he had been one of a pirate crew which had captured the ship and compelled the passengers to walk the plank.  This story is also given by Charles Gayarre, who says the pirate chief was none other than Dominick You, who fought under Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and is buried in that city.  The husband and father of Mrs. Alston were spared the ghastly tale, Mrs. Ravenel says, since both were already in their graves when the sailor’s deathbed confession solved the mystery.

In the Revolution, Charleston played an important part.  Men of Charleston were, of course, among the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who gave us the immortal maxim:  “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!” who was on Washington’s staff, was later Ambassador to France and president-general of the Sons of the Cincinnati, was a Charlestonian of the Charlestonians, and lies buried in St. Michael’s.  Such Revolutionary names as Marion, Laurens, William Washington, Greene, Hampton, Moultrie and Sumter are associated with the place, and two of these are reechoed in the names of those famous forts in Charleston harbor on which attention was fixed at the outbreak of the Civil War:  Moultrie and Sumter—­the latter, target for the first shot fired in the conflict.

Nearly thirty years before the Civil War, Charleston had distinguished herself in the arts of peace by producing the first locomotive tried in the United States, and by constructing the first consecutive hundred miles of railroad ever built in the world, and now, with the War, she distinguished herself by initiating other mechanical devices of very different character—­a semi-submersible torpedo boat and the first submarine to torpedo a hostile war vessel.  True, David Bushnell of Connecticut did construct a crude sort of submarine during the Revolutionary War, and succeeded in getting under a British ship with the machine, but he was unable to fasten his charge of powder and his effort consequently failed.  Robert Fulton also experimented with submarines, or “plunging boats” as he called them, and was encouraged for a time by Napoleon I. The little David of the Confederate navy is sometimes referred to as the first submarine but the David was not actually an underwater boat, but a torpedo boat which could run awash, with her funnels and upper works slightly out of water.  She was a cigar-shaped vessel thirty-three feet long, built of wood, propelled by steam, and carrying her torpedo on a pole, forward.  Dr. St. Julien Ravenel of Charleston and Captain Theodore Stoney devised the craft, and she was built by funds subscribed by Charleston merchants.  In command of Lieutenant W.T.  Glassell, C.S.N., and with three other men aboard, she torpedoed the United States ship New Ironsides, flagship of the fleet blockading Charleston.  The New Ironsides was crippled, but not lost.  After this United States vessels blockading Charleston