SUBMARINES IN THE CIVIL WAR
The most powerful battleship in the world, half a century ago, was the
U.S.S. _New Ironsides_. She was a wooden-hulled, ship-rigged steamer
of 3486 tons displacement--about one tenth the size of a modern
superdreadnought--her sides plated with four inches of iron armor, and
carrying twenty heavy guns. On the night of October 5, 1863, the _New
Ironsides_ was on blockade duty off Charleston Harbor, when Ensign
Howard, the officer of the deck, saw something approaching that looked
like a floating plank. He hailed it, and was answered by a rifle ball
that stretched him, mortally wounded, on the deck. An instant later
came the flash and roar of a tremendous explosion, a column of water
shot high into the air alongside, and the _New Ironsides_ was shaken
violently from stem to stern.
The Confederate submarine _David_ had crept up and driven a
spar-torpedo against Goliath’s armor.
But except for a few splintered timbers, a flooded engine-room, and a
marine’s broken leg, no damage had been done. As the Confederate craft
was too close and too low in the water for the broadside guns to bear,
the crew of the ironclad lined the rail and poured volley after volley
of musketry into their dimly seen adversary till she drifted away into
the night. Her crew of seven men had dived overboard at the moment of
impact, and were all picked up by different vessels of the blockading
fleet, except the engineer and one other, who swam back to the _David_,
started her engine again, and brought her safely home to Charleston.
[Illustration: Views of a Confederate _David_.
From Scharf’s History of the Confederate States Navy.]
The _David_ was a cigar-shaped steam launch, fifty-four feet long
and six feet broad at the thickest point. Projecting from her bow
was a fifteen-foot spar, with a torpedo charged with sixty pounds of
gunpowder at the end of it. This was exploded by the heat given off by
certain chemicals, after they were shaken up together by the impact
of the torpedo against the enemy’s ship. The _David_, steaming at her
full speed of seven knots an hour, struck squarely against the _New
Ironsides_ at the water-line and rebounded to a distance of seven or
eight feet before this clumsy detonator could do its work. When the
explosion came, the intervening body of water prevented it from doing
any great damage.
The _David_ was not a true submarine but a surface torpedo boat, that
could be submerged till only the funnel and a small pilot-house were
exposed. A number of other _Davids_ were built and operated by the
Confederate States navy, but the first of them was the only one to
accomplish anything.
[Illustration: C. S. S. _Hundley_.
The Only Submarine to sink a Hostile Warship before the Outbreak of the
Present War.]
The one real submarine possessed by the Confederacy was not a _David_,
though she is usually so called. This was the C.S.S. _Hundley_, a
hand-power “diving-boat” not unlike Fulton’s _Nautilus_, but very
much clumsier and harder to manage. She had ballast tanks and a pair
of diving-planes for steering her up and down, and she was designed
to attack an enemy’s ship by swimming under it, towing a torpedo that
would explode on striking her opponent’s keel.
The _Hundley_ was built at Mobile, Alabama, by the firm of Hundley and
McKlintock, named for the senior partner, and brought to Charleston on
a flatcar. There she was manned by a crew of nine volunteers, eight of
whom sat in a row and turned the cranks on the propellor-shaft, while
the ninth man steered. There was no conning-tower and the forward
hatchway had to be left open for the helmsman to look out of while
running on the surface. On the _Hundley’s_ first practice cruise,
the wash from the paddle-wheels of a passing steamer poured suddenly
down the open hatchway. Only the steersman and commanding officer,
Lieutenant Payne, had time to save himself before the submarine sank,
drowning the rest of her crew.
The boat was raised and Payne took her out with a new crew. This time
a sudden squall sank her before they could close the hatches, and
Payne escaped, with two of his men. He tried a third time, only to be
capsized off Fort Sumter, with the loss of four of his crew. On the
fourth trip, the hatches were closed, the tanks filled, and an attempt
was made to navigate beneath the surface. But the _Hundley_ dived too
suddenly, stuck her nose deep into the muddy bottom, and stayed there
till her entire crew were suffocated. On the fifth trial she became
entangled in the cable of an anchored vessel, with the same result.
