Fishing For Torpedoes

I was among others detailed from the Federal steamer Monongahela to search the Red River between Tensar and the Mississippi for the torpedoes which had been planted by the Confederates before our fleet appeared in those waters. These torpedoes were of all makes, shapes and sizes, from a pork barrel half full of powder, to be fired by electricity from the shore, to a glass demijohn holding ten pounds to be exploded by contact. Some where on the surface, some just under it, and some on the bottom. We went out in gangs of four in row boats to hunt for these terrifiers, each boat being provided with grapnels, nets, boat-hooks and whatever else was needed for fishing up these monsters. We had to go slow and exercise great caution, for the channel was tortuous and no one could guess at what point we would come across a torpedo. 

While the woods were shelled two or three times a day by our gunboats, the Confederate swamp cats were by no means driven out. They had every chance to secrete themselves along the banks, and we realized that if we came upon an electric torpedo, which could be exploded from the shore, we ran every risk of being blown sky-high. 

We had been at work three or four days and had fished up seven or eight ugly looking fellows, when we got into a part of the channel which ran within fifty feet of the right hand bank. Just at this time a colored man, who had been lying out in the swamps for several weeks, waiting for his deliverance, informed us that he had observed men planting something in this bend about two weeks before. He said there were wires leading from it to the swamp, but we scouted about for a couple of hours without being able to find that such was the case. The bank was dense jungle in which a thousand men could have concealed themselves and the gunboats could not shell it from the position they had taken. 

It was about an hour after dinner that we moved up and began grappling in the bend. The boat in which I was stationed turned her bow down stream, threw over her grapnels, and two men used the oars to give her headway. We had not pulled fifty feet when the irons took hold, and I drew the boat back to the spot by means of the ropes. Then, standing on the seat in the stern, I lifted at the obstruction, and it came up slowly. It had just appeared at the surface sufficient for me to make out that it was a boiler-iron torpedo when there came an awful explosion. At the same instant our boat was lifted high in the air and broken to pieces, and I scarcely comprehended what had occurred until I found myself in the water at least 200 feet below the point of the explosion. My hair, whiskers and eyebrows were badly singed, and my clothing was on fire as I came down after the flight. 

While I had escaped the three other men were killed outright and horribly mangled, and the great wave created swamped the boat working a few hundred feet below us and drowned one of her crew. While swimming for this capsized boat a man stood on the bank of the river and fired four shots at me from a revolver, and with the fifth he killed the colored man who had given us information. The victim stood on the bank, about midway between the two boats and was shot through the head. The torpedo was no doubt exploded by electricity, and the man who fired the shots was the operator who exploded it.