August 4, 2007
Terrorist Attack on New York by Revolutionary War Submarine? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:25 AM EST Yesterday morning three police boats, a helicopter, and the Coast Guard converged on a suspicious craft in New York Harbor approaching the Queen Mary 2. Fearing the worst as they moved in for an arrest, they surrounded a mostly submerged plywood egg containing Duke Riley, a Brooklyn resident who according to the story in today’s New York Times “emerged from his rusty hatch without the tall-boy can of beer he had taken into his vessel when it launched.” One of the police officers present remarked, “What are we going to do with this thing? It looks like the Turtle!” The officer knew what he was talking about. The craft was, in fact, a replica of the submarine Turtle built during the American revolution by a man named David Bushnell. In 1776 Bushnell took his one-man, pedal-powered wooden sub into New York Harbor and attempted to screw a time bomb into the hull of the flagship of the British fleet. Bushnell’s Turtle was an audacious attempt at the probably impossible long before the birth of the true submarine. It didn’t blow up any ships, but Bushnell survived, and one of his descendants was assisting Riley yesterday; another living relative is Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City. Riley, a sort of performance artist who last year built a makeshift illegal tavern on Rockaway Inlet in Queens to recreate the lawless atmosphere of the area a century ago—the police quickly put a stop to that, too—actually constructed a sub that was if anything even cruder than Bushnell’s. It was of cheap plywood coated with fiberglass, rather than Bushnell’s thick sections of hardwood, lacked enough ballast to get all the way underwater, which was probably lucky, and lacked any means of propulsion. “I’m not really a very technical kind of guy. I just guessed a lot on this,” he explained yesterday. He got out into the water off Red Hook with the help of friends in a rubber raft, floated on the current toward the Queen Mary 2, and apparently had no real plan for moving along from there. His arrest may have been his goal; the Times reports that his sub will make its next appearance in a Chelsea art gallery. American Heritage of Invention & Technology ran a full account of the original Turtle and of a recent more thoroughgoing, if less headline-grabbing, attempt to recreate it a few years back. You can read it here.
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