The most powerful battleship in the world, half a century ago, was the U.S.S. New Ironsides. She was a wooden-hulled, ship-rigged steamer of 3486 tons displacement—about one tenth the size of a modern superdreadnought—her sides plated with four inches of iron armor, and carrying twenty heavy guns. On the night of October 5, 1863, the New Ironsides was on blockade duty off Charleston Harbor, when Ensign Howard, the officer of the deck, saw something approaching that looked like a floating plank. He hailed it, and was answered by a rifle ball that stretched him, mortally wounded, on the deck. An instant later came the flash and roar of a tremendous explosion, a column of water shot high into the air alongside, and the New Ironsides was shaken violently from stem to stern.

The Confederate submarine David had crept up and driven a spar-torpedo against Goliath’s armor.

But except for a few splintered timbers, a flooded engine-room, and a marine’s broken leg, no damage had been done. As the Confederate craft was too close and too low in the water for the broadside guns to bear, the crew of the ironclad lined the rail and poured volley after volley of musketry into their dimly seen adversary till she drifted away into the night. Her crew of seven men had dived overboard at the moment of impact, and were all picked up by different vessels of the blockading fleet, except the engineer and one other, who swam back to the David, started her engine again, and brought her safely home to Charleston.

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.

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.”

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.