“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.