By this time the submarine’s victims numbered thirty-five, and the
Confederates had nicknamed her the “Peripatetic Coffin.” But at the
sixth call for volunteers, they still came forward. It was decided to
risk no more lives on practice trips but to attack at once. In spite of
the protests of Mr. Hundley, the designer of the craft, her latest and
last commander, Lieutenant Dixon of the 21st South Carolina Infantry,
was ordered by General Beauregard to use the vessel as a surface
torpedo-boat, submerged to the hatch-coaming and with the hatches
open. A spar-torpedo, to be exploded by pulling a trigger with a light
line running back into the boat, was mounted on the bow. Thus armed,
and manned by Lieutenant Dixon, Captain Carlson, and five enlisted
men of their regiment, the little _Hundley_ put out over Charleston
bar on the night of February 17, 1864, to attack some vessel of the
blockading fleet. This proved to be the U.S.S. _Housatonic_, a fine new
thirteen-gun corvette of 1264 tons. What followed is best described by
Admiral David Porter in his “Naval History of the Civil War.”
“At about 8.45 P.M., the officer of the deck on board the unfortunate
vessel discovered something about 100 yards away, moving along the
water. It came directly towards the ship, and within two minutes of
the time it was first sighted was alongside. The cable was slipped,
the engines backed, and all hands called to quarters. But it was too
late--the torpedo struck the _Housatonic_ just forward of the mainmast,
on the starboard side, on a line with the magazine. The man who steered
her (the _Hundley_) knew where the vital spots of the steamer were and
he did his work well. When the explosion took place the ship trembled
all over as if by the shock of an earthquake, and seemed to be lifted
out of the water, and then sank stern-foremost, heeling to port as she
went down.”
The _Hundley_ was not seen after the explosion, and it was supposed
that she had backed away and escaped. But when peace came, and
Charleston Harbor was being cleared of the wrecks with which war had
clogged it, the divers sent down to inspect the _Housatonic_ found the
_Hundley_ lying beside her. Sucked in by the rush of the water through
the hole her torpedo had made, she had been caught and dragged down by
her own victim. All the _Hundley’s_ crew were found dead within her. So
perished the first and last submarine to sink a hostile warship, before
the outbreak of the present war. A smaller underwater boat of the same
type was privately built at New Orleans at the beginning of the war,
lost on her trial trip, and not brought up again till after peace was
declared.
The North had a hand-power submarine, that was built at the Georgetown
Navy Yard in 1862. It was designed by a Frenchman, whose name is now
forgotten but who might have been a contemporary of Cornelius Van
Drebel. Except that its hull was of steel instead of wood and greased
leather, this first submarine of the United States navy was no better
than an eel-boat of the seventeenth century. It was propelled by eight
pairs of oars, with hinged blades that folded up like a book on the
return stroke. The boat was thirty-five feet long and six in diameter,
and was rowed by sixteen men. It was submerged by flooding ballast
tanks. There was an oxygen tank and an apparatus for purifying the
used air by blowing it over lime. A spar-torpedo was to be run out on
rollers in the bow.
Ten thousand dollars was paid to the inventor of this medieval
leftover, and he prudently left the country before he could be called
on to operate it, though he had been promised a reward of five thousand
dollars for every Confederate ironclad he succeeded in blowing up. Like
the first _Monitor_, this nameless submarine was lost in a storm off
Cape Hatteras, while being towed by a steamer.
After the loss of the _Housatonic_, the North built two
semi-submersible steam torpedo-boats on the same idea as the _David_,
but larger and faster. Both were armed with spar-torpedoes and fitted
with ballast tanks to sink them very low in the water when they
attacked. The smaller of the two, the _Stromboli_, could be submerged
till only her pilot-house, smoke-stack, and one ventilator showed above
the water. The other boat was called the _Spuyten Duyvil_. She could
be sunk till her deck, which was covered with three inches of iron
armor, was level with the water, but she bristled with masts, funnels,
conning-towers, ventilators, and other excrescences that sprouted out
of her hull at the most unexpected places. Neither of these craft was
ever used in action.