." Suspicious of the drifting
charge, the British retreated back to the island. Lee reported that
the charge drifted into the East River, where it exploded "with
tremendous violence, throwing large columns of water and pieces of
wood that composed it high into the air." It was the first recorded
use of a submarine to attack a ship; however, the only records
documenting it are American. British records contain no accounts of
an attack by a submarine or any reports of explosions on the night
of the supposed attack on HMS Eagle.
According to British naval historian Richard Compton-Hall, the
problems of achieving neutral buoyancy would have rendered the
vertical propeller useless. The route the Turtle would have
had to take to attack HMS Eagle was slightly across the
tidal stream which would, in all probability, have resulted in Ezra
Lee becoming exhausted. In the face of these and other problems
Compton-Hall suggests that the entire story was fabricated as
disinformation and morale-boosting propaganda, and that if Ezra Lee
did carry out an attack it was in a covered rowing boat rather than
the Turtle.