Coal torpedo

[3] In April 1865, most of the official papers of the Confederate Secret Service were burned by Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin just before the government evacuated Richmond, making it impossible to determine with any certainty how many ships were destroyed by Courtenay's shell.

Union Admiral Porter credited the coal torpedo with sinking the Greyhound, a private steamboat that had been commandeered by General Benjamin F. Butler for use as a floating headquarters on the James River.

[1][10] In the spring of 1865, Canadian customs raided a house in Toronto that had been rented by Jacob Thompson, one of the commissioners of the Confederate Secret Service stationed in Canada.

Within a few days, the first mate, who had failed to redistribute the weight on the top-heavy boat once a large load of supplies was removed from the hold, claimed that the Sultana was exploded by a coal torpedo.

In 1888, a former Union prison guard claimed that a Confederate mail-carrier named Robert Louden had told him years before that he had used a coal torpedo to sink the steamboat.

[13][14] Other reports scoffed at the rumors, suggesting they were false stories planted by supporters of Samuel Plimsoll, a Member of Parliament who was trying to pass a bill reforming the shipping industry.

[15] Nothing was ever proven, but the reports stirred up popular interest in various supposed methods of sabotaging ships, and the coal torpedo even made an appearance in the short story, "That Little Square Box", by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in the collection The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales in 1890.

The Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish nationalist organization operating in the United States in the late 1860s–1870s, reportedly considered placing coal torpedoes in the furnaces of New York City hotels as well as English transatlantic steamships.

[17] During the Russo-Japanese War Russia's French naval attaché came into possession coals that been hollowed out with the appearance that they could have been filled with explosives and used to attack the russian fleet.

[20][21] The German commandos who came ashore on Long Island in 1942 as part of Operation Pastorius carried plastic explosives disguised as coal for use against coal-fired electric generating plants.