“Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” yelled Admiral David Farragut, who had lashed himself atop the mainsail to see above the smoke.
His fleet of wooden ships with hulls wrapped in chains, and his four iron-clad monitors, were attacking Fort Morgan in Mobile Bay, Aug. 5, 1864.
When one of his ships, the Tecumseh, sank after hitting an underwater mine, called a torpedo, his fleet faltered in confusion.
Farragut rallied and drove them on to capture the last Confederate stronghold in the Gulf of Mexico.
Earlier, April 29, 1862, Farragut captured New Orleans, the Confederacy’s largest city. Sailing the Mississippi River at night, his ships were hard to hit, as he tied tree branches to the rigging and covered the hulls with mud.
The first U.S. Navy admiral, Farragut declined offers to run for president. There is a statue and subway stop, Farragut Square, in his honor in Washington D.C., as well as a statue in New York City and a city in Tennessee.
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Early in his naval career, 1817-1818, David Farragut served aboard the USS Washington, patrolling the Mediterranean Barbary Muslim coast. He spent nine months in Tunis as an aid to Navy chaplain and U.S. consul, Charles Folsom, till a plague forced his departure.
His son, Loyall Farragut, wrote in a book titled “The Life and Letters of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut”: “He never felt so near his Master as he did when in a storm, knowing that on his skill depended the safety of so many lives.”
During his last illness, David Farragut asked for a clergyman to pray to the Lord, saying: “He must be my pilot now!”
In 1825, David Farragut served on the USS Brandywine as it escorted General Marquis de Lafayette back to France. Another sailor on that ship was 19-year-old midshipman Matthew Fontaine Maury.
Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873), became known as the “pathfinder of the seas” for having charted sea and wind currents while serving in the U.S. Navy. Considered the founder of modern hydrography and oceanography, he was professor of meteorology at Virginia Military Institute.
Matthew Fontaine Maury wrote in his book “Physical Geography of the Sea,” 1855: “I have always found in my scientific studies, that, when I could get the Bible to say anything on the subject it afforded me a firm platform to stand upon, and a round in the ladder by which I could safely ascend. As our knowledge of nature and her laws has increased, so has our knowledge of many passages of the Bible improved.
“The Bible called the earth ‘the round world,’ yet for ages it was the most damnable heresy for Christian men to say that the world is round; and, finally, sailors circumnavigated the globe, and proved the Bible to be right, and saved Christian men of science from the stake. And as for the general system of circulation which I have been so long endeavoring to describe, the Bible tells it all in a single sentence: ‘The wind goeth toward the South and returneth again to his circuits.'”
Engraved on Matthew Fontaine Maury’s tombstone at the U.S. Naval Academy is the verse from Psalm 8 which had inspired him all his life: “Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.”
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