to send Hartford around Brooklyn and into the lead of the column. Recognizing hesitation from his subordinate commanders, he took the bold action by ordering Captain Percival Drayton to send Hartford around Brooklyn and into the lead of the column and giving the order, “Damn the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!”. This took the ship into the torpedoes that had just sunk Tecumseh, but Farragut was confident that most of them had been submerged too long to be effective. His gamble paid off, and the entire column of 14 warships passed through unharmed. Several Union sailors reported hearing clicks of torpedo detonators when passing through. Tennessee lacked the speed needed to ram the Union vessels as they passed, allowing Farragut to order some of his small, faster gunboats to attack the three Confederate gunboats. Metacomet, unleashed from Hartford, captured Selma. Fire from the gunboats holed Gaines, and she would have sunk had she not been beached; she was then burned by her crew. Morgan put up no resistance, but fled to the protection of the guns of Fort Morgan; next night she crept through the anchored Union fleet and escaped to Mobile. Clash with CSS Tennessee Farragut expected Tennessee to take shelter under the guns of Fort Morgan while he rested his ships and assessed battle damage in the middle of the bay, but Buchanan instead decided to take on the entire Federal fleet single-handed. Possibly he hoped to repeat the ramming tactics that had been so successful at Hampton Roads two years earlier; Buchanan did not explain his reasoning. This time, the ships that he was facing were in motion, and he had to contend with three monitors, not one. Tennessee was so slow that she became the target of ramming rather than her opponents. Several of the Federal sloops managed to ram, including Monongahela, which had been fitted with an iron shield on her bow for just this purpose. None of the collisions harmed the ironclad; in every case, the ramming vessel suffered more. Shots from Farragut's fleet bounced off Tennessees armor, but Tennessees fire was ineffective due to inferior powder and multiple misfires. The balance was tilted finally when two monitors arrived. Tennessee was already almost motionless, her smokestack shot away and so unable to build up boiler pressure. Her rudder chains were parted so that she could not steer. Furthermore, some of the shutters on her gun