Maury was relieved, on the 20th of June, 1862, by Lieutenant Hunter Davidson of the duty of “devising, placing, and superintending submarine batteries in the James River”. Davidson was at the time in command of the _Teaser_, and to signalize his new appointment, he had the misfortune, on July 4, of losing his ship to the enemy, together with the diagrams showing the exact position of the mines already laid down. Although Maury’s participation in this new field of warfare had extended over only a little more than the first year of the war, still his pioneer work therein deserves high consideration as it laid the foundation for experiments by other Confederate officers, and these mines, electric and otherwise, resulted in the loss during the war of a large number of Union ships, varying from 20 to 58 according to different authorities. These facts bear out the following claim made by Maury: “All the electrical torpedoes in that (James) river were prepared and laid down either by myself or by Lieutenant Davidson who relieved me after having been instructed by me as to the details of the system. These were the first electrical torpedoes that were successfully used against an enemy in war”. Maury did not pretend that the idea was original with him. Robert Fulton had had a device for firing a mine by electricity, but had never succeeded in making his battery work. Also Colonel Colt experimented with some success with such mines as early as 1842. Maury’s work was so important because he was the first to demonstrate that such weapons could be made of practical use in warfare. He has, however, been given almost no credit, until recently, for this pioneer work. Even Jefferson Davis, in his “Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government”, makes no mention of Maury’s name in connection with the electric mines, but gives all the honor to General Gabriel J. Rains, who did not become head of the Torpedo Bureau until October, 1862. Scharf’s “History of the Confederate States Navy” names not only Rains but also Hunter Davidson and Beverly Kennon as rivals for priority in the invention and practical use of the electric mine. The claims of the first two are so extravagant and so unjust to Maury as to merit no consideration; while those of Kennon cannot be successfully sustained in comparison with the well-established priority of Maury’s “electrical torpedoes”. These electric mines were not the only new naval weapons that Maury advocated and had a hand in devising. In the autumn of 1861, he wrote a series of articles for the Richmond _Enquirer_ under the pseudonym of “Ben Bow”, in which he urged the necessity of building a strong navy for the South without delay, and of providing, at least, for the protection of bays and rivers by the construction of small ships armed with big guns. Maury had had in mind such a fighting craft for years, and as early as 1841 he had urged the building of ships of this sort in his “Scraps from the Lucky Bag”.