Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/278

260 feet high, would be observed gliding toward the stern; at this point it would pause for a second or two, as though suspended in air; it would then give a mighty lurch, fall head first into the water, sending up a great splash, and then sink beneath the waves. By the time the disturbance was over the ship would have advanced a considerable distance; then, in a few seconds, another black object would roll toward the stern, make a similar plunge, and disappear. You might have followed the same ship for two or three hours, watching these mines fall overboard at intervals of about fifteen seconds. There were four planters, each of which could and did on several trips lay about 860 mines in three hours and thirty-five minutes, in a single line about forty-four miles long. These were the Canandaigua, the Canonicus, the Housatonic, and the Roanoke. Occasionally the monotony of this procedure would be enlivened by a terrible explosion, a great geyser of water rising where a mine had only recently disappeared; this meant that the "egg," as the sailors called it, had gone off spontaneously, without the assistance of any external contact; such accidents were part of the game, the records showing that about 4 per cent, of all the mines indulged in such initial premature explosions. For the most part, however, nothing happened to disturb the steady mechanical routine. The mines went over with such regularity that, to an observer, the whole proceeding seemed hardly the work of human agency. Yet every detail had been arranged months before in the United States; the mines fell into the sea in accordance with a time-table which had been prepared in Newport before the vessels started for Scotland. Every man on the ship had a particular duty to perform and each performed it in the way in which he had been schooled under the direction of Captain Belknap.

The spherical mine case, which contains the explosive charge and the mechanism for igniting it, is only a part of the contrivance. While at rest on board the ship this case stands upon a box-like affair, about two feet square, known as the anchor; this anchor sinks to the bottom after launching and it contains an elaborate arrangement for maintaining the mine at any desired depth beneath the surface. The bottom of the "anchor" has four wheels, on which it runs along the little railroad track on the launching deck to the jumping-off place at the stern. All along these railroad