Episode 355 - The Turtle, The World's First Combat Submarine

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Hello, and welcome to the Lions that Buy Donkeys podcast.

We're time-traveling soldiers from the 21st century.

We've jumped back in time to the American Revolution.

However, we did not build the time machine or mean to become time travelers.

Rather, for reasons I cannot legally get into, we were all crowded into a porter potty at the same time.

Inside, the mixture of shit, piss, sweat, and cum mixed together at just the right amounts, and then they began to resonate with one another at the perfect frequency.

In a flash of light, we were ripped back in time.

Our porter potty lands in the middle of a continental army camp.

The door flies open and we pour out onto the grass.

Confused and angry, the soldiers of the revolution walk over to us.

Upon breathing in the mist of shit, piss, sweat, and come, several men pass out and begin vomiting.

Witch!

yells a soldier.

Whores of the devil, yells another.

The men rush us, armed with anything they get their hands on, and we're promptly beaten to death.

How you boys doing?

It feels like

what you have just described sounds like if a bunch of Joes in the army had to fucking sit, like, one-upped each other to write a story about involving Portejons and jacking off, and one of them accidentally invented the plot of the soviet science fiction film Kinzadzah.

Like dead series, like critical mass of gross shit in the portage on, and then you have to draw the time travel rune, a huge cock and balls, and it causes you to travel through time in the portagon.

That is your time travel machine.

I was really going to try to pivot that into a plug for my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar.

I swear.

It's been so long since I've seen Kinzadza, but I'm pretty sure it's a phone booth.

There's no cum involved.

It's a Soviet film.

They're pretty prudish about that.

Yeah, the dictatorship of the proletariat does not come.

Well, you know what?

You can pirate the fuck out of it because there's no intellectual property rights for a country that doesn't exist anymore.

Your movie?

Our movie?

Do a fan reboot with Joe and a Port-a-John, but it's that 70s sci-fi movie.

So it would get me a whole bunch of tablets and zinc.

I feel like I could do this.

Try to fucking Port-a-John time machine is just such a fucking cursed energy.

What if a time machine was also just a scab that you had to peel?

I one time saw, and I participated in an argument between contractors like the A, you know, ACOM fucking welders and soldiers writing back and forth like a primitive message board and Sharpie on a Portagon wall and basically arguing about how contractors are pieces of shit and don't do any fighting.

And basically, like, you know, somebody tried to say, we're here because, you know, we're fighting the people who did 9-11.

And then someone wrote, 9-11 was planned in fucking Hamburg, Germany.

That piece of shit.

You guys are just here to make money.

And then someone came and ended the conversation by drawing, you're all F-slurs and a cock and balls from floor to ceiling and so to me that's incredible yeah

oh to me it's just like you you bring that up and i'm like yeah it's such a rich tapestry and folding in my mind's eye i will only make it into history not from books not from papers i've worked on not from this podcast but if somewhere in a landfill in Afghanistan or Kyrgyzstan or any of the place that this trash ended up in a panel of wall that I drew a dink and balls on in a porter potty lives on.

That's the only way some alien archaeologists and like, hmm, this one's balls are furry.

It's like the negative energy version of the Voyager plate.

The aliens think we have really fucked up bodies because these dudes have no idea how to draw naked chips.

And everybody's dick is like six feet long.

You're like the road boys at the Priippus statues.

Oh, good news.

Today's episode does have something to do with a whole bunch of gross people packed into a very small space.

So we brought it back around.

Submarines.

Okay.

We love them, at least as a topic on the show.

I once said that you have to be really, really, really fucking weird to serve in a submarine.

And we have a lot of sub-mariner listeners, and they have written into the show to me and have said, that is correct.

So we salute our deeply weird sub-mariner listeners because today we're diving into

the earliest form of submarine history, the turtle, the world's first combat submarine.

Have you ever heard of this?

No, but I am super excited to figure out what sort of like human acorn they've created to fucking go to fight Poseidon.

Close.

Isn't the turtle like something from the infinity times that Japan invaded China in what's now Korea?

Same name, but that's a ship.

It was a famous ship that the Koreans used.

The turtle, the world's first combat submarine, was used during the American Revolution, which means

we get to talk about some really, really weird engineers and inventions today.

I was trying to remember the name of what they call it on a U.S.

Navy submarine, like the sort of lower enlisted or

non-commissioned officers hangout area.

I could have sworn it was like the bull ring or the bullpen or something like that.

And I remember when they banned smoking, it was like this huge event in the fucking Navy.

Like dudes were literally losing their minds.

And I'm like, can you imagine smoking on a a submarine?

I mean, I guess they got air filters, but you're just like, imagine like, hell yeah, dude, oxygen is limited.

We're like a thousand meters below the ocean.

This thing's about to crush us to death.

We have very, very limited ability to breathe.

Let's make it worse.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I remember reading that in

maybe a newspaper or something, because this happened a long time ago and those existed back then.

I said, like, smoking banned on submarines.

And the only thing that came to my mind was like, it wasn't before.

I couldn't smoke in my fucking tank.

I was trying to Google a thing to see if I had the word right, and I accidentally wrote sus Navy instead of U.S.

Navy.

So I have no idea what that implies because I feel like, oh no, the episode's being dragged into a series about Fat Lettered again.

Well, you're on a boat underwater in enclosed space with a bunch of dudes.

Pretty sus.

Yeah, exactly.

No, you know full well, like.

Having a cigarette on a submarine is like, you know, Joe and Nate, you've smoked before.

Like that cigarette you have, like you haven't eaten all day.

You've had way too much caffeine and it feels like you've just been kicked in the face.

Imagine that times a thousand.

I feel like smoking a cigarette on a submarine must be like the way that it feels to just be like, You, you, you're so good of an aircraft refueler, you know exactly where you can stand on the airfield and smoke without exploding it.

And you're just like, I was born for this shit.

I mean, that's what it was like refueling tanks and knowing exactly where to sit, like smoking fat doinks under the sea,

just popping out of the fucking hatch, just crammed in there like a human sardinerine can.

You're like, it's fucking nice.

I'm I'm going to smoke big donks.

Smoking big donks under Amish.

Rest in peace, homie.

Oh, rest in peace, young King Dave.

A source of limitless positivity.

And then he died.

I feel really bad.

That's why he was too positive for this world.

They had to smite him.

Now, obviously, we know submarines would not turn into

a big thing until around World War I.

But submarines didn't just appear out of nowhere.

already packed full of disgusting unwashed men trolling through the ocean and sinking cargo.

There are a lot of fits and starts.

Like we talk about whenever we talk about a new invention, there's evolutionary dead ends and restarts and people pick up technology that once upon a time people thought was useless and start running with it.

And today we're going to talk about one of those, the world's first combat submarine, the turtle.

They're usually like kind of surface submersibles, aren't they?

Like in the early days?

Because obviously, you know, you can have something that is effectively submerged and thus you can't see it like it doesn't profile on the horizon on the sea.

But yeah, and you can't see under the water at all back then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, even up until World War I, the vast majority of submarines would stay above water and then normally only dive for a very short amount of time during an attack run because that's all they could really handle.

And also, most importantly, submarines went really fucking slow underwater back then.

Yeah.

Yeah, weren't they turned, like, wasn't some of the early ones, like the in the Civil War, like, turned by a hand crank?

Ah, but Nate, hold that thought.

ah you're talking about the glorious css hunley the the submarine that killed more of its crewmen than anybody else

we did episode

yeah yeah yeah yeah they just had to keep unloading the dead bodies and loading in new crewmen at the idea of a submarine or at the very least some kind of vehicle that could travel underwater had been around since pretty much ships in general Though for obvious reasons, there was always something in the way of human beings getting under them waves.

