The Turtle and the Eagle
A Novel of the Revolution's Secret Weapon

About this book:

Beneath the hulls of the world's mightiest navy, a revolution is brewing—in a wooden barrel held together by pitch, prayer, and Yankee stubbornness. *The Turtle and the Eagle* plunges you into the true story of America's first submarine: the *Turtle*, a one-man, hand-cranked nightmare of leaking valves, foul air, and crushing depth, piloted by a farmer-turned-sergeant who has never seen the bottom of a river, let alone the keel of a sixty-four-gun ship of the line. David Bushnell, the brilliant, spectral inventor who built her, believes geometry can humble an empire. Sergeant Ezra Lee, the man sealed inside her, knows that physics offers no quarter—and that the British fleet waiting in New York Harbor will not wait for him to learn.

In the tradition of Patrick O'Brian and David McCullough, this is historical fiction at its most visceral: the scream of ungreased gears, the blue flame of a dying candle signaling the end of breathable air, the terror of a pump seizing four fathoms down with no way out but a hammer and a prayer. But it is also a story of unlikely brotherhood—between a Yale scholar who speaks in equations, his consumptive brother who drowns so the machine can float, and the soldier who must make their mad arithmetic work in the dark, beneath the guns of the enemy.

When the tide turns and the flagship *HMS Eagle* rides at anchor, the stage is set for a single, desperate attack that will either birth a new kind of warfare—or vanish without a trace beneath the waves. Meticulously researched and brutally alive, *The Turtle and the Eagle* is the untold story of the Revolution's most audacious gamble: the moment the colonies stopped fighting on the King's terms, and went underneath them.