Operations at New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston
1862-64
The sky was cloudless at Charleston Harbor on the night of February 17, 1864, and a full moon shone brightly, outlining in sharp and ominous detail the vessels of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron—the monitors and the ironclads which were stationed inside Charleston bar, and the wooden ships of war that lay at anchor in a wide, irregular crescent at the mouth of the harbor.
The U.S.S. Housatonic, a new, wooden, 200-foot, 1,200-ton, 13-gun steam sloop of war, was anchored for the night at her station 2\ miles off the bar, near the northwest end of the crescent. The watch had been set, and each of the several lookouts was at his post. The lookouts could see the other vessels of the squadron—the Canandaigua, for instance, which was 1 1/2 miles away—with perfect clarity. But, because of a low mist on the water, they could not have perceived a rowboat at a distance of more than 150 yards.
On board the Housatonic, at about 8:45 p.m., the Officer of the Deck, while peering over the starboard rail, saw an object slowly moving towards the ship. He watched the thing for a few moments, then he sounded the alarm. The crew were called to quarters, the engine was started, and an attempt was made to sink the object by gunfire, but to no avail.
In a few minutes a tremendous explosion rocked the Housatonic, and soon the first warship ever to be torpedoed by a submarine had sunk to the bottom.
The submarine of the Civil War period was crude in the extreme, and the torpedo was a far cry from the massive, powerful, gyroscopically balanced, precise instrument of death that it is today. But let us go to New Orleans in the early days of the war, in the spring of 1862, before the full strength of the Union Army had been exerted; before the pinch of the blockade had been felt in the Confederacy; at a time when the South was still flushed with the news of her victory at Manassas, and was contemptuous of the power of the North. Chattanooga was a battlefield only in the future, and the fate of a nation had yet to be decided.
The West Gulf Blockading Squadron, under the command of Rear Admiral David G. Farragut, passed the last of the forts at New Orleans on April 28, 1862. Shortly before the city surrendered, Captain James McClintock, Captain Horace L. Hunley, of the Confederate States Army, and Mr. Baxter Watson had completed a “submarine torpedo boat,” as they called it, in the New Basin at New Orleans.
The craft was designed by McClintock, and was made of old boiler plates. In her appearance she was but vaguely suggestive of a modern submersible; she was 30 feet in length; the middle section of the hull was cylindrical and 10 feet long, while each of the ends was conical, and of the same length. She was driven by a manually operated screw propeller, and was equipped, like the most modern submarines, with two “fins,” “pectoral vanes” or diving rudders.
She had a short conning tower with small, circular glass ports in its sides and a manhole in the top. However, she had no compressed air supply, no ballast tanks, and her sole safety device consisted of an iron keel that could be dropped, when necessary, thus sending her buoying to the surface. Two men formed her crew: a pilot, and a man to operate the propeller crank.
The torpedo, which was detonated by a clockwork mechanism, was attached to the top of the hull behind the conning tower. It was McClintock’s intention that the boat should be submerged in a porpoise-like dive, and maneuvered under the keel of a warship, so that the torpedo could be screwed to the ship’s bottom (by means of a gimlet-tipped crank which was operated from within the conning tower) and left there to explode after the submarine had gone.
Although the submarine was quite difficult to control, she made several successful short dives in Lake Ponchartrain, and with her McClintock destroyed, experimentally, a small schooner and several log rafts. Unfortunately, before she could be used for the purpose for which she was made—to torpedo one of the Federal gunboats, either the Calhoun or the New London, both of which were then on Lake Ponchartrain—the final attack upon New Orleans by Farragut’s fleet became imminent. To save the submarine from capture, McClintock scuttled her in the Bayou St. John, a canal that ran from the New Basin to Lake Ponchartrain.
Nevertheless, when the city fell, the submarine was discovered, and two engineer officers of the U.S.S. Pensacola, Alfred Colin and G. W. Baird, examined her and forwarded drawings of her to the Navy Department at Washington. It does not appear that the Department made much use of the information.
Rear Admiral Baird met McClintock after the war, and it is interesting to note that he told Baird he thought the design of his submarine was completely original. He knew nothing, he said, of the experiments of Bushnell and Fulton. In fact, he was surprised to hear of them, believing as he did that his submarine was the first to be contemplated, much less constructed.