For lack of understanding of the science, seals, propulsion, materials.

I mean, I mean, like watertight seals, not like the animal.

They weren't some kind of, they weren't some kind of guardian of the waves.

All I could think of when you're like, well, you're basically trying to use, you know, 18th century technology to build a submarine that has to be watertight under pressure.

And my mind's eye is just, for some reason, the wood paneling, the shiplap is just, it's a basketball court.

It's like your submarine's made out of a basketball court.

Hope you don't die.

Honestly, that is not as good of an idea as what they eventually come up with.

I mean, it's one of those things that, like, this is suicidal, but also brilliant.

But that, this is solidly the era of, yes, this guy is an engineer.

But by engineer, I mean he calls himself one and he's got a lot of books that he knows how to read, you know?

And that doesn't mean people didn't try.

And depending on who you believe, some of them succeeded in creating submarines, specifically as far back as 1562.

Now, we don't really know what the fuck this device was, but eyewitnesses say a team of Greeks used something to travel under the Tagus River and emerge on the other side holding a lit torch, which they then gave to the waiting Holy Roman Emperor.

Now, this is, there's not a lot of evidence that this actually took place.

It is one of those stories like an oral tradition that's been passed down the line.

We don't have a lot of documentation.

And let's say, I say it's suspicious.

I don't think they probably had all these things figured out quite yet.

There were a few other steps forward over the next couple decades, though, with most of them, most importantly, being designs on paper.

People were not building these things left, right, and center.

People just kept daydreaming them.

Hypothetical work.

For any of these designs to make the jump from paper to actually being a real thing, someone was going to have to invent a lot of shit, and nobody had done it yet.

Kind of like the Leonardo da Vinci kind of understanding the concept of a helicopter in his sketchbook but that so many other things obviously had to be invented before such a thing was possible yeah pretty much uh for example people trying to figure out how do we make this thing go underwater how does man get air when underwater uh you know it's all blueprints nothing was real and nothing had been built that you could pack full of dudes wearing pantaloons and wigs and shit yet yeah people still believed in phlogiston they believed that all things burned because fire was inside it you had to just encourage it to come out so i mean not everyone believed in that but obviously like that was a to give an example of a competing belief.

So, when

some of the elemental things aren't decided on or understood yet, then it's very hard to be like, what makes it sink?

And it's like, I don't know.

And wishing really hard.

Inside of you, there are two submarines.

Both of them are on fire.

You board this thing at the surface, and then you say as many insulting things about King Neptune as you can, and you'll sink for some reason.

Now, one of these blueprints is drawn up by an English guy named William Bourne.

Bourne was a mathematician born in 1578 and

what might be the first detailed blueprint and design of a hypothetical submarine.

Bourne's idea called for a wooden ship to be built and covered it with a waterproof layer made out of leather.

Afterwards, it would simply sink and then be propelled forward by oars.

Now, obviously, by didn't they have tar pitch at this point?

They did.

Yeah.

I think he was trying to come up with an idea of like, how do you make a reusable underwater vehicle?

They didn't have to constantly be slathering with pitch.

He didn't succeed.

He invented the world's first water blivet.

Yeah, he came up with some kind of like idea of treated leather to put over it.

I mean, he didn't actually make this leather seal.

He simply drew it.

I thought like, wouldn't it be cool if?

In the same vein, I recall seeing an illustration that an English engineer made in, I believe, the 1700s, maybe the 1600s.

of a hypothetical mechanism for a channel tunnel back when that was still just the realm of fantasy.

And it was like, there has to be air tunnels.

It has to be lit with candles.

It has to be like basically horse carriages going through it.

And it's drawn in a horizontal like elevation.

And it looks like a 1700s guy invented Castlevania.

It's one of the funniest things.

It's just like the similarity is undeniable.

I hate to have to like go across the channel in my roguelike tunnel.

Exactly.

The good news is I can whip these candles and like a morning star will come out.

Yeah, I was trying to travel to France and some dickhead in a cape just kept attacking me with a whip.

Do you just hate being the guy who's deployed to the primordial channel tunnel who has to just leave tactical chickens everywhere?

Wouldn't you know what?

I was trying to travel home and I found a whole bunch of loot boxes.

Yeah.

Obviously, by the nature of the crew still requiring air and the ship being rowed by hand meant that Bourne's design would not exactly vanish underwater.

It was more of like just below the surface.

Also, since he was working on something theoretical, there wasn't a lot of fine detail.

For example, Bourne did not actually have a plan for the submarine to go under the water.

He simply said, well, I don't know.

It'll sink.

He hadn't quite gotten to the idea of ballasts or counterweights.

For people who don't know, ballasts is like things that are flooded for the purpose of a submarine going underwater, then filled full of air for a submarine to rise back to the surface.

Enough buoyancy to stay on the surface, reduce that to sink, but obviously, you know, mechanism that can then be reversed so you can go back up.

Otherwise,

you haven't invented a submarine.

You've invented a very, very complex sea burial.

Yeah,

it's the first version of the future of a suicide tomb.

And nobody here is really thinking of a ballast yet.

They're like, well, we'll decrease the volume somehow.

Cool.

Pump out air, pump in water.

But there was no external ballasts.

They didn't quite get there yet.

Enter a Dutchman named Cornelius Drebel.

That's a fucking name alert right there.

Was it Dremmel or Drebel?

Drebel.

Yeah.

Oh, I was going to say Cornelius Dremmel, the inventor of the Dremel tool, but

Drebel had his hands in so many different inventions.

You know, it's back in the day where to be an inventor meant that you probably invented 300 things.

280 of them are probably useless.

It's kind of pointless to name everything he was tooling around with, but he did eventually become world-renowned by the 1600s.

Oh, fun fact here.

Drebel, Anabaptist.

They keep on coming up.

Very rarely do we talk about a Dutchman on the show that isn't an Anabaptist at this point.

Yeah, it's kind of their thing, isn't it?

But like, we really like that.

We really should bring back the era of like crackpot inventors, just like dudes just trying stuff.

Now everyone's just like a right-wing grifter instead of like.

I was going to say, everyone's got email jobs now.

Back in the day, one-third of the entire male population was Belle's dad from Beauty and the Beast.

Just making fucking inventions in the attic.

The most traditional way for a man to die is killed by his own invention in the backyard.

This is the new return to masculinity we should do is like, no, I don't want to die in combat.

I don't want to die in war.

I want to be blown up by a doohickey in my back garden that I tried to invent.

Yeah, the unknown device.

Everybody who drives completely blind into the concept of deep-frying a turkey outside without reading anything about it is carrying on a proud legacy.

Those are the only seats left in heaven for

Midwestern dudes who set themselves on fire while trying to deep-fry a turkey.

The guy who killed Shinzo Abe was just part of a long tradition of masculinity.

Exactly.

Drebble was eventually invited to work at the court of the English king James I

and was then kind of given over to the royal navy to work on something that'd give them a bit of a leg up over their competition.

Drebel, having known of Bourne's design from a few decades before, decided to take an actual crack at building this fucking thing, which was made easier because the English king was paying for it.

Drebbel's design looked like a submarine.

It was a long wooden enclosure covered in a waterproof leather that was actually pitch and tar, and air being fed into the sub via a short snorkel, powered by a team of rowers.

So it would be just below the surface, a little bit further, you know, working his way down.

Now, normally when I say something like that, I'm actually describing a very over-the-top method of suicide, but Drebel's submarine actually worked fantastically.

