At 7:25 a.m. on August 5, 1864, Admiral Farragut’s lead monitor Tecumseh entered the torpedo field at the mouth of Mobile Bay while moving to engage the ram Tennessee, and at 7:40, after passing west of the black buoy that marked the field’s eastern limit, it struck a torpedo and sank within three minutes. With his fleet blocked by the Brooklyn and the torpedoes under the guns of the fort, Farragut faced the choice to withdraw or advance into the torpedo field himself, and he led his fleet into the bay at full speed. Although the famous exclamation “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” cannot be proved by contemporary authority, Farragut later said he prayed for divine guidance, his pilot Martin Freeman recalled that the admiral said he would take the lead and told him to pick a way through the torpedoes and go into the bay or blow up, and Freeman then relayed the order that would send the ship ahead at full speed. A later newspaper account sent by Captain Thornton A. Jenkins attributed a similar outburst instead to Tecumseh captain Commander Tunis Craven, who was said to have declared that he was after the Tennessee despite the torpedoes. What mattered in the crisis was that both Farragut and Craven knowingly drove their ships through the torpedo field at full speed; Craven lost his ship and life, while Farragut’s decisive action saved his fleet from certain defeat. The Confederates used two kinds of contact torpedoes in Mobile Bay, the Singer torpedo and the Rains keg torpedo, each capable of blowing a hole eight feet by ten feet in a ship’s bottom, usually with charges of thirty-five to fifty pounds of black powder, and engineer Victor Von Scheliha reported that a Singer torpedo sank the Tecumseh.