Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/216

202 were, came up with cutters and launches ahead, dragging and searching for these machines and ascending at the rate of about half-a-mile a day. They caught some of the mechanical torpedoes, for there was wire enough for only a few electric ones.

Finally, after having swept over and passed with their drags one electric torpedo which had been in the water eighteen months, a fine steam corvette, the 'Commodore Jones,' was sent ahead to feel a coppice on the bank for masked batteries and rifle-pits. Davidson, concealed in a marsh on the opposite bank, with the two wires of the galvanic pile in his hand, allowed her to pass, hoping that larger game would follow. She had paused right over the torpedo and waited for the row-boats, with their sweeps and grapnels, to go ahead dragging again. Fearing that these boats might now foul his wires, he determined not to let her pass his magic line. He closed the circuit, and up she went! Engine and boilers were blown clean out of the vessel for fifty feet. The hull was shattered, and fragments of the wreck filled the air; out of a crew of 150 men only three escaped to tell the tale. It was all the work of a minute. The terror-stricken enemy stood still in his tracks, and fearing that the Confederates might come down upon him at night with their torpedo-boats, floating torpedoes, and little ironclad, he proceeded to sink his own ships in the channel, to barricade the river, and to blockade himself out of Richmond. There was, at this time, only one electrical torpedo in the whole river, the first planted having been washed away in a flood of unprecedented violence. The Confederates were quick to take advantage of this blunder with the barricade. They immediately mounted a battery above ("the Hewlett House Battery"), which commanded it and prevented its removal after the panic caused by the fate of the 'Commodore Jones' should have subsided.