Note 63 — NO. XIII.—FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 1807.

The allusion is here evidently to the experiment made by Fulton in New York Harbor, on the 20th of July, 1807, shortly after his return from Europe, bringing with him the favorite plans of “torpedo warfare,” as he called it, which he had laid before the governments of France and England. An old brig was, after some delay, blown up in the bay by one of Fulton’s charged canisters. The affair, with Fulton’s appeal to the Government, his previous lecture on Governor’s Island to the magistracy of the city, when the audience was somewhat diminished on the production of one of the loaded torpedoes, with his declaration that it contained a hundred and seventy pounds of powder, and that, if he were to suffer the clock-work to run fifteen minutes, he had no doubt it would blow the fortification to atoms—all this, with his letter to the Corporation the day after his successful experiment, was well calculated to produce the stir in the city so pleasantly set forth in this paper of Salmagundi.