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.
CHAPTER V
THE WHITEHEAD TORPEDO
How best to float a charge of explosives against the hull of an enemy’s ship and there explode it is the great problem of torpedo warfare. The spar-torpedo, that did such effective work in the Civil War, was little more than a can of gunpowder on the end of a stick. This stick or spar was mounted usually on the bow of a steam-launch, either partially submerged, like the David, or boldly running on the surface over log-booms and through a hail of bullets and grapeshot, as when Lieutenant Cushing sank the Confederate ironclad Albemarle. Once alongside, the spar-torpedo was run out to its full length, raised, depressed, and finally fired by pulling different ropes. So small was the chance of success and so great the danger to the launch’s crew that naval officers and inventors all the world over sought constantly for some surer and safer way.
Early in the sixties, an Austrian artillery officer attached to the coast defenses conceived the idea of sending out the launch without a crew. He made some drawings of a big toy boat, to be driven by steam or hot air or even by clockwork, and steered from the shore by long ropes. As it would have no crew, this boat could carry the explosives in its hull, and the spars which were to project from it in all directions would carry no torpedoes themselves but would serve to explode the boat’s cargo of guncotton by firing a pistol into it, as soon as one of the spars came into contact with the target. Before he could carry out his ideas any further, this officer died and his plans were turned over to Captain Lupuis of the Austrian navy. Lupuis experimented diligently with surface torpedoes till 1864, but found that he would have to discover some better steering-device than ropes from the shore and some other motive-power than steam or clockwork. So he consulted with Mr. Whitehead, the English manager of a firm of engine manufacturers at the seaport of Fiume.
Whitehead gave the torpedo a fish-shaped hull, so that it could run beneath instead of on the surface. For motive-power he used compressed air, which proved much superior to either steam or clockwork. And by improving its rudders, he enabled the little craft to keep its course without the aid of guide-ropes from the shore. The chief defect of the first Whitehead torpedoes, which were finished and tried in 1866, was that they kept bobbing to the surface, or else they would dive too deep and pass harmlessly under the target. To correct this defect, Whitehead invented by 1868 what he called the “balance chamber.” Then, as now, each torpedo was divided into a number of separate compartments or chambers, and in one of these the inventor placed a most ingenious device for keeping the torpedo at a uniform depth. The contents of the balance-chamber was Whitehead’s great secret, and it was not revealed to the public for twenty years.