Turtle ship
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Comment by bdh on May 9th, 2010 at 8:54 am
Is this really the best anyone can do? The sources are all from Korea. The Japanese and Chinese have writings on this period and were both involved in conflicts that saw the “Turtle Boat” see action.
The one time a supposed Japanese source is used:
One Japanese record of Ship-Battles in Korea includes a description of a battle as experienced by two Japanese commanders on July 9, 1592, three weeks after Yi Sun-sin’s having described the features of his turtle boats. The relevant part reads:
…About 8 o’clock in the morning the enemy fleet (Yi Sun-sin’s fleet), composed of 58 large ships and about 50 small ships, began to make an attack on ours. Three of the large ones were blind ships (turtle-boats) covered with iron.[4]
…it comes from a Korean book that has apparently found enough evidence to proclaim the boat to have an Iron-clad in the book title itself (footnote 4: Hae-Ill Bak, “A Short Note on the Iron-clad Turtle Boats of Admiral Yi Sun-sin,” Korea Journal 17:1 (January 1977)). Is this a joke?
Moreover, using “Iron-cladding” as a subject heading and then using sub-headings of “Pros and cons” is hardly a discussion on the autheticty of the proclamation (myth?). Further, the sub-headings are definately not what I would expect when there is, in even the authors own words, “No clear evidence exists that the ships had iron cladding.”
Can someone start working on this?
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