In July, 1878, the hulk of the submarine was set up on the bank of the Bayou St. John, near the old Spanish fort. There, half overgrown with weeds and flowers it could be seen until 1901, when it was transferred to Fort Beauregard and thence, in 1909, to Camp Nicholls, Soldiers’ Home of Louisiana, in New Orleans, where it still remains.
McClintock, Hunley, and Watson escaped from New Orleans before the city was captured, and went to Mobile. There they reported, with their plans, to Major General Dabney H. Maury of the Confederate States Army, who authorized the construction of another submarine.
This one was built in the machine shops of Parks and Lyons, in Mobile, with the assistance of Lieutenant J. A. Alexander, an engineer officer of the 21st Alabama Regiment. Like the first one she was fabricated of iron boiler plates. Twenty-five feet long, she was oblong in cross section, being 5 feet in breadth and 6 feet in depth. She had wedge-shaped instead of conical ends.
She made several practice dives in the Mobile River, but while she was being towed out into Mobile Bay to attempt her first attack upon the Federal Fleet, a squall blew up, and she foundered off Fort Morgan. Fortunately, no lives were lost.
The Confederate government refused to supply funds for the construction of another “fish torpedo boat,” and as a result McClintock and Watson resigned from the enterprise.
Despite this setback, Hunley personally met the expense of building a third vessel. This was the submarine that torpedoed the Housatonic. Her manufacture was supervised by Lieutenant Alexander; since he had to make the best of the materials at hand, he utilized an old boiler in her construction. She had an overall length of 30 feet; the center section was 4 feet in beam and 5 in depth, and tapered sharply at each end to form a wedge-shaped bow and stern. The keel was perfectly straight, and the line of the deck was broken only by two conning towers and a ventilating device, so that her profile was starkly rectangular.
The keel consisted of several flat, iron castings which could be released one by one from within the submarine, until she had acquired sufficient buoyancy to rise to the surface, or at least that was the theory.
The conning towers were located fore and aft at the points where the center section tapered to form the bow and stern. Each tower was elliptical in shape, 16 inches in length, 12 inches in breadth, and about 8 inches in height. These towers had watertight, hinged hatch covers which were bolted from the inside. Small circular ports of thick glass were fitted into the sides and ends of the hatch combings to allow observations to be made.
The ventilating device previously mentioned was a complicated arrangement of pipes which was designed to conduct fresh air into the submarine while she was submerged. But this contrivance was far from practical. The crew breathed and rebreathed the air contained in the hull, which was not sufficient to allow the boat to remain under the surface for more than 2| hours. To replenish the air supply it was necessary for the pilot to bring the submarine to the surface and open the hatch covers. "On several occasions,” to quote J. A. Alexander, “we came to the surface for air, opened the cover, and heard the men in the Federal picket boats talking and singing.”
Bulkheads were riveted across the hull to form ballast tanks at the bow and at the stern. (These bulkheads were left open at the top, and this unrecognized defect was to be the direct cause of a later disaster.) The water entered each of these tanks through a sea cock, and it was ejected by means of a force pump.
A shaft passed through stuffing boxes on each side of the submarine, just forward of the center of balance, that is, a few feet abaft of the forward conning tower. On each end of this shaft there was a hydroplane, or diving rudder, which was 5 feet long and 8 inches wide. The rudder which controlled the course of the boat on a horizontal plane was operated by an arrangement of levers and rods that ran from the stern to the forward conning tower.
To protect it from fouling, the propeller, which was driven by manual power, revolved in a wrought iron ring, or band. Eight cranks were placed on the propeller shaft at different angles; the shaft itself was supported by brackets that extended from the starboard side of the submarine, while the men sat on the port side to turn the cranks. These cranks took up so much room that it was difficult for the members of the crew to pass from fore to aft.
A mercury depth gauge and an adjusted compass comprised the simple navigating instruments. Candlelight was the sole illumination.
Although the periscope is nothing more than an adaption of the camera obscura, the principle of which was known to Aristotle, and in spite of the fact that the plans of a semi-submarine designed in 1859 by Telar van Elven of Amsterdam embodied a periscope, this craft of Hunley’s, the first successful military submarine, was not equipped with one. It was necessary for the pilot to bring the submarine to the surface and make his observations through the lights in the combing.
