[
194]
sometimes called the
Middle-Ground Battery.
On
Cummings's Point of
Morris Island was Battery Gregg, and about a mile south of it, commanding the main channel, was a very strong and extensive work, called
Fort Wagner.
A little farther south, at Light-House inlet, which divides
Folly and
Morris Islands, was a battery that commanded the landing-place there.
On these works several hundred guns were mounted, a large portion of them of Enlish manufacture.
Further to protect the city, the southerly channel of the inner harbor was obstructed by several rows of
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Middle ground Battery. |
piles, one of them having an open space that might invite a vessel to enter, but to perish in the attempt, for under the water, at the threshold of that open door, was a mine containing five thousand pounds of gunpowder.
Besides these, there were chains composed of linked
railway-iron, to obstruct channels; and there lay, between
Forts Sumter and
Moultrie, a heavy rope buoyed up by empty casks, and bearing a perfect
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Piece of chain |
tangle of nets, cables, and other lines, below, attached to torpedoes, chiefly of the form shown in the engraving,
1 the whole kept in place by anchors of peculiar form, represented in the cut. These torpedoes were prepared for explosion, by means of electricity transmitted through wires from batteries at
Forts Sumter and
Moultrie.
The harbor and its approaches were also sown with torpedoes, one kind of which, represented in the engraving, was supplied with a head, filled with detonating powder, from which radiated tubes.
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Torpedo. |
When any of these were struck, an
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Torpedo anchor. |
explosion was produced by means of the percussion powder.
Such were some of the contrivances for obstructing
Charleston harbor — such were the fortifications which have been alluded to, against which the squadron of
Dupont was arrayed on a bright and balmy day in early April, 1863.
Dupont intended to move up the main ship-channel, immediately after crossing the bar, to an attack on
Fort Sumter, without returning any fire that might be opened on
Morris Island.
But a thick haze that spread over land and water, just after sunrise, obscured the more distant guides for the pilots, and the squadron lay quietly within the bar, in the main ship-channel, until little past
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Torpedo.2 |
noon the next day,
when it advanced in a prescribed manner of “line ahead,” the
Weehawken,
Captain Rodgers, leading, the others following in the order named in note 3, page 192. “The ships will open fire on
Sumter,” ran
Dupont's directions, “when within easy range, and will take up a position to the northward and westward of ”
