previous next

Doc. 111. loss of the Housatonic.

Charleston, S. C., June 10, 1864.
Since the destruction of the Housatonic, at Charleston, nothing has been heard of Captain Dixon and his crew, by whom the act was accomplished. The following letter on the subject is addressed to Major-General Maury:

Office Submarine defence, Charleston, April 29, 1864.
General — The United States sloop of war Housatonic was attacked and destroyed by Lieutenant Dixon and crew on the night of the seventeenth of February.1 Since that time no information has been received of either boat or crew.

I am of the opinion that the torpedo being placed at the bow of the boat, she went into the hole made in the Housatonic by explosion of the torpedo, and did not have power sufficient to back out, consequently sunk with her.

I have the honor to be, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

M. M. Gray, Captain in charge Torpedoes. To Major-General D. H. Maury, District of the Gulf, Mobile, Ala.


1 See Rebellion Record, Vol. 8, p. 391. Documents.

Van Nostrand. New York, New York. 1868.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
United States (United States) (1)
Mobile, Ala. (Alabama, United States) (1)
Charleston (South Carolina, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
D. H. Maury (2)
Dixon (2)
M. M. Gray (1)
Doc (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
June 10th, 1864 AD (1)
April 29th, 1864 AD (1)
February 17th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: