A Confederate “Keg-Torpedo.”
Percussion-caps instead of flintlocks were now used to explode contact mines. A new type of anchored torpedo, set off by an electric spark through a wire running to an operator on shore, was also a favorite with the Confederates. Because they are exploded not by contact with the ship’s hull but by the closing of the circuit by the operator when he observes an enemy’s vessel to be above one of them, these are called “observation mines.” In the Civil War, many effective mines of this sort were made out of whisky demijohns. One of these blew up the gunboat Cairo, in the Yazoo River, in the autumn of 1862. The double-ended, river gunboat Commodore Jones was blown to pieces by an observation mine, whose operator was subsequently captured and tied to the cut-water of another Federal gunboat as a warning and a hostage. During the bombardment of Fort Sumter by the United States fleet in 1863, the New Ironsides lay for an hour directly above an observation mine made of boiler iron and containing a ton of gunpowder but which failed to explode despite all the efforts of the operator. He was naturally accused of treachery and it would have gone hard with him had it not been discovered, soon after the New Ironsides ceased firing and stood out to sea, that the shore end of the wire had been severed by the wheel of an ammunition wagon.
U. S. IRON-CLAD “CAIRO” (BLOWN UP BY CONFEDERATE TORPEDO).
From Scharf’s History of the Confederate States Navy.
First Warship Destroyed by a Mine.
During the Franco-Prussian War, the powerful French fleet blockaded the German coast but did not attack the shore batteries, which were well protected by mines. After peace was declared the foreign consuls at one of the North German seaports congratulated the burgomaster on having planted and taken up so many mines without a single accident. Unknown to any one, the prudent burgomaster had unloaded them first, and they kept the French away just as well.
In the Spanish-American War, Admiral Dewey was able to enter Manila Bay and destroy the Spanish squadron there because its commander “had repeatedly asked for torpedoes (mines) from Madrid, but had received none and his attempts to make them had been failures.”[20] It was the mine-fields and not the feeble shore batteries that kept Sampson’s fleet out of Havana and Santiago. At Guantanamo, now a United States naval station, the Texas and the Marblehead each “struck her propeller against a contact mine, which failed to explode only because it was incrusted with a thick growth of barnacles. Gratitude for the vessels’ escape may fairly be divided between divine care to which the gallant and devout Captain Philip attributed it in his report, and the Spaniards’ neglect to maintain a proper inspection of these defenses. A number of these torpedoes, which were of French manufacture, and contained forty-six and a half kilograms (one hundred and two pounds) of guncotton, were afterward dragged up in the channel.”[21]
From Scharf’s History of the Confederate States Navy.