Look off to the west sometime, down the long arm of sand that trails away toward the sunset. Way out at the tip of that peninsula, about twenty miles from here, stands an old brick fort called Fort Morgan — and one August day in 1864, it was the stage for one of the most famous moments in American naval history. Let me set it for you.
It was the Civil War, and Mobile Bay, just west of here, was one of the last open ports the Confederacy had left. Fort Morgan guarded its mouth, and the channel in front of it was sown with mines — which in those days they called 'torpedoes' — floating iron eggs of gunpowder waiting to blow the bottom out of any ship that touched one.
On the morning of August fifth, 1864, a Union admiral named David Farragut came to take that bay. He lashed himself high up in the rigging of his flagship so he could see over the smoke, and he sent his fleet straight at the fort and its guns. And then the lead ironclad, the Tecumseh, struck one of those torpedoes and sank in minutes, taking most of her crew straight to the bottom. The whole attack shuddered to a halt, ships bunching up right under the fort's cannon, about to be torn apart.
And that's when Farragut roared out the line they still teach schoolchildren: 'Damn the torpedoes — full speed ahead!' And he drove his own ship forward through that minefield, and by some miracle the rest of the torpedoes didn't fire, and the fleet broke through and took the bay. Fort Morgan itself held out under siege for another couple of weeks before it finally surrendered. It's still standing out there today, and you can walk its ramparts. Damn the torpedoes. Right down the beach from where you're sitting.
Photo: Altairisfar · Public domain