The operation of the submarine was very simple. The captain stood with his head in the forward conning tower, where the rudder controls, the sea cock, and the force pump were under his hand. The officer at the stern conning tower had charge of mooring and casting off. At the command of the captain, he cast off, fastened down his hatch cover, and lit a candle. The ballast tanks were then flooded, according to Alexander,
until the top of the shell was about three inches under water. This could be seen by the water level showing through the glasses in the hatch combings. The sea cocks were then closed and the boat put under way. The Captain would then lower the lever and depress the forward end of the fins very slightly, noting on the mercury gauge the depth of the boat beneath the surface; then bring the fins to a level; the boat would remain and travel at that depth. To rise to a higher level in the water he would raise the lever and elevate the forward end of the fins, and the boat would rise to its former level in the water.
When the crew were tired, the submarine was brought to the surface by ejecting some of the water from the ballast tanks. Since the vitiated air in the submarine continually produced a feeling of great fatigue in the crew, frequent use was probably made of this method of surfacing the craft.
The original clockwork torpedo was superseded by another type, “a copper cylinder holding a charge of 90 pounds of explosive, with percussion or friction primer mechanism, set off by flaring triggers,” which was towed at the end of a 200-foot line. Theoretically, upon sighting a ship, the submarine was to approach, dive under her, and draw the torpedo against the ship’s side, where it would explode upon contact.
Now, experimentally, this mode of employing the torpedo was quite successful. In the calm waters of the Mobile River, several old flatboats, which were used as targets, were easily torpedoed and sunk. The choppy waters of Mobile Bay, however, presented a problem. The submarine could be navigated without difficulty, but the torpedo line did not remain taut, and the torpedo continually drifted towards the submarine, thereby endangering her.
Hunley and Alexander had raised a crew, drilled them in the operation of the submarine, and made plans for a night raid. No sooner was everything prepared than General Maury decided that Charleston offered a much better field for operations against the Federal blockading fleet than Mobile Bay. He therefore detached the submarine from his command, and sent her by rail to General Beauregard, who was then in charge of the defense of Charleston.
The submarine arrived in Charleston some time in September, 1862, and was moored at Fort Johnson, on James Island, opposite Fort Sumter. Lieutenant John Payne, of the Confederate Navy, who was then on duty on board the ironclad C.S.S. Chicora, volunteered, with eight others of the Navy, to operate her. On the first dark night, the crew of nine men, all of whom were without experience in handling the submarine, attempted to torpedo the newly commissioned, 3,500-ton, 18-gun U. S. frigate New Ironsides.
The New Ironsides was 230 feet in length with a 60-foot beam. Her sides were of solid oak, 18 inches in thickness, and were armored with 4.5 inches of wrought iron plating. She delivered her fire with more rapidity and greater accuracy than any other vessel in the fleet. During one engagement, for instance, she fired 840 shots, the total weight of the projectiles being 40 tons. To add insult to injury, the New Ironsides was so well armored that the Confederates found it impossible even to damage her by gunfire. Her surgeon, Marius Duval, considered his job to be a sinecure, and when the ship went into action, he spent most of his time in the lee of the pilothouse, watching the progress of the battle. The nearest approach to a fatal accident on the ship occurred when a roundshot splintered a gunner’s wooden rammer, and several members of the gun crew were wounded by the flying splinters.
In General Beauregard’s opinion, she was the most powerful ship off Charleston, and was more to be dreaded than any monitor.
The New Ironsides may have seemed impregnable to gunfire, but she appeared to be quite vulnerable to a properly managed torpedo. Payne and his crew seemed eager to be the ones to accomplish the feat of destroying her.
But courage and confidence do not form an antidote for inexperience. As the submarine left the wharf at Fort Johnson, at the very start of her first raid, the bow wave of a passing steamer swamped her. Payne, who was standing with his head projecting out of the forward conning tower hatchway, was the only one to escape.
Not at all daunted, Payne had the boat raised, and he obtained another crew. While on the way to attempt a second attack upon the New Ironsides, the submarine capsized off Fort Sumter, and of her crew of nine men, only Payne and one other escaped. After this we hear no more of Lieutenant Payne in connection with submarines. He served with distinction on board the gunboat Gaines, and on other ships of the Confederate Navy, but never again did he set foot in a submarine. Evidently, he’d had enough.
