to perform the duties required of them, and conducted themselves well
at all times and under all circumstances. The crews of each vessel
numbered from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and sixty men,
some of them able-seamen, and most of them efficient and reliable men.
Each vessel carried a torpedo, fitted to the end of a spar some
fifteen or twenty feet long projecting from the bows in a line with
the keel, and so arranged that it could be carried either triced up
clear of the water or submerged five or six feet below the surface.
The squadron was in a good state of discipline and drill, and, so far
as the personnel was concerned, in a very efficient condition.

Every night one or two of the iron-clads anchored in the channel near
Fort Sumter for the purpose of resisting a night attack on that place
or a dash into the harbor by the Federal squadron.

Not long before the evacuation of Charleston an iron-clad named the
_Columbia_ was launched there. She had a thickness of six inches of
iron on her casemate, and was otherwise superior to the other three
iron-clads of the squadron. Unfortunately, she was run aground whilst
coming out of dock, and so much injured as not to be able to render
any service whatever.

Charleston was evacuated by the Confederate forces on the 18th of
February, 1865. Several days previous to the evacuation a detachment
from the squadron of about three hundred men, under the command of
Lieutenant Commanding James Henry Rochelle, consisting of the officers
and crews of the _Palmetto State_, _Columbia_, and the recruits from
the receiving-ship _Indian Chief_, were dispatched by rail to
Wilmington, which the detachment reached only a few days before it
was, in turn, abandoned by the Confederate Army. The Charleston naval
detachment was ordered to co-operate with the Army as a body of
infantry, and was assigned to duty with General Hoke's division, of
which it formed the extreme right, resting on Cape Fear river. The
position was exposed to an annoying fire from the Federal gunboats in
the river, to which no reply could be made, but from which some loss
was suffered. The evacuation of Wilmington took place on the 22d of
February, 1865, and the Charleston squadron's naval battalion marched
out with Hoke's division, to which it remained attached until
somewhere in the interior of North Carolina it reunited with Tucker's
command.

With the officers and crews of the _Charleston_ and _Chicora_, T