From Scharf’s History of the Confederate States Navy.
A Confederate “Buoyant Torpedo” or Contact-mine.]
At the siege of Port Arthur in 1904, the Japanese fleet planted mines outside the harbor to keep the Russians in, and the Russians came out and planted mines of their own to entrap the blockaders. While engaged in this work, the Russian mine-layer _Yenisei_ had a mine which had just been lowered through her specially constructed sternports thrown by a wave against her rudder, and was blown to atoms by the consequent explosion of three hundred more in her hold. The flagship _Petropavlosk_, returning from a sortie on April 13, struck a Japanese contact-mine and went down with the loss of six hundred men, including Vereshchagin, the famous painter of war-scenes, and Admiral Makaroff, who was not only the commander but the heart and soul of the Russian fleet.[22] A month later, another mine cost the Japanese their finest battleship, the _Hatsuse_. Nor was the loss confined either to the belligerents or to the duration of the war. Nearly one hundred Chinese and other neutral merchant vessels were sunk by some of the many mines torn loose from their anchors by storms to drift, the least noticeable and most terrible of derelicts, over all the seas of the Far East, long after peace was declared.
The same thing on a larger scale will doubtless take place as a result of the present European War. From the Baltic to the Dardanelles, both sides have sown the waters thick with contact mines, hundreds of which have already broken loose and been cast up on the shores of Denmark, Holland, and other neutral lands. How many more have been picked up on the coasts of the different belligerent countries, the military censors have naturally kept a close secret; how many of these infernal machines are now drifting about the North Sea, the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean it is impossible to compute. Scarcely a week passes without the publication of such news items as the following extracts from “Current events in Norway,” in the “American-Scandinavian Review” for July-August, 1915:
“One hundred and fifty mines had been brought into Bergen up to April 12. The steamer _Caprivi_ of Bergen, which sank after being struck by a mine off the coast of Ireland, was on its way from Baltimore with a cargo of 4150 tons of grain, the property of the Norwegian government.... The German government has declared its willingness to comply with the demand of the Norwegian government for compensation for the _Belridge_, provided it be proved that the sinking of the steamer was the result of a German torpedo. The pieces of the shell found in the side of the vessel are to be sent to the German government, and in case there should be any disagreement about the facts they will be submitted to arbitration.”
