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The device was a wooden barrel torpedo carrying a hundred pounds of gunpowder.
Igniting when jarred, the torpedo ripped a huge hole on the port side aft of the bow. The explosion lifted Patapsco’s bow up in the air. Quackenbush and Sampson were thrown to the deck as a giant column of water rose into the air before slamming down on the gun turret.
“Man the boats!” Quackenbush shouted.
But it was too late. Patapsco dove beneath the waves in less than a minute and a half, down forty feet to the seabed. Sixty-two of the officers and crew went with her. Only the tip of the smokestack remained above water at low tide.
Quackenbush and Sampson barely escaped being sucked under by the doomed monitor and were rescued by a launch.
It was a fortunate rescue for the U.S. Navy.
William Sampson later became superintendent of the Naval Academy and was named commander of the Atlantic squadron during the Spanish-American War. When the Spanish fleet attempted to escape Santiago, Cuba, Sampson’s fleet, utilizing his battle plans and temporarily under the command of Winfield Scott Schley, destroyed it.
Honed by their combat experience in the Civil War, Sampson, Schley, and Dewey all died as heroes with the rank of admiral.
II
Three for the Price of One 1981, 2001
When possible, I always try to piggyback expeditions. It makes perfect sense on an obtuse level. If NUMA is searching for a certain ship, it becomes cost- and time-efficient to look for other wrecks in the same general area.
Charleston is a case in point. During the 1981 expedition to find the Confederate submarine Hunley, we used two boats, one to mow the search grid line with a magnetometer and the other to carry a gradiometer and divers to investigate any interesting targets.
You might want to scan over this paragraph, since I think it’s a good time to differentiate between a magnetometer and a gradiometer. The Schonstedt gradiometer, which we have used over the years with great success, reads the difference in magnetic intensity of a ferrous object between two sensors placed twenty inches apart and can be towed at speeds up to twenty-five knots. By comparison, a magnetometer reads differences in the earth’s magnetic field, which, because of various atmospheric conditions, may often cause bogus readings. It must be towed at relatively slow speeds.
While the survey boat went about its business hunting the sub, the dive boat drifted around with nothing to do, waiting for a call that rarely came. Having learned that time is money, I sent the dive boat prowling after other shipwrecks that sank during the siege of Charleston in the Civil War.
The waters in and around Charleston Harbor are a veritable salvage yard of old shipwrecks. From the late 1600s until the eve of the twentieth century, hundreds of ships of every size and rig have gone to the bottom within sight of the city. Nearly forty New England whalers were scuttled in a vain attempt to barricade the cha
Union ships went on the bottom too: Housatonic was torpedoed by Hunley. Weehawken sank accidentally in a squall. Patapsco was sunk by a mine. And Keokuk sank after being struck nearly a hundred times by Confederate ca
At first it appeared as if finding them would be a kindergarten hide-and-seek operation. We had a chart drawn by a Union navy officer in 1864 that showed the approximate position of ten blockade ru
Walt Schob acted as our advance man, arriving in town with his wife, Lee, to charter a boat and arrange quarters for a crew whose eventual size could have fielded three hockey teams. The house he rented was a large two-story affair on Sullivan’s Island with a long boardwalk that stretched over the dunes to the beach and ended in a comfortable little gazebo. Walt hired a lady named Doris to cook for the guys. Doris turned out excellent meals, but for a reason she would never explain, she refused to fix me grits for breakfast. She also had a strange habit of making only baloney sandwiches for our afternoon picnics at sea. No cheese, tuna, or peanut butter. Not until much later did I find out that it was at Walt’s insistence. He laid out the afternoon one-course menu because he liked baloney sandwiches. I still become drowned in nostalgia whenever I see baloney in a delicatessen showcase.
Sadly, during Hurricane Hugo, the house was completely swept away and destroyed. The same is true of the motel we all stayed in during the 1980 expedition. All that was left were the concrete slabs where the cottages once sat.
A brief detour here: No historical saga of the Civil War ships lost in Charleston can be written without a mention of Benjamin Mallifert, a former Union officer of engineers, who became the most renowned salvage specialist of his time. One of his descendants sent me a photo of him in the uniform of a Union army major. The ladies would have considered him an attractive man; his eyes burned with a humorous twinkle, and he sported a neatly trimmed thick beard. He was energetic, and no slouch when it came to stripping a shipwreck of anything that was valuable, including scrap metal.
Mallifert ruled over an operation that salvaged more than fifty Civil War shipwrecks in the years after the war. In Charleston alone, he raised millions of pounds of iron, brass, and copper from the sunken warships, Union and Confederate alike.
His diving operations are recorded in his diaries that rest in the Charleston Fireproof Building archives, and they make interesting reading. He must have been a congenial man with a droll wit. One of his entries reads, “My divers reported bringing up five hundred pounds of iron today, more or less… probably less.”
His description of each wreck, and his accounting of the metal removed, was valuable in determining how much wreckage remained after he moved on.
Ten years ago, I ran across him again. Not in Charleston, but on the James River of Virginia. My NUMA team and I were searching for Virginia II, Richmond, and Fredericksburg, three Confederate ironclads that made up the James River fleet. When General Grant took Petersburg near the end of the war, the commander of the fleet, Admiral Raphael Semmes, former captain of the famed Confederate raider Alabama, ordered the fleet blown up and scuttled.
There was a crude drawing of the ships exploding below Drewry’s Bluff on the river below Richmond. We found nothing on the sidescan sonar. The magnetometer registered large targets, but they seemed indistinct and scattered. Since they were all buried in the river’s mud, Doc Harold Edgerton, renowned inventor of the sidescan sonar and strobe light, came along with his subbottom profiler — or penetrator, as he called it.
Doc tried hard but had no luck. His penetrator could not see through the gas pockets under the mud formed over the decades by decomposing leaves from trees along the banks. We were about to throw in the towel when I decided to take a day off from the search to comb through the Army Corps of Engineers archives in Portsmouth, Virginia. I was determined to study every drawer and cabinet in the place if it took me all week.