Naval technology from Dixie.

• Author: Brock, Darryl E.
• Position: Includes related article

The evening watch officer strode the deck of the USS New Ironsides, the Union navy's pride, peering into the surrounding blackness for Confederate threats. His ship led the blockading fleet, guarding the harbor at Charleston, where the conflict known as the U.S. Civil War began. The alert young navyman spied a dark object, low in the water, emerging from the darkness and approaching quickly. The form of a man took shape, seemingly gliding on the water's surface; a shotgun blast then ruptured the silence. Almost immediately, a wrenching concussion followed, and the entire ship reeled as if in agony.

That moonless October night in 1864 the Union navy faced another example of what Northerners had come to call "diabolical Rebel ingenuity." Reputed to be the world's most powerful warship, the New Ironsides would not see action again for almost a year. The ironclad frigate had fallen victim to a new class of vessel introduced by Confederate naval engineers, the semi-submersible torpedo boat CSS David. Designed to ram enemy ships below the water line with explosive charges, then called "torpedoes," the David contributed to dashing Union hopes of invading Charleston by sea, and lifted the flagging morale of the struggling Confederate nation.

As engineer on the David, James Hamilton Tomb displayed extraordinary bravery in the hazardous attack on the goliath New Ironsides. An impressed Confederate president Jefferson Davis granted him increased authority to experiment with novel challenges to the Yankee stranglehold. The fall of the Confederate States, however, left Tomb and other scientific personnel of the innovative Confederate Naval Torpedo Bureau with bleak futures.

Yet he would soon put his skills to the test and again risk his life as a leader in another war, the second bloodiest of this hemisphere.

As the North American conflict wound down in 1865, a similarly devastating war exploded in the southern continent, though the root causes and objectives radically differed. Secession of the Southern states of the U.S.--the new Confederate Republic--threatened the nation's unity; the remaining Northern states struggled to preserve the Union. In South America, territorial ambitions ignited a tragic five-year war of attrition: The Paraguayan marshal-president Francisco Solano Lopez made a desperate bid for regional power. Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, in an unholy Triple Alliance, responded to crush his Napoleonic ambitions. Lopez's defenders, however, maintain the Allies only sought to dismember the smaller, vulnerable Paraguayan nation and seize its lands and resources.

The Allies initially found themselves unprepared to challenge the British-installed Paraguayan war arsenal and well-honed sixty-thousand-man professional army, the continent's largest. Insightful and cunning, Lopez had earlier contracted with a British firm for engineers, mechanics, construction workers, and physicians to construct railroads and otherwise modernize his country's infrastructure. In response, the Allies quickly adopted recent military innovations from foreign shores. In particular, the Triple Alliance looked to the acknowledged technical expertise of the recently defeated Confederate States of America. This short-lived nation revolutionized the world's navies with its use of the ironclad warship, developed history's first submarine to sink a ship in battle, and proved the defensive value of submarine mines (torpedoes), which sunk or damaged more than forty Union vessels. If the triumphant Union government would squander capable North American talent, the South American nations would seize the opportunity presented by the disenfranchisement of these seasoned inventors and engineers.

Brazil's Dom Pedro II, a gifted emperor of rare wisdom--and an amateur scientist in his own right--moved aggressively to bring about one of the few successful brain drains ever directed against the United States. By a generous immigration policy and effective propaganda advertisements in the U.S. media, the emperor recruited thousands of disaffected Confederates. He exploited the positive image of Brazil, popularized before the war in the 1853 book The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America by then U.S. commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury. Honored as the father of oceanography, Maury would later initiate the...