Japanese Imperialism? Turtle Ships to the Rescue!

My interest in history is all over the place.  One aspect of history that really interests me is the history of sailing ships.  The funny thing is that this interest puzzles me because I feel like I should find it boring when I find it quite the opposite.  One really interesting aspect of naval history is the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592.

A newly united Japan invaded with the intention of first conquering Korea, then China, and then India.  Pretty ambitious, but the Koreans had no intention of letting them get through.  The Japanese with their many guns made landfall and began to win the land war, however a korean admiral named Yi Sun Sin(left) crushed the Japanese navy again and again and again until the Japanese couldn't maintain the land war anymore.  One major factor in his crushing blows to the Japanese was a ship that he himself designed and had built while running a korean naval district called Gobuk Son, hangul(korean) for Turtle Ship.

Turtle ships are no small feat to naval historians.  These ships were fully covered with a shell (Hence Turtle), had a huge indoor staff that operated in cramped conditions like a submarine, and generally packed 60 fighting marines for boarding after ramming.  They also carried cannons but made for peculiar flagships (The Flagship would be the strongest military ship in a war fleet) as they were designed for ramming enemy ships and breaking lines.  Backed by Panokseon ships which were often armed with up to 4 times as many cannons as the inferior japanese ships, these ships wreaked glorious havoc on the Japanese invaders.  Scholars have spent much time (Particularly patriotic Korean scholars) debating whether or not Turtle Ships were the first Ironclads.  An ironclad is a naval ship that has iron plating, and represents the transition from wooden navies, to modern navies.  The Koreans may have been the first to put metal armor on ships, but the debate centers around whether it was iron plating or just iron spikes.  One advantage of the shell, iron-plated or not, was that you could not board a turtle ship, they could only board you.  in addition they had oars (like the panokseon) that allowed them to operate in shallower waters and made them more maneuverable than their japanese opponents.  All in all, my favorite ship in all of naval history, kudos Admiral Yi.