The Battle of Stonington by James De Kay

Author:James De Kay [ De Kay, James Tertius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612512570
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Two of Fulton’s suggestions for employing his torpedoes. Fig. 1 shows a torpedo attached to a harpoon. In Fig. 2, two floating torpedoes (EE) attached by a line (CD) are swept by the tide toward an anchored ship. When the ship’s cable (B) catches the line, the torpedoes are forced against the hull on either side and made to explode either by contact or by a clockwork device. This was the method used to blow up the Dorothea and was similar to the method employed by Jeremiah Holmes in his attack on the British squadron. (Fulton’s Torpedo Warfare and Submarine Explosions)

On the night when they finally decided they were ready, no 74s were anchored off the Thames, so they decided to attack a frigate. The one they targeted—probably the Endymion—was lying off the west end of Fishers Island. From the beginning, the attack did not go well. First, they misjudged the tide and arrived too late, so by the time they were paying out the torpedo from the boat, the tide had turned to flood. Then they realized that the line attached to the floating bomb was too stiff to work freely, and it fouled on something hidden on the sea bottom. When they tried to free it, they succeeded only in pulling the torpedo underwater, where it too got caught. Raising it without danger of explosion was impossible. The men worked frantically throughout most of the night to try to free the torpedo; but after several hours of fruitless effort they finally gave up, cut the line, and abandoned the weapon, rowing disconsolately back to shore.

The next day the crew sailed the boat back to New York for a second torpedo, and within a week Ryker supplied them with not only a second bomb but a third one as well. Once more they returned as quickly as possible to New London.

By now a 74 had once again taken up station there. Holmes thought the ship was the Ramillies, but in fact Hardy had been called away, and the command of the blockade was now in the hands of Captain Capel of the La Hogue, 74. That night of 24 March the Americans targeted his ship.

Holmes’ barge passed silently past Eastern Point and around the dark shape of the La Hogue, coming up to the northwest of her and dropping anchor. This time the men caught the tide, and the rope was properly flexible. After paying out the torpedo for a considerable distance, and feeling the gratifying pull of the tide directing it toward the ship-of-the-line, Holmes ordered the anchor raised. The oarsmen attempted to row eastward toward the land, so as to swing the torpedo against the ship. The wind was fresh from the northwest, and the tide was strong in ebb. These conditions so deceived the men in the boat that in passing across in the darkness they unwittingly drifted down so near the targeted ship’s bows that they could clearly make out the sails furled on her jibboom.

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