It traveled up and down the Thames River for hours, keeping a depth of 12 feet without any issue.

It's kind of amazing, actually.

Yeah, that's nuts.

There was issues of it leaking, but like nothing enough to kill anybody.

I mean, the Thames obviously has, you know, the sort of tidal rise and fall to some extent in the estuary, but it's not like it's not like a huge amount of waves so much as like it's just the salinity changes.

So my one question is like, what's this thing going to be like when you got actual ocean conditions?

I imagine it'd been eaten alive.

I mean, it's unsealed wood for the most part.

And he has to continue.

Every time he pulls it out of the water, he has to reapply a fuckload of pitch and tar, replace wood that is failing.

But he did build two more of the submarines.

The third could fit 16 people inside.

And soon this thing became so popular that King James himself rode inside of it, making him the first head of state and and first king ever to travel via submarine.

Also, the guy who wrote a counter blast to tobacco.

So you know what, U.S.

Navy guys, smoking on submarines has always been a sin before God.

All of this in 1620.

And looking at this revolutionary piece of technology hand-built by one of the world's best engineers and working for them, the Royal Navy just kind of shrugged and said, We don't really see the point of this, and everybody kind of forgot about it.

After this, again, there was more advancement on paper, as well as some accounts of submarine uses, but these were more akin to what is better known as the diving bell.

It wasn't pilotable.

It was a chamber which you could go underwater.

One of them was famously used by Cossacks.

Which tells me

Cossacks were the first people to do anti-Semitism at the floor of the sea.

They're like, hey,

we heard you can desecrate a synagogue.

It's at the bottom of the ocean.

They really wanted to find Atlantis because they heard it was filled with Jews.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Because diving bells, I mean, like, this is earlier than, but like for when you think about stuff in London and elsewhere in places where you have coastal or like river, I mean, in that era, European cities almost uniformly were on rivers, is that like it would allow you to basically build foundations and pillars and stuff at the riverbed.

Yeah.

So like, yeah, but obviously it's, it's a fixed thing more or less.

It's not like a, you don't go into the diving bell and become the boy in the ball and just roll up the the river somewhere.

That would be cool.

Kadamari Damasieing your way across the ocean.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Ocean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Riverine Kadamari Damashi.

And then there was a guy named Giovanni Borelli who sketched out really the first idea of a reusable ballast made out of goat skin.

He never used it, but he did draw it.

So that's something.

And with that, we jump to the 1700s, the American Revolution, and a man named David Bushnell.

Born in 1742 in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut, Bushnell was hardly born into the upper crust of American life.

His family were farmers and not the kind of rich farmer that is kind of known in this era of being taking a lead in the American Revolution.

They were fucking poor.

He didn't get anything other than a basic level of education necessary for contributing to the family tradition of working the land, which we can assume a basic level.

of reading and math.

And just to underline how poor they were, this is early America we're talking about.

His family could not afford slaves.

So they made their multiple children work the fields instead.

That's how you could tell someone was poor in early America.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, depending on the era, too, whether or not they had indentured servants.

No, they didn't have anything.

They couldn't afford shit, so they put their kids to work.

A lot of people who were indentured servants, that's wound up being like their existence afterwards.

They were able to get like a foothold in terms of having some kind of land, you know, pioneer-claimed land, but

there were no resources yet.

But in his spare time, he would go into the local town of Saybrook, which is little more than a village.

It's still quite small today.

Yeah.

And exchange favors for books.

I could not find what these favors were.

Make of that what you will.

And then he would take them home and read.

These were books and papers that covered engineering, math, Latin.

Things of that nature.

And he did not have a teacher.

So he simply taught himself these things.

It's like 1700s Connecticut Noel Coward, basically making him dress up in cosplay and sing a song going, there goes the baker with his trade, like always.

Just doing the opening scene from Beauty and the Beast, but then getting his books and he can go home and read about Pythagoras or whatever.

Some really drunk guy in a powdered wig.

Do the song again!

Noel Coward, Pride of Indiana that nobody acknowledges because they're like, wait, we can't acknowledge a gay man came from our state.

It's impossible.

Then within only a few years, most of his family died from one thing or another, mostly from simply being alive in the 1700s.

Yeah.

Especially being a manual laborer in the 1700s.

Death comes quick and often.

Yeah, yeah.

Basically, every piece of metal has tetanus.

Every animal has rabies.

You basically live in the this is not a place of honor spike field.

A cow coughs on you once, you shit out blood and drop dead.

This left the family's entire plot of land and everything they owned to him and his brother.

He was 31, unmarried and without kids.

And that's another way you can tell that he was pretty poor, that nobody would marry off their daughter to him, despite being a landowner.

They're like, nope, not the Bushnills.

Fuck them.

They couldn't post a money spread.

So I was like, no, no, no one for you.

Deciding this gave him an opportunity to, you know, try to go get an education.

despite living his entire life as a poor farmer, he sold his half of the family's possessions and then paid his way way into Yale.

Remember, he's 31, which, you know, it nowadays is like being 60.

But that also, like, in that era, am I wrong in assuming that you had the same kind of weird spread that you had?

We talked about West Point, that you could go to Yale and be like, here's a 40-year-old, you know, yeoman studying next to like 10-year-old who's just like, yep, you go to Yale instead of fourth grade.

It kind of depends.

I'm not taking away anything from Bushnell here, but admission standards in Yale in the 1700s were, let's say, sporadic and low.

Connections always made things easier, but generally, you had to be literate in English and Latin and have money.

And depending on what your literacy was in both English and Latin and even the money, you could get in anyway if enrollment numbers happened to be down that year.

I was going to say, the Latin part's not true anymore.

No, of course not.

Other than that, though, it's like, he's like, oh, you got to have money and you have to know people to get you.

He's like, yeah, I guess a lot's changed since back then.

It's like the past is a foreign country, right?

And, you know, Bushnell's fluency in Latin is kind of unknown, but it was enough at the time to get in, whatever their standards happened to be on that particular day.

Good for him, whatever.

He graduated Yale in 1775, just as the revolution was, you know, really kicking off.

And he graduated a die-hard patriot for the cause, like most people of the day that came out of these universities.

So Bushnell offered his services.

as an engineer and an inventor because he was kind of old for soldiering at that point.

Also, he was smart.

He figured that revolutionaries could probably never win a war against the British Empire in a fair fight.

They would need to think outside of the box to counter the overwhelming might of the Royal Navy and Army.

But specifically, Bushnell was worried about the Royal Navy.

Classicist is like, does Canada have any elephants we can bring over?

I'm going to go find my buddy, Canadian Hannibal.

Well, in a sense, like if he drew direct inspiration from Hannibal, you imagine at least at one point he thought, what if we captured blue whales and weaponized them?

I'll lash a couple whales together, make a sea chariot.

Yeah, yeah, I can't invent a submarine that's watertight, but nature's got a submarine and I'm gonna make it hate the British.

What if I just hollow out this whale and teach it to hate beans on toast?

Yeah, exactly.

I'm gonna befriend this whale and slowly introduce it to the concept of

fucking no British drinking songs that somehow became our national anthem and make them hate every single one of them.

Well, after all, the British were completely dependent on the Royal Navy for transportation, logistics, manpower, and maintaining a blockade in colonial ports.

There was a certain amount of loyalists in the colonies and a certain amount of food and water, of course, to draw from, but the 13 colonies were hardly an outpost of British strength at the time, which is one of the reasons why the revolution was allowed to get up and start moving.

The Royal Navy would be a major workhorse in putting down any rebellion that happened there.

