172 
Offensive and Defensive 
[March, 
cutters ; but owing to the unfavourable report of Commodore 
Rodgers, who Lieut. Sleeman characterises as unfair and 
prejudiced, Fulton’s submarine inventions were not adopted, 
and the skilled inventor turned his ingenuity to the more 
humanitarian improvement of the steam-engine. 
In faCt as long as clockwork, originated by springs, 
weights, levers, &c., was employed, torpedo science was 
practically a failure; and until after the introduttion oi 
voltaic electricity submarine batteries were regarded merely 
as futile experimental toys. In 1839 Colonel Pasley, 
R E used galvanic electricity to blow up the wreck 
of the Royal George , and Colonel Colt, whose name will 
ever be connected with the revolver,* first publicly essayed 
to explode a case of gunpowder by elearicity at a dis- 
tance, in 1842, and he accomplished the destruaion of a 
vessel under weigh by an insulated elearic cable in 1844. 
Two years subsequently the two great explosive compounds 
of modern times, viz., gun-cotton and mtro-glycenn , were 
discovered ; and in the next war that took place stationary 
buoyant mines under water, fired on contaCt or observation 
bv means of elearicity, were used for defensive purposes by 
the Russians on a large scale, both in the Baltic and Black 
Sea, thereby rendering inaaive all naval operations on the 
part of the British squadrons, as much by their moral as 
by their physical effeas. During the Baltic campaign the 
Russian ports were rendered impregnable against naval 
attack if we except distant bombardment, such as Sveaborg 
underwent, and the capture of Bomarsund, which was 
praaically undefended. , „ 
The explosions from which H.M. ships Merlin and Firefly 
narrowly escaped deterred the near approach of Admiral 
Napier’s fleet, and his famous signal of “ Lads sharpen your 
cutlasses ” was thereby rendered a bye-word of bombast. 
The breaking out of the Civil War in America brought 
the science of torpedo warfare more prominently forward, 
and as might have been expected, was first used for defence 
by the Confederates on the Savannah River, causing thereby 
great delay in the advance of the Federal gun-boats ; and 
in December, 1862, the iron-clad ship Cairo was shattered 
and sunk in twelve minutes by two stationary torpedoes in 
the Yazoo River — the first instance in history of a vessel oi 
war being thus destroyed in adtual war. Subsequently 
several instances are cited in Commander Sleeman s work 
* Colt, when a mere lad, commenced experiments with submarine mines as 
early as 1829. 
