Page:Brief Sketch of Work of Matthew Fontaine Maury 1861-65.pdf/30

 to Army and Navy—adopting generally the Confederates as the best.

In August, 1864, the Federal fleet advanced upon Fort Morgan at the entrance of Mobile Bay, the line being led by "Tecumseh," the newest and most powerful enemy's ironclads, which was completely destroyed by a torpedo planted under the direction of General Raines, Chief of the Confederate Army Torpedo Bureau. She sunk in a moment, carrying down with her her entire crew of one hundred and forty souls, save about fifteen or twenty who escaped by swimming to Fort Morgan.

This was the greatest achievement of a single torpedo during our war and served to stimulate the Confederate authorities to renewed vigour. Thenceforward, the Bay of Mobile and adjacent waters became the chief scenes of torpedo operation. Genl. Maury stated that he had caused to be placed 180 in her channel and waterways, that they held the powerful fleet of Admiral Farragut for ten months at bay, and destroyed fully a dozen United States vessels, of which six were gunboats and four were monitors. Regular torpedo stations were established in Richmond, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah and Mobile, at which sixty naval officers and men were on duty, preparing these new engines of war. The channel-ways, rivers and harbours were protected by them from Virginia to Texas. Sometimes a hundred were taken out of James River in a single day, and when the Southern seaports fell hundreds of torpedoes were found floating in their waters ready to explode upon the first contact. At first the older Confederate officers who regarded them with disfavour, as Captain Wm. H. Parker says he did, were now "torpedo mad." "Commodore Tucker and I," he said, "had torpedo on the brain," and the destruction