And it was pretty obvious that the revolutionary naval power of the colonies was not going to check the Royal Navy.

It did exist.

It was known as the Continental Navy, and it was little more than an afterthought for much of the same reason.

There was privateers, you know, fancy word for pirate, which we talked about a couple episodes ago in some ways.

There was mostly smugglers and just ships that people happened to own that we put cannons on.

There wasn't really going to be a square-off between the two naval powers, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Congress and military commanders thought that dumping really any amount of money into the Continental Navy was a waste of time, even if they had money to do it.

But they didn't, because no matter how much they spent on it, their shitty converted ships or whatever they had would get absolutely dusted by the Royal Navy.

Yeah, we might be able to beat them on this terrain, which we know better than they do.

We might be able to beat them by adapting tactics in a way that they aren't going to adapt quickly enough.

But our Navy will only ever be some permutation of Jimmy Buffett, and there is zero way we're going to beat them in the open seas.

You're also a veteran of the Battle of Margaritaville.

Dead parrots on the deck of the ship, as far as I can see.

Jesus Christ.

PTSD, Jimmy Buffett.

Oh, God.

I'm just picturing the parrot from Aladdin squawking as it dies because it's gut shot.

Thousand-yard stare, Jimmy Buffett singing about how he's got a drinking problem.

He drinks to make the ghosts disappear.

There I go.

Lost again on my way to Margaritaville.

That's why the reinforcements never showed up on time.

I'm sorry.

My parents listened to Jimmy Buffett when I was a kid.

Now, PTSD Jimmy Buffett is going to be echoing in my brain.

I mean, he's basically just Audi Murphy when he was a country singer, but regardless.

Audi Murphy's much shorter and much more violent.

During the land war with the British, the revolutionary leaders rightfully thought the Navy was a lost cause.

Bushnell went to those same leaders and said, Fair enough, but what if we found a way to fight the British at sea anyway?

And that's when Bushnell pitched the idea of what amounted to be a sea mine, an underwater bomb with a flintlock fuse.

Obviously, everyone laughed at him because, well, you can't light a fuse nor explode gunpowder underwater.

However, it turned out on top of studying the usual shit people studied at Yale, Bushnell's main field of study was actually figuring out how to set off a flintlock powered bomb underwater because Yale was way cooler back then.

But also like, surely people understood the concept that like a thing, as long as it's, it's watertight, like things float.

Like that wasn't advanced science.

It's like, did this man have to go before the deciding body here and be like, let me drop some knowledge on you.

There's this thing called bubbles.

Have you ever heard of one?

I've invented a bubble.

He sticks his ass under a local body of water and just starts.

He's like, behold.

His main revolutionary thing was like the mechanism to set off a bomb underwater.

powered effectively by repurposed flintlock firing mechanisms of a musket.

And people were really impressed by this because they never thought it was possible.

I should point out here that according to the Connecticut Historical Society, he scared the ever-living dog shit out of Yale while trying to do this and nearly killed himself multiple times.

But he did prove it could work.

Well, yeah, because I mean, you think about like this mad undergraduate who's way older than the normal student age running around doing undersea bombs.

It's basically like a beautiful mind in the early, like the opening act of John Nash got recruited by ISIS.

Fuck me.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is one of the few people he trusts that he knows they're real.

Somehow that only makes him slightly less of a bad person than the real guy.

Now, people were, of course, incredibly happy with the idea that Bush could build the West's first version of a sea mine.

And I say the West because, of course, China had deployed quite a few of what would be considered a sea mine hundreds of years before against the Japanese.

But the revolutionary leadership did ask an important question.

Okay, let's say you do build this bomb.

How the fuck are we going to deploy it against the British?

This is the interesting part of the history of the turtle.

It did not start with a submarine and work its way into a bomb.

It started with a bomb and worked its way into a submarine.

Because he started to think, I don't know, submarine?

But he already had the bomb.

Remember, most sea mines we think of are contact detonated.

That's not something that could be done yet.

Bush was working with a timed fuse, meaning you couldn't exactly just light it and kick the bitch into the ocean and hope for the best.

It needed to be directly deployed.

It was a sabotage weapon.

And so Bushnell kind of worked his way backwards to a submarine as the delivery method.

It wasn't like you could put a big-ass bomb on a paddleboat and just roll over to the Royal Navy.

They would just be shot.

So it would have to go underwater.

And we don't actually know where he gets the idea to land on a submarine.

He never wrote down why he thought of it.

Other than maybe practicality, there's a good chance he read about Drebel's tests and designs in the Thames while he was attending Yale and figured, sure, the weird Dutch boat might work.

We legitimately have no idea why he ended up here.

But we do know he had the bump first.

What's interesting too is that, I mean, the timing part kind of makes sense that if you just measure it, you know, like how long the fuse has to be for various distances, as long as like your distance estimation is pretty decent, you would be able to be effective.

What is really curious to me is, okay, so presumably this isn't a suicide boat.

He's not inventing the USS Cole.

So is this

the propulsion part is what's interesting.

Because this is before combustion engines.

I mean, I think conceptually they may have been at that point, but certainly not like deployment.

No real engines to think of, to be fair.

All I could think of is like winding up a gear or like letting it unfloor, you know, like a wind-up toy.

Like fucking pedaling a bike or some shit to turn a propeller?

Actually, I would say that the bike pedaling would be a better design than what he comes up with, but hold the thought.

So with this idea of a submarine in mind, he retreats to his brother's farm and enlists into helping him build the world's first combat submarine.

You might be wondering, why his brother?

What kind of education did he have that would make him good at this kind of thing?

None.

He was just a guy at the farm that never sold his part of the farm so he could go to school.

But he was very strong and had a wood shop for him to work in.

Therefore, he's hired.

Every scientist needs a large oafish assistance.

Yeah.

Soon, Bushdill had a design that looked vaguely like a wooden barrel that would fit one man inside of it.

That man would be able to sink the barrel and propel it forward with a system of gears attached to a screw propeller that the man inside would need to crank with his hands.

So he is just frantically

he is jerking a submarine forward.

It's this weird horizontal crank and you like, you would think like a hand-powered bicycle would be a good way of doing it, but maybe those didn't exist yet.

I have no idea.

And instead, he has like a forward-facing handle.

You have to crank like forward.

So it's the most unergonomically designed fucking thing on earth.

And you only operate it with one hand at a time.

So it really is just straight jorkin.

Yes.

In a combat sense.

It's the first vehicle ever propelled via jorkin.

But what gets me is that, yeah, it's funny to imagine a situation like this where because your collaborator is just a gigantic guy, that you've effectively created a device that seems like it makes sense to you, but can only in truth be operated by somebody with Neanderthal DNA.

And so like when you put it with other people, you're like, oh, wait, it's not as easy for you.

It's like, yeah, because your brother is apparently Connecticut Samson.

Listen here, young Jedediah.

I've invented a new vehicle.

I call it CrossFit.

You just jam yourself down inside and start cranking until your arms fall off.

Don't worry about the damage to your elbows.

The latent heat of all the orthopedic injuries will propel it forward.

Yeah, exactly.

And because it would have to be sneaky, it couldn't have a snorkel or anything.

Everything would have to be self-contained.

This is where Bushnell ran into some problems.

Namely, at no point did he have the means, material, or money to build anything he was planning.

He was unemployed.

Remember, he just graduated Yale and used all of his money to go to Yale.

Also, while he had a mind for science, he had no understanding of finely tuned precision mechanics that existed at the time because you couldn't go to a place and simply buy them.

Everything would need to be designed and purposely built for his very advanced hypothetical waterborne coffin.

