Sea of Shadows

of her country.

Someone had just poked a stick into a hornet's nest. And if Frank knew anything at all about Emily Irons, there would be hell to pay.

CHAPTER 7

TORPEDO: THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF A KILLING MACHINE

_{(Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript [pages 84–87] and reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)}

It is an axiom in both philosophy and politics that a single determined person can change the world. Anyone who dares to argue the point is likely to face an exhaustive litany of famous names — Louis Pasteur, Robert Goddard, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Ferdinand Magellan, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Alexander the Great, Henry Ford, Grace Hopper, Adolf Hitler, Alan Turing — some of whom have changed the world for the better, and some of whom have changed it for the worse, but all of whom have inarguably left an imprint on the pages of history.

As citizens of the human race, we are well prepared to accept the idea that human beings can alter the fate of mankind. But we are far less likely to consider the effect of non-human influences on the course of world events. Perhaps it is a sort of species-centric conceit that blinds us to the effect of the inanimate object — the thing — on history.

And yet, through the sharply focused lens of hindsight, we can see that objects — tools, devices, or weapons — have often become the axis on which history itself has turned. Some of these incidences are easy to spot.

On a cold December morning in 1903, a crude biplane clawed its way into the air over Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The homemade aircraft’s maiden flight lasted only three and a half seconds, but it carried the future of aviation on its spruce and cotton muslin wings. And after that nothing would ever be the same.

Forty-two years later, a single bomb (with the innocuous nickname of Little Boy) devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In a single instant of fire and destruction, the world was catapulted into the nuclear age.

At just before 1:00 PM on November 22, 1963, a rifle bullet killed John F. Kennedy. The president was struck by at least one other bullet (conspiracy buffs count a third), but medical opinions are virtually unanimous in saying that Kennedy would have survived his other injuries if not for the head shot. Popular theories argue for a second, or even a third gunman in the shooting, but no one seriously disputes the fact that a single 6.5mm bullet ended John F. Kennedy’s life. It’s impossible to know if the world was changed for the better or the worse in the wake of JFK’s assassination. But there’s no doubt that Lyndon Johnson’s vision for American was different from Kennedy’s. LBJ had different views on Vietnam, human rights, and the future of the space program. And he led the most powerful nation on Earth down different paths than Kennedy might have taken.

Are these examples proof of the concept that inanimate objects can drive the forces of history? To verify the validity of the assertion, we must work the problem in reverse, in the same manner that we can check our answer to a mathematical equation by working backward from the answer.

To determine if the bullet that killed Kennedy was truly responsible for altering human events, we can ask two simple questions: If that particular bullet had misfired, or gone astray, would the world be a demonstrably different place than it is today? And, in natural corollary to the first question, would JFK have made different decisions as president than did his successor, Lyndon Johnson? If the answer to either question is yes, we must conclude that a single 6.5mm rifle bullet seized control of the destiny of the most powerful nation on Earth, and therefore the destiny of mankind.

The same sort of reverse check can be run on the atomic bomb question. If the bomb at Hiroshima had failed to detonate (for whatever reason), would the world be a different place? Would the nuclear arms race have ever come to pass? Would mankind have ever been forced to live under the threat of nuclear annihilation?

These examples are relatively easy to recognize: the airplane, the A-bomb, the bullet that killed a president. But there are other instances, other objects or machines that have shaped the fate of our planet.

One particular device has been the engine of history on numerous occasions, and yet its impact is almost entirely overlooked. The torpedo.

On at least five verifiable instances in recorded history, the torpedo has become the lever of Archimedes: the machine that moved the world.

To examine the influence of the torpedo, we must examine the history of the torpedo itself. When was the torpedo invented? How did this influential and deadly device come into being?

Some military historians trace the origins of the torpedo back to the Roman Empire, and the fire ships that the ancient Romans would send drifting amongst the fleets of their enemies. Others prefer to attribute the invention of the torpedo to a sixteenth-century Italian inventor named Zambelli, who used a drifting boatload of explosives with a delayed fuse to destroy a bridge in 1585.

But the actual word torpedo was first applied to naval warfare in the late eighteenth century by a young colonial American named David Bushnell. Graduating from Yale University at the dawn of the American Revolution, Bushnell was inspired to use his engineering expertise to support the fight for American Independence. With the help of fellow Yale graduate Phineas Pratt, Bushnell designed an underwater bomb with a clockwork-delayed flintlock detonator. By modern standards, the device would be more properly classified as a limpet mine, but Bushnell chose the name torpedo—in reference to the harm-less-looking (but dangerous) torpedo ray. A member of the electric ray family (Torpedinidae), the torpedo ray can deliver a crippling electrical shock to its prey and its enemies alike. Bushnell hoped to emulate the torpedo ray’s nasty underwater surprise by attaching his clockwork bomb to the bottom of one of the British warships that were currently blockading New York harbor.

The blockade gave the British control of the Hudson River Valley, allowing them to effectively split the colonial forces in two. The situation was becoming increasingly desperate for the Americans. If the blockade remained unbroken, the revolution would likely fail.

Without a navy of their own, the colonials could not challenge the blockade. Although generally unrecognized by scholars and students of history, Bushnell’s torpedo — as crazy and as unproven as it must have seemed — held the only real hope for American independence.

Shortly after midnight on September 7, 1776, a young Army sergeant named Ezra Lee climbed into a tiny one-man submarine, pulled the hatch shut over his head, and submerged beneath the waters of New York harbor. His target was HMS Eagle, a sixty-four — gun man-of-war that served as the flagship of the British fleet. (In a tiny stroke of irony, the British Admiral Lord Howe had anchored Eagle within a few hundred yards of Bedloe’s Island, which would one day be renamed Liberty Island — the site for the Statue of Liberty.) The submarine used in the attack was another of David Bushnell’s inventions. Constructed from curved oaken planks and strengthened with iron bands, the little one-passenger craft was shaped very much like a peach. Bushnell called his submarine the Turtle, and he equipped it with hand-operated propellers, ballast tanks, and a pair of hand-pumps that enabled the vessel to submerge or surface.

The torpedo was carried near the top of the little submarine, just above the rudder. Built into the top of the submarine was a vertically mounted auger, which the operator could use to screw the torpedo to the bottom planking of the target ship.

Without electricity, the only illumination inside the Turtle came from the glowing foxfire moss that surrounded the compass and depth gauge.

Battling unfamiliar tides and physical fatigue from manually powering the submarine through the water, Ezra Lee had only about thirty minutes of air with which to conduct his attack and make his escape. Laboring, sweating, and — perhaps — grunting and swearing in the darkened confines of the tiny vessel, Lee managed to maneuver the Turtle under the hull of HMS Eagle. He set to work with the auger, but several minutes of unproductive drilling convinced him that he could not penetrate the hull planking of the British ship. He rested for a few minutes and then tried again, still without success. With his air supply running low, Lee was forced to abandon the attack.

Nearly exhausted and starving for breathable air, Lee pumped out his ballast tanks shortly after he was clear