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David Bushnell And His American Turtle
by
” You’ll find your answer in the prayer you’ve just offered! “
“But,” said practical Mr. Bushnell, “the Lord did not send you money to buy oak and iron and brass, did he?”
“Yes,” returned David, “by the hand of my good friend, Dr. Gale. To him belongs half the victory.”
“Pshaw! pshaw!” impatiently uttered the doctor. “I tell you it is no such thing ! I only advanced My Lady here,” turning to Madam Bushnell, “a little money, on her promise to pay me at some future time. I’m mightily ashamed now that I took the promise at all. Madam Bushnell, I’ll never take a penny of it back again, never, as long as I live. I will have a little of the credit of this achievement, and no one shall hinder me.”
“How is that, mother?” questioned Mr. Bushnell. ” You borrow money and not tell me!” and David and Ezra looked at her.
“I–I–” stammered forth the woman, “I only guessed that David was doing something that he wanted money for, and told Dr. Gale if he gave it to him I would repay it. Do you care, father?”
Before he had a chance to get an answer in, David Bushnell stepped forward, and, taking the little figure of his mother in his arms, kissed her sharply, and walked away, to give some imaginary attention to the Turtle at the bank.
“It is a fair land to work for!” spoke up Doctor Franklin, looking about upon river and earth and sea; “worthy it is of our highest efforts; of our lives, even, if need be. God give us strength as our need shall be.”
With many a tug and pull and hearty heave-ho, the Turtle was hoisted up the bank and safely drawn into the seine-house. The door was locked, and Lady Fenwick’s tomb gave forth no sound that night.
Doctor Franklin went his way to Boston. Doctor Gale returned to Killingworth and his waiting patients, and the Bushnells, father, mother and sons, having put the two gentlemen on the Saybrook shore, went down the river into the Sound, along its edge, and up the small Pochaug to their own home by the sycamore tree.
Mr. Bushnell and Ezra did the rowing that night. David’s white hands had, somehow, a new radiance in them for his father’s eyes, and did not seem exactly fitted for rowing just a common boat and every-day oars.
The young man sat in the stern, beside his mother, one arm around her waist, and the other clasped closely between her little palms, while, now and then, her finding eyes would penetrate his consciousness with a glance that seemed to say, “I always believed in you, David.”
* * * * *
If you go to-day and stand upon the site of the old fort, built at the mouth of the Connecticut River, in the year 1635, by Lion Gardiner, once engineer in the service of the Prince of Orange, and search the waters up and down for the island on which David Bushnell built the American Turtle in 1775, you will not find it.
If you seek the oldest inhabitant of Saybrook, and ask him to point out its locality, he will say, with boyhood’s fondness for olden play-grounds in his tone:
“Ah, yes! It is Poverty Island that you mean. It used to be there, but spring freshets and beating storms have washed it away.”
The unexpected visit of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, to see the machine David Bushnell was building, gave new force to that young gentleman’s confidence in his own powers of invention.
He worked with increased energy and hope to perfect boat and magazine, that he might do good service with them before winter should fall on the waters of the Massachusetts Bay, where the hostile ships were lying.