CSS Ivy
Steamboat
CSS Ivy was a sidewheel steamer and privateer purchased by Commodore Lawrence Rousseau for service with the Confederate States Navy, and chosen by Commodore George Hollins for his Mosquito Fleet. The Mosquito Fleet was a group of riverboats converted to gunboats, and used to defend the Mississippi River in the area of New Orleans during the American Civil War.
Equipped with a powerful rifled 32-pounder, Ivy fought with the Mosquito Fleet at the Confederate victory of the Battle of the Head of Passes and their defeat at the Battle of Island Number 10. Subsequently, trapped in the Yazoo River, Ivy was destroyed to prevent her capture by the Union in May 1863.
Description
Ivy was 191 feet (58.2 m) long overall, had a beam of 28 feet (8.5 m) and a draft of 9 feet (2.7 m). Her two side paddle wheels were powered by a large, sophisticated walking beam engine and multiple boiler propulsion system with 44 inches (112 cm) diameter cylinders on an 11 foot (3.4 m) stroke, giving a maximum speed of 12 knots (22 km/h; 14 mph). She had a complement of 60 officers and men.
As a privateer Ivy was armed with two brass 24-pounder smoothbore howitzers. As a riverboat her armament was increased to an eight-inch smoothbore mounted aft, and a 32-pounder rifled gun mounted on a forward pivot position on the bow. The conventional description of "rifled 32-pounder" is misleading, however.
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This entry incorporates text from “CSS Ivy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.