“Beauregard consented, but only on the condition that she should not be used as a submarine machine, but operating on the surface of the water, and with a spar torpedo in the same manner as the David. All the thirty or more men who had met death in the ‘fish’ were volunteers, but Dixon had no difficulty in finding another volunteer crew ready to take the same risks. They were Arnold Becker, C. Simpkins, James A. Wicks, F. Collins, and —— Ridgway, all of the Confederate navy, and Capt. J. F. Carlson, of Captain Wagoner’s company of artillery.

“It was a little before nine o’clock, on the evening of February 17, 1864, when Master J. K. Crosby, officer of the deck of the Housatonic, detected the torpedo-boat, a scant hundred yards away from the ship. It looked to him, he said, ‘like a plank moving along the water,’ and before he decided to give the alarm, he had lost the seconds in which he might have saved his vessel. When he did pass the word, her cable was slipped, her engine backed and all hands called to quarters; but Dixon had closed on her and fired his torpedo on the starboard side, just forward of her mainmast. A hole was knocked in her side extending below her water line and she went down in four minutes. Five of the Housatonic’s people were killed by the shock or drowned; the remainder took refuge in the rigging, from which they were rescued by other vessels of the fleet. But the victory of the ‘fish’ was fatal to herself and her crew. Whether she was swamped by the column of water thrown up by the explosion, or was carried down by the suction of the sinking Housatonic, will never be known; but she went under never to rise again, and the lives of all on board were sacrificed.”

All the current histories of the war say that this David was found after the war on the bottom, within a hundred yards of the wreck of the Housatonic, but Johnson says the story is not confirmed. But that the men gave their lives to accomplish the work is certain.

This chapter may very well close with the story of a brave colored man, a Charleston harbor pilot, named Robert Small, at that time a slave. He was employed on the Confederate transport steamer Planter. On the morning of May 13, 1862, Small made one of the most remarkable dashes for liberty known to history. The Planter was lying at the pier, near army headquarters. The captain having gone on shore, Small, from the pilot-house, directed the lines holding her to the pier cast off, and it was done. He then headed out to sea, with the Confederate flag flying above her taffrail. As he passed Sumter and the other forts, he saluted them with three long blasts of the whistle in the usual fashion, and they dipped their flags in return. His boldness saved him from suspicion, and when beyond the line of fire he hauled down the Confederate flag, sent up a white one, and gave the ship to the Union forces.

CHAPTER XVII
CAPTURE OF FORT FISHER

IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST WORKS IN THE SOUTH, THOUGH NOT WELL LOCATED—BUTLER’S POWDER-BOAT SCHEME, AND WHAT HE EXPECTED TO ACCOMPLISH BY IT—THROWING 15,000 SHELLS AT THE FORT DISABLED EIGHT GREAT GUNS OUT OF A TOTAL OF THIRTY-EIGHT—BUTLER THOUGHT THE FORT STILL TOO STRONG AND WOULD NOT TRY—HE DID NOT EVEN MAKE INTRENCHMENTS ACCORDING TO ORDERS—GEN. A. H. TERRY, WITH 6,000 SOLDIERS AND 2,000 FROM THE SHIPS, EASILY TOOK THE FORT THREE WEEKS LATER—THE NAVY’S LAST FIGHT IN THE CIVIL WAR.

The last of the expeditions of the navy in the Civil War, and the greatest in the number and force of the ships and men, was that sent to capture Fort Fisher, guarding the entrance to Cape Fear River, on which Wilmington, North Carolina, stands. The preparations for this expedition began in the fall of 1864, and one cannot help wondering that no determined effort was made to capture the port early in the war, for, because of its situation and the peculiar nature of the entrances to the mouth of the river, it was the favorite resort of the blockade-runners, and therefore the chief source from which the Confederates drew their foreign supplies. “From it Lee’s army in front of Richmond was kept supplied, and the great Confederate commander had plainly informed Colonel Lamb, the officer in charge of Fort Fisher, that the Confederates must fall back from before Richmond, through inability to procure food, if the port was lost.”

The Entrance to Cape Fear River, Showing Fort Fisher.

From “The Navy in the Civil War.”