Niantic New London Connecticut United States

The Niantic (or, in their own language, the Nehântick or Nehantucket) are divided by the due to intrusions of the Pequot into an eastern and a western division.

The Western Niantic are subject to the Pequot and live just east of the mouth of the Connecticut River while the Eastern Niantic have become very close allies to the Narragansett.

The division of the Niantic has become so great that the language of the eastern Niantic is classified as a dialect of Narragansett while the language of the western Niantic is classified as Pequot-Mohegan.

The Niantic are an Algonquian speaking people, speaking an Algonquian Y-dialect, similar to their neighbors the Pequot, Montaukett, Mohegan, and Narragansett.

The tribe's name "Nehantic" (Nehântick) means "of long-necked waters" believed by local residents to refer to the "long neck" or peninsula of land now known as Black Point; located in the village of Niantic, Connecticut.

The Nehântics spend their summers fishing and digging the abundant shellfish here.

They live on corn, beans, and squash, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and collecting.

David Bushnell, a Westbrook, Connecticut, native credited with creating the first submarine ever used in combat, while studying at Yale University in 1775, proving that gunpowder explodes under water; he also made the first time bomb.

He had combined his ideas in an attempt to attack British ships which were blockading New York Harbor in the summer of 1776 by boring through their hulls and implanting time bombs, but had failed every time due to a metal lining in the ships hull meant to protect against parasites in their previous station, the Caribbean.

Bushnell then created the Turtle, so called because of its look in the water.

His idea of using water as ballast for submerging and raising his submarine is still in use today, as is the screw propeller, which is first used in the Turtle.

The Turtle eventually sinks when it is being smuggled away from the British aboard a sloop, and a British frigate spots the sloop and sinks it.

Bushnell also comes up with mine barrage in 1777.

In this year, he attempts to use a floating mine to blow up the HMS Cerberus in Niantic Bay; the mine strikes a small boat near the Cerberus and detonates, destroying the vessel, but not the intended target.