And he didn't have any connections either.

But he did go to Yale, so he reached out to a guy who also went to Yale, a very, very, very, very famous and wealthy engineer named Isaac Doolittle.

He was prominent in pre-intra and post-revolutionary America.

Most importantly, he was the best brass and gear engineer in America at the time and just about hit infinity dollars for the colonies.

That meant outside of building the bomb itself that they would arm the submarine with, which had required gunpowder created in one of Doolittle's gunpowder factories, most of the entire submarine would actually be built entirely by Doolittle because the man who designed it had no idea how.

Building the propeller, the drive drive system, pretty much any of the parts that were going to go into the submarine, none of that shit had ever existed before.

Then he had to invent a underwater depth gauge when it quickly became clear that, hey, it turns out there's no good way for a human being to know how deep underwater they are naturally, because these are things that people just never thought about before.

So that is how the world's first combat submarine was built in a guy's backyard.

In short, Bushnell sketched out ideas and Doolittle quickly changed them into something that might actually work.

This is an interesting kind of fusion here in the sense that, but it sounds like what you're describing is

even if you get good enough with this, like you are kind of inventing a lot of the concepts here, whole cloth.

Like there just isn't a lot of, I mean, even if the machinery, the components, the parts, if that's the kind of thing that's been used in other kinds of, you know, employments, like...

It's never been done to propel something underwater.

It's never been done in this environment before.

So it is kind of just like, well, I mean, not even trying to be flippant.

You're effectively inventing.

It might as well be a mecha, given that it's just like, it's a war machine.

No one's ever seen before.

It does a thing people think isn't possible.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

All in a farmhouse with your own money.

And you effectively need it to be as good as the

tamed blue whales who've been taught to hate the British.

Yeah, exactly.

They probably don't have a problem figuring out depth.

They evolved for that.

That is one advantage the blue whale has.

Eventually, a testing model was built and transported to a nearby harbor for testing.

And this is where Bushnell ran into problems.

The hand crank.

He originally planned to pilot this thing himself.

But when he tried with his hand crank, he realized he does not have the strength nor cardio ability to pilot it.

So he turned to his large O-fish brother, Ezra.

Yeah,

get America's best cranker.

Who's jorking up?

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, I feel like you know a guy.

It's probably easier than using, you know, the printing press to put out announcements for like, you know, classified ad for continental gooning champion

catching a letter from the local like horse postman like are you a gooner would you like to make a living off your gooning come to the strange farmhouse in connecticut they didn't have 18th century discord it would have been a lot harder yeah this is from the article david bushnell's turtle quote the operator entered through an airtight hatch in the top of the sub sat on a traverse beam note not a seat mounted inside the vessel and drove the submersible with a hand-cranked propeller, a large one in front and a smaller one on top.

He steered by means of rudders that he would use at the rear of the vessel like a boat.

The operator determined where he was going while on the surface by looking through a set of glass ports surrounding the hatch.

Submerged, he made use of a compass lit by phosphorus.

The turtle could float on the surface and pump in fresh air through a leak-proof intake valve, but once underwater, the operator could only keep the vessel below until the air trapped inside ran out.

The ship dove and surfaced by means of brass pumps that took in or expelled seawater as ballast, as well as a 700-pound lead weight at the bottom, increments of which would be played out on a 50-foot line and retracted as needed.

So, and remember how I said looked like a barrel?

Well, it was built like one too.

It was just panels of wood held together with a metal ring and then slathered with tar to make it airtight and watertight.

I mean, it's basically an x-ray of the barrel looks like the shirt we did for Trash Future about what if your robot was just a guy.

Yeah, that's exactly

in there just cranking.

That's exactly diagram art and stuff like that.

However, there are some very serious limitations, both because it's, you know, the 1700s and also because in order to be sneaky, Bushnell and Doolittle decided the submarine would have to be as small as possible, coming in at seven feet tall and six feet wide.

That meant there would not be a lot of room for anything like, say, external ballasts that could be flooded with water to submerge the turtle.

Not that anyone had made a working external ballast yet, but I mean, hell, if anybody could do it, it was probably them.

The ballast itself would need to be the inside of the turtle.

Oh, no.

They would simply flood the chamber where the dude was sitting to submerge.

What the fuck?

Ezra decided, through a complex series of trial and error, that in order to be all the way underwater, the water inside the turtle would have to be about up to his waist.

How tall is like the vertical space inside of this?

Because I'm trying to like in my head picture how tall of a guy you can fit inside it.

It's seven feet tall.

So you could fit in a decent sized NBA player.

If the NBA existed back then and there were weird shoes.

I don't know.

I'm just thinking about like all of these movies I've seen about like maritime disasters and submarines and shit where something goes wrong and like they're managed to, you know, cut off the flooding just before it like drowns the dudes in the engine room or whatever.

And they're like keeping their heads above water.

And it's like, oh yeah, just normal day at the office for these guys.

It's designed to do that.

And remember, Ezra is in there alone.

And the only air that would be in there was the air trapped inside after he's submerged is between where he flooded and the roof of the submarine.

Assuming Ezra didn't suddenly come down with the world's most understandable panic attack in human history, it would be about enough for 30 minutes.

Just like invent some kind of concept of Zen Buddhist meditation.

You know, like, did living in continental America, like the colonial era pre-revolution, suck so bad that you'd be like, yeah, it's all right.

I mean,

as he's sitting in the death barrel, water flooding up around him as he's in like some lake or whatever testing, he's like, you know what?

Still better than being a farmer.

Yeah.

Yeah, to a guy like that, this is basically an onsen.

But like,

he must have been a a master of like fucking like mindfulness like breathing techniques because like how do you not like freak out the water's up to your waist and you're like i am in a wooden like egg and i'm about to fucking die and you have no understanding of any of the science at work because again you're an uneducated farmer who your brother drafted to be the world's first submariner because you built dummy thick and could crank the bitch forward you grew up on a farm in connecticut in the 1700s before the revolutionary war so effectively, like your entire life was sort of like, yeah, life sucks.

You starve.

Weather's bad.

Ground's hard.

Naked axe.

People come out of the woods every now and again and kill everyone.

And so it's like, maybe this isn't so bad.

Maybe this isn't so stressful for him.

You got to adopt the Ezra mindset, which is fucking, I'm dead already.

Now, this thing moves really fucking slow.

Underwater, it moves at like the speed of a slow creeping fart.

It could only move as fast as he could crank it, which is obviously not great.

When it came time to resurface, Ezra would have to hand pump out all of the water inside, which would then just kind of shoot out the top like

a whale, I guess, like a whale's fluke.

The idea was it would travel above water with just the top of it sticking out so he could continue to bring in air for Ezra, and then he would quickly flood it halfway into the final attack run.

Then came the design of the bomb they intended to fit on the turtle.

Bushnell teamed up with a guy named Phineas Pratt, because this is the era where Americans were still named Phineas, as well as Doolittle again.

And together they modify the Flintlock firing device from a musket onto clockwork gears that would in turn ignite a massive black powder bomb and a 12-hour delay.

The bomb itself would be attached to the side of the targeted Royal Navy ship.

via a long hand-operated screw from inside of the turtle.

The idea was that once Ezra gets up close to a Royal Navy ship, he would deploy the submarine's proboscis nose screw thing, drill a hole into the side, and then that is where he could attach the bomb before scooting away very slowly.

We've basically, we have built a Rube Goldberg device to bring you next to a Royal Navy vessel that you can then dry hump for a couple of minutes, maybe an hour, in order to attach a bomb.

