THE SINKING OF THE HOUSATONIC.
("History of the Confederate States Navy.' By J. T. Scharf, LL.D. Pages, 760 and 761.)
"The fish torpedo boat that destroyed the Federal gunboat Housatonic off Charleston Harbor was built at Mobile, Ala., in 1863 by Hundley & McClintock and was arranged with a pair of lateral fins, by the use of which she could be submerged or brought to the surface. Her motive power was a hand propeller worked by eight men, and it was intended that she should dive under a vessel, dragging a torpedo after her, which would explode on contact with the hull or keel of the enemy, the 'fish' making off on the other side. She was provided with tanks which could be filled or emptied of water to increase or decrease her displacement, but there was no provision for a storage of air. During an experiment at Mobile she sank, and before she could be raised the whole crew were suffocated.
"In February, 1864, Beauregard accepted this boat for use at Charleston. Lieutenant Payne, C. S. N., and a crew of eight men were preparing to take her out for action one night when she swamped by the wash of a passing steamer, and all hands except Payne were drowned. Four times she sank, and four times she was raised. General Beauregard was asked by Lieut. George E. Dixon to try her against the Housatonic, a splendid new ship of war, which lay in the North Channel off Beach Inlet. Beauregard consented, but only on 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.
"It was a little before nine o'clock on the evening of February 17 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 like 'a plank moving along the water,' and before he decided to give the alarm he had lost 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 extending below her water line, and she went down in four minutes. Five on the Housatonic were killed by the shock or drowned; the remainder took refuge in the fleet.
"But the victory of the 'fish' was fatal to her crew. Whether she was swamped by the column of water thrown up by the explosion or was carried down by the suction will never be known, but the lives of all on board were sacrificed.
"After the war, when the wrecks off Charleston were removed, she was discovered lying on the bottom about one hundred feet from the Housatonic, with her bow pointing to the latter."
(Gen. James G. Holmes, of Charleston, says that Capt. James Smith, a diver, of Charleston, S. C., told him that his father and his partner had searched some five acres of the bottom around where the Housatonic was sunk trying to find the Little David in order to receive the $100,000 offered for it by P. T. Barnum. It could not be found, and they supposed the strong outgoing tides had carried it into the ocean depths.)