Today, we meet a turtle with an iron shell. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
When the Japanese ruler
Hideyoshi invaded Korea in 1592, he was armed with
a new weapon. He carried muskets that'd been sold
to him by the Portuguese. Hideyoshi quickly overran
Seoul, and he seemed to be on his way to conquering
the country.
Then the Korean government turned to Admiral
Sun-Shin Yi. Yi was a brilliant strategist who'd
seen war coming. He'd raised private money to
construct a small fleet of utterly remarkable
ships. They were called Turtle Boats.
The Turtle Boat was ironclad. And it really
did look like a seventy-foot-long turtle. It had a
low, rounded roof, bristling with spikes to prevent
boarding. In battle, its sails came down and twenty
oars powered it. Just above the oars were ports for
cannon, small firearms, and arrows. It had features
in common with both Civil War ironclads, the
Monitor and the Merrimac,
built two hundred and fifty years later. A Turtle
Boat was equipped with a ram as well as a dragon's
head on the prow. The dragon's head poured out
smoke to frighten the enemy and to lay down a smoke
screen.
So, for several months, Yi used his new weapon to
tear into the Japanese fleet of some two hundred
ships. He devastated it. The war ended in a truce,
with Korea divided politically. Admiral Yi had
stopped the invasion, but he'd stirred up political
jealousy by doing it. His opponents had him thrown
in jail, and there he sat until Hideyoshi renewed
the invasion in 1597.
With Yi out of the way, the Japanese ravaged the
Korean navy. Yi was finally exonerated and put back
in charge of just twelve surviving warships. Less
than a month later he ambushed 133 Japanese ships
with his tiny fleet. He sank thirty-one of them and
drove the rest off. He bought time to rebuild his
navy.
A year later, the Japanese were fighting a losing
war. They began a total withdrawal in an armada of
five hundred ships. Then Admiral Yi struck once
again with his Turtle -- with his mad, visionary
weapon. He sank hundreds of ships -- over half the
fleet.
The carnage far exceeded the slaughter in Drake's
defeat of the Spanish Armada, which had taken place
around the world just ten years before. In fact,
the Japanese loss of fifty thousand sailors was
twice the combined number who'd merely
sailed in the English and Spanish fleets.
The Japanese were so badly beaten that they stayed
away from Korea until 1904. Admiral Yi was killed
in the battle. And, in a strange way, so too was
the Turtle.
The oddest thing about this already-odd chapter of
naval history is that the Turtle Boat didn't
outlive the war. Neither it, nor this vast naval
encounter, are even footnotes in Western history
books. During the American Revolution, David
Bushnell called his experimental one-man submarine
The Turtle. But we didn't again see anything
resembling the Korean Turtle boat until the Civil
War -- so recent as to have been within both my own
grandfathers' lifetimes.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