The boat was raised again, and General Beauregard turned her over to a volunteer crew from Mobile, “Messrs. Brockbank, Patterson, McHugh, Marshall, White, and another,” and Lieutenant J. A. Alexander, under the command of Captain Hunley. At the last moment, before the crew had left Mobile, Thomas Parks, of Parks and Lyons, the owners of the machine shop in which the submarine had be constructed, prevailed upon Alexander to give up his place to him.
Hunley and Parks had helped to make the boat. Nearly all of the men had made descents in Mobile Bay, and were fully qualified to operate her. Despite all that, they fared no better than the two previous crews. After several practice dives in Charleston Harbor, they must have grown careless and overconfident for, on October 15, 1863, they tried to dive under the Confederate ship Indian Chief, which was anchored in the Cooper River. During the dive, one of the ballast tanks was allowed to overflow, and the submarine was flooded. It sank, and remained on the bottom for a week.
The Journal of Operations, kept at Confederate Headquarters, Charleston, South Carolina, carries the following entry under the date of October 18, 1863:
Mr. Smith, provided with submarine armor, found the sunken submarine today in 9 fathoms of water. The engineer department was instructed to furnish Mr. Smith all facilities in the way of ropes, chains, etc., that an attempt might be made to recover the boat.
General Beauregard wrote:
All on board perished from asphyxiation. When the boat was discovered and opened the spectacle was indescribably ghastly; the unfortunate men were contorted in all kinds of horrible attitudes; some clutching candles, evidently endeavoring to force open the manholes; others lying on the bottom tightly grappled together, and the blackened faces of all presented the expression of their despair and agony.
Lieutenant George E. Dixon, like J. A. Alexander, was a mechanical engineer, and a member of the 21st Alabama Regiment. He had taken a great interest in the submarine while it was under construction in Mobile and during its operations in the Mobile River. Had there been a vacancy, he would have been one of the Hunley and Parks crew.
As soon as the news reached Mobile that the submarine had sunk again, he and Alexander discussed the matter together, and decided to request permission to operate her.
It was not without some misgivings that General Beauregard accepted their offer and allowed them to recruit a crew of seven volunteers. They could get only six men: “Arnold Becker, E. Simpkins, James A. Wicks, F. Collins, and — Ridgeway, all of the Navy, and Corporal J. F. Carlson of Capt. Wagener’s Company of Artillery.”
On the advice of Francis D. Lee, a Captain on General Beauregard’s staff, the towed torpedo was discarded in favor of a Lee spar torpedo. This device, the invention of Captain Lee, consisted of a copper cylinder which contained 90 pounds of rifle powder, and which was studded with 7 extremely sensitive “automatic fuses.” This cylinder (the torpedo) was attached, by means of a socket, to a tapering yellow pine boom 22 feet long, which projected from the bow of the submarine. In order to be effective, the torpedo had to be run head-on into the side of the enemy ship. The operation was hazardous, to say the least.
When the C.S.S. Hunley, as the submarine was now known, had been refitted, she was moored off Battery Marshall on Sullivan’s Island, opposite Fort Sumter. Dixon and his crew were billeted at Mount Pleasant, several miles away.
On October 5, 1863, the ironclad New Ironsides was torpedoed by the David, a razeed steam launch equipped with a Lee spar torpedo, and commanded by Lieutenant W. T. Glassel, who had been a shipmate of Payne on board the C.S.S. Chicora. The splendid construction of the New Ironsides saved her from being more than slightly damaged.
In fact, the nerves of the Federal commanders and the officials of the Navy Department were far more shaken than the timbers of the New Ironsides. As a result of this incident, the following protective measures were taken on board every ship then stationed within the bar: The number of lookouts was doubled; anchor chains were made ready for slipping; heavy rope nettings were suspended from booms rigged out over the sides; small boats rowed guard on dark nights, while a powerful calcium light, mounted on top of the pilot-house, revolved round the horizon, and high steam was carried at all times so that the ship could get under way instantly.
Faced with these extraordinary precautions, Dixon and Alexander were forced to abandon whatever designs they may have had on the near-by New Ironsides and the other ironclads, and to transfer their attentions to the less accessible, but not so well-protected ships in the Outer Harbor.
