The Engines of Our Ingenuity 1540: The Ironclad Turtle

0:00This is the engines of our ingenuity made possible by the friends of KUHF Houston. 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 shogun Hideyoshi invaded Korea in 1592 he was armed with a new weapon. He carried muskets that had been sold to him by the Portuguese. Hideyoshi quickly overraned Seoul and he seemed to be on his way to conquering the country. Then the Korean government turned to Admiral Sun Shin Ye. Ye 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 70-foot-long turtle. It had a low-rounded roof bristling with spikes to prevent boarding.

1:03In battle, its sails came down and twenty ores powered it. Just above the ores were ports for cannon-small firearms and arrows. It had features in common with both civil war ironclads, the monitor and maramack built 250 years later. A turtle boat was equipped with a ram as well as a dragon's head on the prow. The dragons had poured out smoke to frighten the enemy and to lay down a smoke screen. So for several months Ye used his new weapon to tear into the Japanese fleet of some 200 ships. He devastated it, the war ended in a truce with Korea divided politically. Admiral Ye had stopped the invasion but he'd stirred up political jealousy by doing it. His opponents had thrown him in jail and there he sat until Hideyoshi renewed the invasion in 1597. With Ye out of the way the Japanese ravaged the Korean navy. Ye 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 31 of them and drove off the rest. He bought time to rebuild his navy.

2:13A year later the Japanese were fighting a losing war. They began a total withdrawal in an Armada of 500 ships. Then Admiral Ye struck again with his turtle with his mad visionary weapon. He sank hundreds of ships over half the fleet. The carnage far exceeded the slaughter and Drake's defeat of the Spanish Armada which had taken place around the world just ten years before. In fact the Japanese loss of 50,000 sailors was twice the combined number who'd merely sailed with the English in Spanish. The Japanese were so badly beaten that they stayed away from Korea until 194. Admiral Ye was killed in the battle and in a strange way so too was the turtle. The oddest thing about this already odd chapter in naval history is that the turtle both 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 grandfather's lifetimes.

3:21I'm John Leanhardt at the University of Houston where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. I'm John Leanhardt at the University of Houston.