The Turtle and the Eagle
A Novel of the First Submarine Attack

About this book:

1775. The British fleet dominates the Atlantic. The Continental Army has muskets, grit, and a desperate idea born in a Connecticut barn: a wooden barrel bound with iron, driven by hand-cranked screws, carrying a single man and a keg of gunpowder beneath the keel of a sixty-four-gun ship of the line. They call it the *Turtle*.

David Bushnell, a scholar who calculates water displacement like scripture, built it. Ezra Lee, a sergeant who cannot swim and fears closed spaces, must pilot it. Together they will slip into the Hudson under cover of darkness, breathing air that turns sour in minutes, navigating by foxfire light, hunting the flagship *Eagle* in a harbor swarming with Redcoats. One mistake—a stuck valve, a fouled screw, a moment's panic—means a cold death in the mud.

Based on the astonishing true story of the world's first submarine attack, *The Turtle and the Eagle* plunges you into the dark water where invention meets courage, where the fate of a rebellion rests on a machine that never should have worked, and the man who dared to take it down.