port lavaca
The Sinking Of The USS Houstanic
Part 2
Read Part 1 At TexasNOWmag.com
A Story by Roger Williams
Captain Edgar Collins Singer
And The Singer Secret Service
“In future days, if malice should abound,
Someone intent on mischief, or inspired
With devilish machination, might devise
Like instrument to plague the sons of men
for sin, on war and mutual slaughter bent.”
John Milton, Paradise Lost, VI. 502
Private Edgar Collins Singer, of Lavaca, Texas, swore: “This would be the
last time a Northern fleet would slip into a Southern harbor without a fight.”
A promise not easily kept by a private assigned to a Confederate artillery
battery of Texas volunteers. “Middle-aged men unfit for active service,”
is how Mark K Ragan describes this rag tag unit which drove off two
Union gunboats from the town of Lavaca, Texas. Singer was a 6-foot-3
inch gunsmith/inventor who was the nephew of Isaac Singer, founder of the
Singer Sewing Machine Co. Edgar hatched this outrageous idea he could
blow up Union ships using an underwater “torpedo.”
In the early 1800s Robert Fulton began tinkering with the idea of torpedoes.
His idea was to fill a water proof vessel with a large mass of gunpowder,
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& THE ARTS
TAGE,
EVENTS, HERI
SPAR TORPEDO TRIALS
Get Your History On At TexasNOWmag.com