The first great achievement with torpedoes was accomplished on Saturday
morning last (May 26), by two Russian officers and a Roumanian, near Ibraila. A party of Russian boats had sur- rounded a small Turkish monitor at Matchin before the morn- ing fully broke. The Russian gunboats Czarevitcb, Czarevna, Xenia, and Djihne were under the most dangerous fire from the Turkish monitor for twenty minutes, and the Xenia was riddled with balls, but the darkness and the nearness of the boats saved them from the great guns of the monitor. The Russian lieu- tenants, Doubasoff and Chestakoff, with the Roumanian, Major Murgesco, appear to have been the most prominent of the heroes of the occasion, though there were forty men in all among the four gunboats,—Doubasoff making the firstattempt to affix the torpedo to 'the Turkish monitor, and Chestakoff the second, which succeeded. The torpedo was attached to the side of the monitor and fired by electricity through the conducting-wires, after those who had attached it had left the side of the Turkish ship. At half-past three in the morning the monitor was exploded, and all her 300 men were killed by the shock or drowned. This achievement is but a beginning of the career of torpedoes in naval war, —a career which seems likely to place the humblest above the greatest of our ships-of-war, in relation at least to their security from sadden -annihilation.
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