Exactly.

And expect them to not notice this.

Yep.

I mean, I figured they probably had lots of rats and stuff scurrying around.

There were noises, et cetera, you know, creaky wood, et cetera.

But I still think you'd probably hear this.

Yeah, I mean, nothing is making engine noises, at least.

Yeah.

At first, Bushnell invited a guy named Dr.

Benjamin Gale to watch the first test of the turtle.

And Gale was so impressed, he then invited Benjamin Franklin to see the thing work.

Franklin then got in contact with George Washington, who was so impressed by the design or simply fucking desperate for anything to hit the Royal Navy with, that he immediately wanted to enlist Bushnell and his turtle for the war effort with a promise to pay any future repairs or development using the weapon.

Lushton also arranged for the transportation of the turtle to the war zone, which at this point was New York in the summer of 1776.

And just to give you a picture here, New York Harbor in the summer of 1776, It must have just looked like the revolution was already over.

There were so many warships, transport ships, merchant ships, whatever, that people often said that London was at sea in the harbor because so many British resources had been deployed to crush the revolution.

Tens of thousands of British soldiers were preparing to land in New York.

There's a crushing blockade.

A failure to control New York would be failure to control the Hudson River Valley, and that would mean cutting the colonies in two, which was the British battle plan in the first place.

Yeah.

For Washington and the others, the only way to even try to have a little glimmer of hope to save New York lay in breaking the British naval blockade.

And for that, Washington turned to Bushnell and his turtle, deciding effectively, well, fuck it, nothing else has worked, why not?

Washington never really believed in the turtle too much, but he figured if it failed, we'll only kill one guy.

One NBA-sized olf is a is a acceptable loss.

Exactly.

The America's first Olympic basketball team would really suffer from the loss of Ezra, but you know, they have other guys who have good fundamentals.

But the slow deployment of the turtle actually worked in its favor.

It was a horribly complicated thing to use.

And according to Washington's personal notes, it broke every time they tested it.

But that is to be expected.

Again, it's a submarine.

It's 1776.

This thing's going to be a piece of shit.

The fact it hadn't killed Ezra yet is a minor miracle unto itself.

Though Ezra did nearly die multiple times due to flooding going wrong, running out of air, expelling the water going wrong.

Every little gear on this thing breaks every time they try to use it.

But these are, again, you can consider them growing pains.

I say this worked in the turtle's favor because by the time Washton called the turtle up for service, Ezra had been training inside the turtle for over a year, meaning he knew the thing inside and out, how to fix the various problems as they popped up while he was using it, and more importantly, how to not die while he cranked and paddled like a man-man.

imagine how big his forearms were what the fuck straight up popeye shit man like you're basically it's like how to conceive of this it's basically apollo 13 in a barrel with paul bunyan

every day is forearm day of the turtle so with the turtle armed and transported to the hudson bay to attack the royal navy while it lay in anchor ezra prepared for his first Combat submarine mission.

Not only his, but in all of human history.

And then he came down with a really bad fever and diarrhea the night before.

Oh no, it's gonna stink in there.

I'm not saying Ezra was faking it, but as a soldier who faked out of getting sick to get out of a lot of really shitty duties, nothing but respect to him.

But getting a fever in the 1700s was a life-threatening situation.

So Ezra Bushnell was immediately sidelined.

The turtle and David were forced to retreat out of the bay and go back home while they looked for a replacement submariner, accepting only volunteers.

Of course, whenever I say anything on the show only accepts volunteers and whatever they're doing is a suicide mission, you know Bushnell was absolutely flooded with more volunteers than he knew what to do with.

Imagine what it must be like to be a Continental Army soldier in 1776 and someone describes to you what a submarine is and asks if you'd like to pilot that shit.

It would be like if someone came to me in circular 2007 at Fort Knox and told me, hey, we have a no shit Gundam parked down the street.

Would you like to try it out?

I could be completely certain I was going to die, but also even more certain, I would want to be the guy that died trying to fix it or use it or trip over my own feet and die of some brain injury as the Gundam falls over and crushes my barracks building.

I mean, inside every soldier, there's two soldiers and neither of them have a self-preservation drive.

In August 1776, they settled on picking a sergeant named Ezra Lee to be their new Ezra in the turtle.

I don't know how many dudes back then were named Ezra, but I feel like the odds of finding a new one were weirdly high.

Lee did not get a year of training, though.

He got like three weeks.

He's doing like the V-shred, get abs at home in three weeks fucking routine.

Getting increasingly frustrated because it doesn't work.

It's just interesting because this was setting up like a Rocky movie and you have the big long training montage for Oath Ezra.

And then like right before the cataclysmic event, he's like, oh, like Tommy hurts.

And they have to get a different Ezra.

And he gets like the acceleration.

He gets the teamu.com version of training montage.

It's like, look, Ezra 2, we don't really have a lot of time for you to hit the crank machine.

So we're just going to dope you full of horse steroids and hope for the best.

The decision was made,

you're not going to do better than Ezra 1.

So, you know what?

Let's just get another Ezra.

Yeah.

And as Ezra 2 started his training, shit got worse and worse for the revolution.

Washington was retreating from New York City.

The Continental Army was getting more and more desperate.

Namely, a guy named General Israel Putnam began to beg Bushnell to deploy the Turtle to do something to the Royal Navy before it was too late.

So he did.

On September 6th, 1776,

around midnight, Ezra II climbed into the turtle and began to crank and paddle his ass into New York Harbor, armed with hundreds of pounds of explosives.

They decided to aim for the HMS Eagle, the fleet's massive 64-gun flagship that was anchored right off of Governor's Island.

And the mission began to go immediately wrong for completely foreseeable reasons.

You don't fucking say, you don't say, putting a man in a wooden barrel in 1776 and saying, fucking crank that shit towards that ship, light this bomb under the water, that's going to fucking work.

Ye old soldier boy, crank that and die.

For starters, it was only after Ezra 2 was sealed inside and kicked into the harbor that he discovered how rough the water water was.

He had also never trained in any rough water when it came to piloting or navigating the turtle.

It made the already damn near Herculean task of making this thing move in the right direction a hundred times harder.

Then for some reason, nobody thought about how to navigate at night, leaving Lee to just kind of wig it.

Now, the inside of the turtle, we talked about this during that quote, was lit.

All the gauges, the windows, everything was lit with phosphorus paint, which gave it a very dull glow, but he could see.

Bushnell decided that, yeah,

combine that shit with the moon and the stars.

That's probably enough.

That's fine.

No, not even close.

I love the idea.

They're like, they'll just find something huge and big, and it'll probably be the right target.

And this man becomes the first person to conduct a bombing attack on the New Jersey Palisades somehow.

A second turtle has hit the building.

They ran into a small issue that, honestly, we can't can't really blame them too much for not understanding.

The inside of the turtle was illuminated by phosphorus paint, which caused a glare on the viewing ports that Ezra 2 was forced to look out of.

These viewing ports were covered in glass and they were constantly being splashed with seawater, meaning that even if the moon was as bright as humanly possible, Ezra 2 would not be able to see shit at night no matter what.

Despite it being dark and Ezra 2 not really being able to tell where he was going most of the time, and the turtle barely moving through the waves and the chop, and despite the fact that Ezra had been inside the thing for five hours now, and the carbon monoxide buildup inside was probably strangling off his brain, and despite the fact he could probably not really feel his arms anymore from cranking that shit, he was creeping up on the HMS Eagle very slowly.

Just like absolute death rattle, like last bit of energy before you pass out, just saying, soldier boy up in this,

watch me crank that.

