LIEUTENANT CUSHING AND THE RAM

THE

"ALBEMARLE"

HE great Civil War was remarkable in many ways, but in no way more remarkable than for the extraordinary mixture of inventive mechanical genius and of resolute daring shown by the combatants. After the first year, when the contestants had settled down to real fighting, and the preliminary mob work was over, the battles were marked by their extraordinary obstinacy and heavy loss. In no European conflict since the close of the Napoleonic wars has the fighting been anything like as obstinate and as bloody as was the fighting in our own Civil War. In addition to this fierce and dogged courage, this splendid fighting capacity, the contest also brought out the skilled inventive power of engineer and mechanician in a way that few other contests have ever done.

This was especially true of the navy. The fighting under and against Farragut and his fellowadmirals revolutionized naval warfare. The Civil War marks the break between the old style and the new. Terrible encounters took place when

the terrible new engines of war were brought into action for the first time; and one of these encounters has given an example which, for heroic daring combined with cool intelligence, is unsurpassed in all time.

The Confederates showed the same skill and energy in building their great ironclad rams as the men of the Union did in building the monitors which were so often pitted against them. Both sides, but especially the Confederates, also used stationary torpedoes, and, on a number of occasions, torpedo-boats likewise. These torpedoboats were sometimes built to go under the water. One such, after repeated failures, was employed by the Confederates, with equal gallantry and success, in sinking a Union sloop of war off Charleston harbor, the torpedo-boat itself going down to the bottom with its victim, all on board being drowned. The other type of torpedo-boat was simply a swift, ordinary steam-launch, operated above water.

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It was this last type of boat which Lieutenant W. B. Cushing brought down to Albemarle Sound to use against the great Confederate ram Albemarle. The ram had been built for the pose of destroying the Union blockading forces. Steaming down river, she had twice attacked the Federal gunboats, and in each case had sunk or disabled one or more of them, with little injury to

herself. She had retired up the river again to lie at her wharf and refit. The gunboats had suffered so severely as to make it a certainty that when she came out again, thoroughly fitted to renew the attack, the wooden vessels would be destroyed; and while she was in existence, the Union vessels could not reduce the forts and coast towns. Just at this time Cushing came down from the North with his swift little torpedo-boat, an open launch, with a spar rigged out in front, the torpedo being placed at the end. The crew of the launch consisted of fifteen men, Cushing being in command. He not only guided his craft, but himself handled the torpedo by means of two small ropes, one of which put it in place, while the other exploded it. The action of the torpedo was complicated, and it could not have been operated in a time of tremendous excitement save by a man of the utmost nerve and self-command; but Cushing had both. He possessed precisely that combination of reckless courage, presence of mind, and high mental capacity necessary to the man who leads a forlorn hope under peculiarly difficult circumstances.

On the night of October 27, 1864, Cushing slipped away from the blockading fleet, and steamed up river toward the wharf, a dozen miles distant, where the great ram lay. The Confederates were watchful to guard against surprise, for they feared lest their foes should try to destroy

the ram before she got a chance to come down and attack them again in the Sound. She lay under the guns of a fort, with a regiment of troops ready at a moment's notice to turn out and defend her. Her own guns were kept always clear for action, and she was protected by a great boom of logs thrown out roundabout; of which last defense the Northerners knew nothing.

Cushing went up-stream with the utmost caution, and by good luck passed, unnoticed, a Confederate lookout below the ram.

About midnight he made his assault. Steaming quietly on through the black water, and feeling his way cautiously toward where he knew the town to be, he finally made out the loom of the Albemarle through the night, and at once drove at her. He was almost upon her before he was discovered; then the crew and the soldiers on the wharf opened fire, and, at the same moment, he was brought-to by the boom, the existence of which he had not known. The rifle balls were singing round him as he stood erect, guiding his launch, and he heard the bustle of the men aboard the ram, and the noise of the great guns as they were got ready. Backing off, he again went all steam ahead, and actually surged over the slippery logs of the boom. Meanwhile, on the Albemarle the sailors were running to quarters, and the soldiers were swarming down to aid in her defense;