rengthen the works which he
now had to encounter. The number of heavy guns in Fort Morgan bearing
upon the channel was thirty-eight. In Fort Jackson, excluding the
obsolete caliber of twenty-four pounders, there were twenty-seven, and
in St. Philip twenty-one--total, forty-eight; but in caliber and
efficiency those of Morgan were distinctly superior to those of the
river forts, and it may be considered an advantage that the power was
here concentrated in a single work under a single hand. The gunners of
Fort Morgan, moreover, had not been exposed to the exhausting
harassment of a most efficient bombardment, extending over the six days
prior to the final demand upon their energies. They came fresh to their
work, and suffered during its continuance from no distraction except
that caused by the fire of the fleet itself. While, therefore, Fort
Gaines could not be considered to support Morgan by any deterrent or
injurious influence upon the United States fleet, the latter work was by
itself superior in offensive power to the two Mississippi forts.

To the general defense the Confederates had here brought two other
factors, one of a most important and as yet unknown power. As the sand
bank extending eastward from Dauphin Island was to some extent passable
by light gunboats, a line of piles was driven in the direction of Fort
Morgan nearly to the edge of the channel. Where the piles stopped a
triple line of torpedoes began, following the same general course, and
ending only at a hundred yards from Fort Morgan, where a narrow opening
was left for the passage of friendly vessels--blockade runners and
others. Had the electrical appliances of the Confederacy been at that
time more highly developed, this narrow gap would doubtless also have
been filled with mines, whose explosion depended upon operators ashore.
As it was, the torpedo system employed at Mobile, with some few possible
exceptions, was solely mechanical; the explosion depended upon contact
by the passing vessel with the mine. To insure this, the line was
triple; those in the second and third rows not being in the alignment of
the first, but so placed as to fill the interstices and make almost
impracticable the avoidance of all three torpedoes belonging to the
same group.

These arrangements were sufficiently well known to Farragut through
information brought by refugees or deserters. They--the power of the
works, the disposition of the torpedoes, the Tennessee and her