James Barnes, author of David G. Farragut, Naval Actions of 1812, Yank ee Ships and Yankee Sailors, Commodore Bainbridge , The Blockaders, and other naval and historical works, The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 6: The Navy.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

[276] connecting with the propeller-shaft. The torpedo was attached to the end of a spar which could be projected in front of the craft. H. L. Hunley, of Mobile, was the designer, and the vessel was built in his native city.

After several unsuccessful and fatal attempts at Mobile and Charleston, Hunley went to the latter city to take command of his invention in person. Volunteers seemed easy to find, for he picked six men, and starting out in the harbor made several spectacular dives. She was gone overlong on one of these. It was a week before she was brought to the surface. Her inventor and all of his crew were huddled together under one of the manholes. Nothing daunted, Lieutenant George E. Dixon, a friend of the boat's inventor, got together another crew, and on the 17th of February, 1864, silently they moved out to where the fine sloop-of-war Housatonic was lying at anchor. The torpedo plunged against her side and exploded, blew her almost out of the water and she sank immediately. But the little Hunley never returned. She found a resting-place on the ocean bed beside her gigantic victim.

On the 27th of October, 1864, the indomitable Lieutenant W. B. Cushing, who had been constantly proposing wonderful and almost impossible things, succeeded in getting eight miles up the Roanoke River in North Carolina and sinking, in an open launch, with a torpedo, the Confederate ram Albemarle.

The gunboat Otsego ran afoul of a torpedo in the Roanoke River on December 9th and went to the bottom, and after the fall of the last fort, Fort Fisher, the Patapsco was sunk in Charleston Harbor, January 15, 1865, and officers and crew were lost to the number of sixty. Still later in the war, in April, the monitors Milwaukee and Osage suffered a like fate. They were in Admiral Thatcher's fleet that was assisting Generals Canby and Steele in the capture of Mobile. After the forts had been taken by the army, the war-ship advanced up the torpedofilled channel. A tin-clad, a wooden gunboat, and several tugs were also blown up before the ships anchored off the city.