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effect of such an explosion would be was a question which seemed very necessary to be solved in order to determine the safety of the neighboring cities.
The Naval Ordnance Bureau had many reports recommending the removal of the powder so stored lest damage might ensue, but those reports had never been acted upon by Congress.
On this account also it was thought best to test the question.1
The powder used at Fort Fisher was navy cannon powder, each grain of which is nearly an inch cube, in order that it may burn slowly, so as not to burst the guns.
A commission of naval experts was appointed to examine the subject in behalf of the Navy Department, before whom I was not called.
The navy was to furnish a vessel and one hundred and fifty tons of powder.
The army at first agreed to furnish one hundred tons of powder and afterwards fifty tons more.
A part of this amount was partially damaged powder, all that the army had; and the rest was made up by purchasing blasting powder.
I immediately left Washington, having nothing further to do with this matter, the navy undertaking to see that the powder was properly placed and exploded, and went to my headquarters at the front.
1 No great amount of powder had ever been exploded. The largest known to me at that time was at Erith. where there was only 1,040 barrels of powder, all of which was not exploded, and that was by three distinct explosions. Since then, on June 16, 1887, the schooner Parallel, having on board a general cargo, including forty-two tons of giant powder, drifted ashore hard and fast in the Golden Gate below the Cliff House, when, without premonition, there was a terrific explosion, followed a second later by another which seemed to shake the very foundations of the earth. Not a stick of the vessel was to be seen, while debris of the wreck and pieces of iron were scattered about the country for three-quarters of a mile in every direction. The Cliff House, a very large summer hotel, situated on the top of a hill a hundred yards away and a hundred and fifty feet above the sea level, not only was thrown on its side but the wreck was entirely crushed in like card-board. An immense wave, weighing tons, was lifted in the air and carried over the top of the house. Every window and door in the house was shattered into kindling, and the foundations of the building were crushed so as to be unsafe. A two-story cottage of large size, occupied as a private residence, two hundred feet further inland, was blown bodily off its foundations and moved five feet further from the sea. The adjacent stables, two hundred feet long, were utterly demolished, not a single stick being left standing. The shock was felt for many miles.
During the year in which this note was written there was an explosion in Italy of not a very much larger amount of powder than that exploded at Erith, and it caused very widely extended and disastrous damage and loss of life. Neither of these explosions was instantaneous, but there were consecutive explosions. What would be the effect of an instantaneous explosion of like quantities of powder or dynamite is still left to conjecture. I write this note with a view to having action taken that no large amounts of powder shall be stored in the vicinity of populous cities, and in order that municipal authorities may have their attention called to the matter. But what is everybody's business is nobody's until a great disaster is realized.
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
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