So just gotta keep, keep that motivation like a Zen Cohen.

Exactly.

Repeating soldier boy crank that like a mantra.

Yeah, exactly.

The you know, dude on night watch on the boat is like, did you just hear someone say, you

what a horrible way to die.

Once Ezra 2 got close enough, he submerged the turtle and began the world's slowest attack run.

He settled up next to the HMS Eagle and deployed the screw that was supposed to be used to bore a hole into the side of the ship.

That would in turn allow him to attach the bomb.

However, Ezra 2 was discovering a new problem.

No matter how hard he screwed the side of that ship, he was not making a hole.

That's because unbeknownst to Ezra 2, to Bushnell, to Washington, Franklin, fucking anyone involved in the operation, the bottoms of British ships were coppered.

That meaning covered in metal, copper, to protect them from barnacles and rot.

That meant the little hand-powered wood screw that Lee had been armed with never had a fucking chance.

They didn't have 18th century Bosch hammer technology, you know what I mean?

Could have gotten that metal carbide bit, but...

Yep.

I mean, also, who's to say that Ezra 2 would even be able to punch a hole in a wooden ship by the time he got there?

He had been screwing that stupid little fucking hand crank for like seven hours at this point.

What?

Yeah.

He's not going to have a whole lot of juice left, you know?

So I got to ask the question.

I mean, like, does this mean, does he just SV bids it?

Does he just, does he just, just boat bomb it?

I mean, that would have maybe worked, but.

No, unfortunately.

We did not, in fact, get the first American suicide bomber.

I know that he has a time fuse or whatever.

It doesn't have a big red kill yourself button.

Like, that would be funny, but they couldn't produce plastic or the color red that brightly.

Benjamin Franklin sitting back at a cell phone, like, I knew the coward wouldn't pull the button and hit the call button himself.

Now, I should point out here that not every ship in the Royal Navy was coppered.

It was a newer process and it had not started that long ago.

This was mostly in direct response to the revolution, but it was a standard evolution in naval technology.

But if there was one ship in the harbor that was going to be coppered, the Eagle would have been it.

But nobody knew about it.

Ezra 2 had been busting his ass trying to screw a hole into the side of this thing for so long, he noticed that the sun was coming up.

And also, he had been underwater trying to screw for about 30 minutes, which, if you remember, is about how long it takes for his air to run out.

Lee, having failed completely, decided to break off his attack and try to run back to shore.

But now that it was getting light out, it did not take long for the British standing on the rails of their warships to be like, yo, what the fuck is that thing in the water?

That's a fucking big-ass acorn in the water screwing a barrel to the side of the ship.

What the fuck is going on, Dad?

Do you hear that song?

It sucks.

It's just whale songs.

What are you talking about?

A little known fact about blue whales is they're singing cranked up by Soldier Boy.

Just on a really, really stretched out time frame.

So it sounds like...

They pitched it down so low, it takes years, years to get to the end of the chorus.

US Navy submarines to this day watching the ping going yeah i'll crank that mr whale yeah little known fact sodar fucks whales up really bad makes them go nuts and crash they lose their ability to navigate

yeah it fucks them up so bad now they're singing drake

soon the british deployed gunboats and they began chasing the turtle again i mean you know these are paddle boats so they're not moving very fast either but ezra 2 lee cranking his way across the harbor at about one mile per hour, knew that he was about to be caught and surely executed as a saboteur.

But he still had one trick up his sleeve.

The bomb.

Now, Lee could not arm the bomb while inside the turtle.

It's impossible.

It had been armed when the mission started before he got inside on that 12-hour timer.

He had been underwater for about eight hours now, so he cut that bitch loose, hoping it would blow up at some point.

or scare the Royal Navy of like hey that weird barrel just shit out another barrel We need to get the fuck away from here and that's kind of what happened the dudes chasing him in the rowboats Had no idea what it might be So they decided to err on the side of caution and get away from the bomb Allowing Ezra 2 and the turtle to get away and get back to shore The sea mine then got carried off by the current for about another hour before blowing up in the middle of the East River, harming absolutely nobody.

But the bomb did work, and apparently it was huge.

The explosion was so fucking large that people thought when they saw the explosion from the shore that it must be the HMS Eagle detonating like a fucking bomb.

There was cheering and high fiving until someone pointed out that like,

actually, the eagle is right over there.

We don't know what he blew up.

We just created steam, a little bit of water vapor, but not much else, unfortunately.

And imagine how crazy that must have seemed to just...

Because this is hours after this all ended.

You're in the Royal Navy on one of these fucking miserable ships in the middle of the harbor, and then something just explodes bigger than you've ever seen before.

It's hundreds of pounds of gunpowder.

It sends up like a fucking gout of water taller than your ship.

Yeah, and with a metal bore and a single lag bolt, you could have made it so much cooler, but they hadn't invented those yet.

Fucking Ezra 2 hadn't been armed with like the M3 double-sided stick tape.

Command stripping it to the fucking copper side of the ship.

It's like it will hold for at least five hours.

I have to stop here and point out that there are some people who believe that the attack by the turtle never actually took place at all.

Crisis actor submarines, if you will.

This is mostly thanks to one guy, a British naval historian named Richard Compton Hull.

He claims that due to the strength of the current and the bad design of the turtle, all these mitigating factors, that this attack, even a failed one, would have been impossible.

And instead, Ezra II simply used a covered rowboat to use his, attempt his attack on the eagle.

And the turtle itself is simply revolutionary propaganda.

I don't buy it.

This is despite the turtle's design and testing being well documented by Benjamin Franklin.

and George Washington, who continued to talk about the turtle in his personal letters and diary years after the war was over.

So also the attack itself had multiple eyewitnesses.

I love the idea of someone turning into a turtle truther, though.

I also love the idea of Benjamin Franklin continuing to write about this in his diary over years after the fact.

Like, what was he?

She's like, man, that shit was so fucking cool.

Like, just imagine if it worked, bro.

God damn, yeah.

If only, if only we could have found a way.

If only the Brits hadn't put metal in a boat.

And there's another reason why I think that the turtle attack was absolutely exactly what I mean the failure we just described it as.

And that is George Washington really, really, really getting close with Sergeant Ezra Lee afterwards, but we'll talk about that in a second.

Now, the attack on the HMS Eagle had failed, but it wouldn't be the last time the turtle would be deployed into combat.

On October 5th, Lee and the Turtle floated out into the harbor once again, targeting a British frigate off the coast of Manhattan.

However, all of the problems that were there last time were still there, with the added kink that the British had picked up on the fact that someone tried to sabotage our harbor while at anchor.

So now they doubled their night watches on all of their ships, which meant as soon as Lee pedaled his little ass onto the attack run, someone's like, oi, mate, what the fuck is that?

You got a license for that submarine?

He was immediately spotted, and Ezra 2 inside the turtle knew he had been spotted because he could hear the British people on duty yelling at him.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like a Metal Gear Solid big red exclamation point, but it's just

every time you say Ezra 2 and the turtle, Nate, it just sounds like a fucking fucking like lesser modest mouse album.

I was going to say this sounds like it's the absolute worst vampire weekend spin-off project.

Turtle weekend.

Turtle weekday, even.

So after hearing the British yell at him, Lee turns around and runs without completing the attack.

This would be the final mission of the turtle.

After this attack, Bushnell had the turtle loaded up on a tender, which is like a transport ship.

And then for reasons nobody's entirely sure of, the turtle fell off the back of the ship and sank to the bottom of the sea.

No.

Someone didn't secure it in place with ratchet straps or whatever.

