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.
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.”