Dixon was determined that no accident should overtake him. He drilled the crew constantly, and took the Hunley into the harbor on an average of four nights a week. The daily routine, during the months of November and December, 1863, January, and the early part of February, 1864, was more or less as follows: Dixon, Alexander, and the crew usually left their quarters at Mount Pleasant at about 1:00 p.m. and walked the 7 miles along the beach to Battery Marshall. “This exposed us to fire,” Alexander wrote, “but it was the best walking.” Then they took the Hunley out into the Back Bay for 2 hours of practice. Upon their return, Dixon and Alexander would stretch out on the beach with the compass between them and determine the bearing of the nearest Federal vessel as she took her position for the night.
In the late afternoon, the torpedo (which was kept under guard in a shed at Battery Marshall) was attached to the boom. After dark, if conditions were favorable, the Hunley went out. Because of her low speed, 4 knots at the most, it was necessary for her to go out with the ebb and return with the flood tide. Dixon steered for the ship that he had selected, and proceeded towards her until an adverse wind blew up, or the men became too exhausted to go any farther, or dawn broke, when Dixon was forced to turn back without having accomplished anything.
At Battery Marshall, the Hunley was tied up at the wharf, the torpedo was unshipped and replaced in the shed, and the crew of the submarine then walked back to Mount Pleasant for breakfast.
This happened day after day for almost 4 months, but Dixon never despaired.
He selected as his chief objective the U.S.S. Wabash, Admiral Dahlgren’s flagship, which usually anchored about 12 miles off Battery Marshall. But he was to be robbed of his quarry when, on February 5, 1864, the Wabash was withdrawn from the blockade of Charleston to assist in landing troops in Florida. On the same day, over the protests of Lieutenant Dixon, his second in command, J. A. Alexander, was ordered to Mobile by General Jordan, Beauregard’s chief of staff. He was replaced by “two men from the German Artillery.”
Again Dixon changed his plans, and several times in succession he took the bearings of the Housatonic as she anchored for the night.
The Housatonic lay in the North Channel, opposite Breach Inlet. Her presence there was a material obstacle to the passage of the Confederate blockade runners. No sooner had Dixon decided to attack her than the frustrating hand of General Jordan again obtruded.
Jordan prevailed upon General Beauregard to order that the Hunley never be submerged again, since she had been responsible for so many deaths. He directed that she be used only as a surface torpedo boat, and not as a submarine. Although most of the efficiency of the Hunley would be lost thereby, Dixon agreed.
On the evening of February 17,1864, the moon was full, and the sky was cloudless. Dixon balanced these detrimental factors against these favorable ones: there was a slight mist, no sea running, and a light wind that veered from northward to westward. He decided to take the risk of being sighted in the moonlight and go out.
Shortly after sundown, the Hunley, with her hatches open, left the wharf at Battery Marshall. She proceeded slowly down the bay, at her top speed of 4 knots, towards the Housatonic, which lay at anchor opposite Breach Inlet, 2 ½ miles off the bar and 5 ½ miles from the ruins of Fort Sumter.
The low-lying fog, a murky, obscuring curtain that hung over all the bay, clung to the surface of the water and made the Hunley invisible to the lookouts of the Housatonic at a distance of more than 100 yards, but it did not, at any time, hide the black hull and the lofty spars of the Housatonic from Lieutenant Dixon.
Aboard the Housatonic, at about 8:45 p.m., the officer of the deck, Acting Master J. K. Crosby, while looking in the direction of Breach Inlet, saw a ripple in the water at a distance of about 100 yards from the starboard side of the ship. Thinking that it might be a porpoise, he called the quartermaster, who examined it through his telescope, and said that the disturbance was caused by a school of fish.
As the Hunley came closer, it took on the appearance of a drifting balk of timber. Crosby thought that it was a floating mine, and he at once gave orders to slip the anchor chain, sound the alarm, and call the captain.
As the “Beat to Quarters” was sounded on the Housatonic, the Hunley stopped for a moment, then headed towards the stern of the ship.