There's another telling of the story where the tender carrying the turtle was sank by the Royal Navy.

But either way, the turtle goes to the bottom of the sea.

Bushnell later claims that he staged a mission to pull the turtle up from the bottom of this, like the sea floor, which he almost certainly doesn't because nobody ever sees the fucking turtle again.

It's never used in combat again.

And he completely abandoned any more work on submarines and said goes back to to his first love, blowing shit up underwater.

And he's way more successful at that.

He builds a seamine known as the Death Barrel that would explode on contact.

This was used by the Continental Army to effectively carpet bomb the Royal Navy.

They build a bunch of death barrels and then just kick them down the river all at once.

That is going in the direction they know that the Royal Navy is anchored.

And it works really, really well.

He's eventually made an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers by george washington personally and then at the end of the american revolution he fucking vanishes everyone just thought he moved to france uh which had become something of a common landing spot for educated american revolution veterans but the thing is he never went to france at all instead without telling anyone he changed his name to david bush and then simply moved to atlanta

He abandoned the life of an engineer and instead began working as a doctor despite having no medical education whatsoever, but didn't really need any back then.

And this wasn't even discovered until after he died in 1824.

The only hint as to why he abandoned his own life and ran away to become a southern doctor comes from a friend of his, a guy named George Hargraves, who claimed that, quote, he got duped and cheated by a rascal and found it prudent to absent himself from a dishonest creditor.

So yeah, he ran from his debts.

Fun fact, those debts probably came from building the turtle.

Because remember how I said that the Continental Congress would pay him back?

They did.

They never did.

They never did.

Instead, he just got saddled with all of the debt and then just ran out of this fucking ditch town.

Yeah, you're just like some guy in Atlanta and is like, oh, my doctor keeps like...

explaining all my ailments and illnesses.

It's like, there's a series of small barrels inside your body.

You have too much barrel exposure.

Yeah, we need to like trepan you to get the extra barrels out.

We're calling it barrel carcinoma.

As for Ezra Lee, America's first submarine combat veteran, he was commissioned an officer due to his service in the turtle.

George Washington seemingly liked him so much, admired his nyon suicidal courage to serve in the turtle, that he became his personal secret agent going on special secret missions for George Washington, the details of which Washington never told anyone, nor did he write down, meaning that to this day, we have no idea what kind of shit he got up to.

This is fascinating.

Honestly, like, I guess so much of this stuff, uh,

you feel like it would, it's just been so, like, you know, documented to the point of being hagiography, but this feels like stuff we absolutely did not learn.

learning about

the Revolutionary War at all.

Nothing close to this.

This is way cooler.

He died in 1821 and was given one of the coolest obituaries that I've ever read.

Quote, this soldier is the only man to have fought the enemy on the land, the water, and under the water.

He died without an enemy.

That's pretty badass.

Yeah.

Fuck cool.

I hope they buried him in a barrel.

Buried him in a barrel and chucked it out into the Hudson River Bay so he could just float around, do what he did best.

Crank him that.

In closing, if you want to see a turtle on its full scale, there's a working replica at the Connecticut River Society.

They even used it to conduct a mock attack in 1977 to prove that Bushnell's design worked and the turtle itself worked.

I know we talked about how crazy you have to be to do this in the 1700s, but imagine how crazy you have to do this in the 1970s.

Also, like, here's our premium god-tier museum attraction.

Let's take it out in the ocean and see if we can fucking use it.

It's 225 years old or 200 years old at that point.

You know what I mean?

It's a replica.

It's not the real thing.

But I wouldn't want to get inside of it.

Imagine going to a museum and like the curator's like, hey, kids, you want to see a guy die?

Yeah.

It's like,

I'm just, even if it's a thing that's a modern replica, though, can you imagine how much work and money goes into that?

And they're like, hey, this is this thing that brings people to our museum.

We're like, we're putting it in the goddamn ocean.

We're going to make this British dude shut up once and for all.

We'll show you, motherfucker.

But that, that is a podcast, but we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you can donate to the show on Patreon and you can ask us in the Patreon DMs.

You can ask us in the Discord, you'll also have access to, or you can stuff it into a barrel with a guy named Ezra and kick it towards New York.

Where I assume at some point someone will answer it and get it back to us because none of us live in New York.

Today's question is:

What have you done recently to make yourself feel better?

Next question: who wants to go first?

I have changed my gym programming to not make myself super fucking fatigued all the time, so I'm not like almost paralyzed for two days a week.

I counter that with skill issue,

destroy your CNS, don't be a pussy.

That's right.

Yesterday, it was really warm and sunny, relatively speaking.

Probably the warmest day we've had so far this year.

And I had like a enough sort of work-related annoyances, and there was a small task I needed to do, and I could have waited or done, like, mailed it to return this defective item but I could also drop it off at like the store branch here in town so I got on my bike and rode down and did it and I'm so glad I did it because just like the annoyances didn't stop but getting 20 odd minutes on my bike in beautiful weather is just such a huge mood lift

also like it's it's weird here like it's so dense like the trail the cycling stuff is actually pretty pretty well developed not as good as the Netherlands but it's pretty good but like I guess it kind of keeps you on your toes because you just feel like you're in a labyrinth because it's like geographically small city but it's very very dense so I don't know that was it's a nice break Like lately, I've just been, I've been so busy that like it's really hard to to do anything besides the bare minimum.

And yeah, that was nice.

I mean, I know I talked about on the show before, but I quit vaping a few months ago.

I'm still going strong.

I feel so much better.

I've also pretty much quit drinking.

Not that I ever really intended.

Like I never was like, I have had too much.

I need to go dry or whatever.

But like, I just have lost the taste for it.

And I also like, I feel a million times better now that I'm not drinking and vaping.

I don't know why I ever did that to myself, actually.

I don't know, man.

I'm starting to wonder because, like, I still wake up every morning feeling like I'm hungover.

And it's like, some of it's age and some of it's being apparent, some of it's fatigue, but I also vape.

And maybe it's that because I don't really drink.

I mean, when I used to wake up after vaping, which was every day when you're vaping, I felt really, really bad.

I feel like a fucking moron because I'm like telling you guys about I've unlocked some superhuman ability.

It's just called sobriety,

which I should, I should put out here is nothing no other Kasabian has ever achieved.

You've just, I am the first.

You've just like gone Ursat's vegan straight edge.

On accident, yeah.

Like I really don't eat meat anymore because I just lost the taste for it.

I wouldn't say I'm vegetarian, but I'm largely vegetarian.

But yeah, I've stopped drinking almost entirely.

I have like maybe a glass of wine a week.

Changed up my whole game.

Stopped listening to music that was polluting my brain.

I only listened to Earth Crisis now.

Earth Crisis.

Hare Krishna Chance.

I only listen to Crank That as played on a hand crank in a submarine.

I'm sampling blue whale songs and trying to find the right pitch to chart up so I can hear Soldier Boy.

Exactly.

But fellas, that's a podcast, but you host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

What a hell of Way to Dad, Trash Future, Kill James Bond, No Gods, No Mayors.

All good shows.

All have Patreon content and free content.

Check them out, please.

Beneath the Skin and a new show, This Guy Sucks.

A show about guys in history who sucked.

This is the only show that I host.

Thanks for listening to it.

Consider supporting us on Patreon.

Just $5 a month gets you absolutely everything.

Years and years of bonus content, e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets, and merch gets you a barrel with a guy named Ezra in it, who might be very, very sweaty from all that cranking.

One of two potential Ezras.

You don't know which one you're getting.

We have options.

And until next time,

crank that and die.

You might not go blind.