getting under her and in blowing her to pieces with his torpedo. The
torpedo in a highly developed form is now one of the most important
weapons in naval tactics.

In spite of the success of Fulton's experiments, his plans were not
adopted, either by Napoleon or by the British Admiralty, to whom Fulton
afterwards offered them. The great European wars having been brought to
an end by the downfall of Napoleon, the torpedo for a while sunk into
oblivion, although during the Crimean war the Russians used submarine
mines to protect their harbours. But during the American Civil War the
torpedo was again brought to the front, and the Southerners, or
"Confederates," used vast numbers of them, to the great damage of the
Northerners, or "Federals."

At first these torpedoes proved so harmless--so few exploding out of the
hundreds laid--that the Federal officers paid little attention to them.
But as the war went on, better methods of exploding them were devised,
and vessel after vessel was sunk in a few minutes, often with great loss
of life. Some of these were sunk by submarine mines fired by
electricity, others by floating torpedoes drifted down by the current or
tide; others again by torpedoes at the end of a long spar carried in a
small launch. In one instance, a submarine boat was employed, propelled
by a screw worked by eight men. Instead of running just beneath the
surface, however, her crew insisted on keeping the hatchway just above
water, and open, with the result that the wave caused by the explosion
of her torpedo rushed in and swamped her, so that she went to the bottom
with all on board.

Another night a large frigate was blockading Charleston harbour when a
_David_--as these torpedo boats were then called--was seen approaching.
The frigate, which carried a crew of 700 men, slipped her cable and made
off at full speed, although she was only being attacked by a small
launch, manned by four men, armed with a few pounds of powder extended
on a spar in front of her! In spite of a fierce fusillade aimed at her,
not a shot struck the _David_, which returned in safety to Charleston.

The Russo-Turkish War afforded several additional examples of the same
kind, which, as already mentioned, had not a little to do with the
alteration in naval design and tactics that took place during the last
two decades of the nineteenth century.

Torpedoes were of three kinds: the first were really submarine mines,
and were place