“An account of the progress of our machine”

On 31 Aug 1775, the Rev. Benjamin Boardman, serving as a chaplain to Connecticut troops at the siege of Boston, wrote in his diary:

I collected this day in cash for the encouragt. of Mr. Bushnels Machine the sum of £13.4.4. in cash out of our regt.

Boardman was a graduate of Yale, and David Bushnell (1740–1826) had just graduated from that college.

On 24 September, Dr. Benjamin Church wrote to his British army contact:

The distroying the Ships in the manner I wrote you before they began to dispair of tho’ the former of the Machine is full of faith that he can do it, Works on hardly and so let him, I say.

This intel might have referred to the same machine, or to different technology designed to damage Royal Navy ships.

Bushnell’s invention was still in the works, but getting closer to completion, when the doctor and inventor Benjamin Gale (1715–1790) wrote from Killingworth to Silas Deane at the Continental Congress on 9 November:

In your last you requested I would give you an account of the progress of our machine, and whether anything may be expected of it. I now sit down to give you a succinct but imperfect account of its structure, which is so complicated that it is impossible to give a perfect idea of it. . . .

I conclude by the time this reaches you the machine will be in camp. Lately he has conducted matters and his designs with the greatest secrecy, both for the personal safety of the navigator as to produce the greatest astonishment to those against whom it is designed,—

if this projection succeeds, of which I make no doubt, as I well know the man and have seen the machine while in embryo, and every addition made to it fills me with fresh astonishment and surprize. And you may call me a visionary, an enthusiast, or what you please,—I do insist upon it, that I believe the inspiration of the Almighty has given him understanding for this very purpose and design.

But two weeks later, on 22 November, Gale had to report a delay:

I have to ask pardon for the wrong information I gave you. At the time of my last writing, I supposed the Machine was gone, but since find one proving the navigation of it in Connecticut River. The forcing pump made by Mr. [Isaac] Doolittle, not being made according to order given, did not answer; which has delayed him. The trials I mentioned to have been made since Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin’s being here, was the explosion, which prov’d beyond expectation.

The most famous American scientist of the day had stopped in Saybrook on his way back from Cambridge to Philadelphia in order to inspect this invention.

Gale sent another update and plea to Deane on 7 December:

…everything answers well, but still, he fails on one account. He proposes going in the night, on account of safety. He always depends on fox-wood, which gives light in the dark, to fix on the points of the needle of his compass, and in his barometer, by which he may know what course to steer and the depth he is under water, both which are absolute necessity for personal safety of the navigator; but he now finds that the frost wholly destroys that quality in that wood, of which he was before ignorant, and for that reason and that alone he is obliged to desist. He was detained near two months for want of money, and before he could obtain it the season was so far advanced he was, in the manner I have now related, frustrated. . . .

The person, the inventor of this machine, now makes all his affairs a secret even to his best friends, and I have liberty to communicate this much from him only with a view to know if Dr. Franklin knows of any kind of phosphorus that will answer his purpose; otherwise the execution must be omitted until next spring, after the frosts are past.

As of 1 February, Gale was still seeking some phosphorescent material for Bushnell. He wrote, “I have lately seen the man, and conversed freely with him. He is no enthusiast; a perfect philosopher, and by no means doubtful of succeeding.” But the siege of Boston would end before warm weather.

TOMORROW: A new campaign.

(Several replicas of the Bushnell’s machine have been built over the years based on the verbal descriptions. The one shown above was in Westbrook, Connecticut, as of last year.)

“Discovered to be active in exposing our works to the enemy”?

Benjamin Boardman (1731–1802, shown here) graduated from Yale College in 1758, and two years later he became the minister in Middle Haddam, Connecticut.

When Gen. Joseph Spencer led Connecticut troops to the siege of Boston in the spring of 1775, Boardman went along as a chaplain.

He kept a diary from 31 July to 12 November, at least, and that document was published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1892.

Boardman recorded mostly events in the Connecticut regiments’ camp in Roxbury, particularly deaths, and news about big events elsewhere.

The minister’s frustration with rumors comes through in several places. On 9 November, for example, he wrote a detailed account of a British army raid on Lechmere’s Point in Cambridge and the Continental response. Then he added, “The above acct. cant be relied on,” and wrote down different details; “indeed there is no certainty can be come at,” he concluded.

Nonetheless, two entries stood out for me. On 31 August, the chaplain wrote:

I collected this day in cash for the encouragt. of Mr. Bushnels Machine the sum of £13.4.4. in cash out of our regt.

That must refer to the invention of David Bushnell, which turned out to be a small submarine and an underwater bomb or mine. This entry shows that Connecticut men were talking about the inventor’s work in the summer of 1775, even if they didn’t know the top-secret details.

On 31 October, Boardman’s entry was:

Bought me a flanel waistcoat this day, cost 9/2. We hear that Coll. [Joseph?] Gorham with about 40 tories are taken from ye. eastward who went after wood; also that Harry Knox, who married Secretary Fluckers daughter, and offered himself last July as a voluntary engineer to lay out our works, is taken & discovered to be active in exposing our works to the enemy.

At some later point Boardman returned to that entry, put marks around everything after the semicolon, and wrote: “Mistake of ye. clause in the crotchets.” In other words, never mind that thing about Knox. For that matter, the rumor about Gorham doesn’t seem reliable, either.

Nonetheless, this diary entry shows that some people in the American camp were suspicious about Knox’s family ties in the same month that Gen. George Washington had started angling to get him appointed to command the whole Continental artillery.

That October had started with news of “Doctr. [Benjamin] Church under an arrest for keeping up a correspd. with the enemy in Boston,” as Boardman wrote. Men were deserting both to and from the enemy. So it was easy to be suspicious about someone with such strong ties to the royal government as Knox had. Even if such rumors were quickly deemed to be unfounded.