By the time Captain Pickering reached the deck, the “object” was so close to the ship that any attempt to bring a gun to bear on it would have been futile. The phosphorescence produced by the motion of the Hunley through the water was clearly visible, but of the submarine itself, nothing could be seen except “two strange protuberances.” Only then did those on board the Housatonic realize that a torpedo boat was bearing down on them. Frantically, rifles, revolvers, and even the captain’s fowling-piece, loaded with buckshot, were fired at the submarine, but without apparent effect. Slowly, steadily, and silently, the Hunley continued on her course. Only a minute had elapsed since Crosby had first sighted her. Just as the Housatonic’s engines started, and the ship began to move, the torpedo struck her starboard side, just abaft of the mizzenmast. There was a tremendous explosion, timbers were blown high in the air, a cascade of water descended on the stern of the ship, and the surface of the water for many yards about was covered with debris.
Captain Pickering was thrown several feet in the air, and was severely but not seriously bruised. Lieutenant F. J. Higginson took command of the ship. Orders were immediately given to launch the boats. But the Housatonic was filling rapidly. Ensign E. C. Hazeltine was attempting to clear away on the port side when the ship lurched and his boat was swamped. Like most sailors of his time, he could not swim. His shipmates saw him drown without being able to help him. The Captain’s clerk, C. 0. Muzzey, was trapped in the cabin. Second Class Fireman John Walsh went below to get his money and was never seen again. One of the lookouts, Theodore Parker, disappeared, and the Quartermaster, John Williams, jumped overboard and was drowned.
As the ship began to sink, she heeled over to port, a dense cloud of black smoke rolled out of her funnel, and she went down with a rush, stern first.
Only two boats were launched, and these packed with survivors rowed off to the Canandaigua to get help. Luckily, the Housatonic sank in only 28 feet of water, so that the rest of the crew saved themselves by climbing into the rigging.
By 10:30 the Canandaigua had rescued those of the crew who had not got away in the boats. The Housatonic was found to be a total loss. Ten days later a court-martial was held, and the officers and crew of the Housatonic were exonerated of any dereliction of duty.
The Hunley never returned to port. She had been flooded and sunk, apparently, by the column of water that was thrown up by the explosion of the torpedo. It was forlornly hoped in Charleston that she had been carried out to sea by the ebb tide, and the belief that she would make her way back to the harbor persisted for several days.
All that is historical fact, and there is but one more such fact to relate. After the war, when the wrecks were removed from Charleston Harbor, divers found the Hunley. She was lying, seemingly unharmed, 100 feet away from what was left of the Housatonic. And there, deep in the silt, she remains to this day undisturbed, the iron coffin of her gallant crew.
The Hunley and her two predecessors were the only submarines that the Confederate Navy ever possessed. Of the three, one never saw active service, one foundered during its first raid, and the third, the Hunley, accomplished her mission only at the expense of her own destruction.
Neither the Confederate Navy Department nor the War Department had much faith in the submarine as a weapon of war. The Hunley1 s makers and her successive crews received but little help or encouragement from the Confederate Government. Consequently, the operations of the Hunley in Charleston Harbor formed part of no coherent plan for raising the Federal blockade.
Inasmuch as it was Dixon’s desire to sink one ship—any ship, merely to inflict a loss upon the enemy—the Hunley1 s attack upon the Housatonic cannot be considered as being part of a strategic maneuver; it was no more than a piece of extremely minor tactics.
The sinking of the Housatonic did not materially decrease the strength of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. However, the fact that she had been torpedoed with such apparent ease had a certain psychological effect. Her loss, coupled with rumors that other submarines and torpedo boats were under construction or already in operation, made the commanders of the Federal ships extremely cautious and circumspect. This contributed, in a measure, to delaying the fall of Charleston (which, under attendant circumstances, was almost inevitable) for a few months.
The value of the Hunley cannot be minimized; still, it would be unwise to attempt to magnify it. The Hunley was of some, but not great, value at Charleston. In the final analysis, from the tactical as well as the practical viewpoint, the sinking of the Housatonic cannot be considered as anything more than an exploit. Yet I do not wish to detract from the heroism of that exploit. I believe that Captain Dixon and his crew were fully aware that, for them, success would also mean death. Realizing that, I can only say that the torpedoing of the Housatonic was an act of great daring, of superb, blind courage.
The Housatonic had been attacked by a submarine, the David, commanded by Lieutenant Dixon, who in triumphing buried himself and his crew. This pioneer is well worth naming; for if the naval art [has] had to wait a quarter century to realize all the profit of an invention destined to once more modify tactics, none the less this example shows the brilliant result which could already be obtained with an instrument of war incomplete, and even in the rudimentary state. —Darrieus, War on the Sea.