At around 2:30 am, in a heavy rain, a large force of three hundred Confederate seamen and marines in fourteen boats attacked and seized the U.S.S. Underwriter, a 180 foot sidewheeler gunboat moored with its boilers banked in the Neuve River in North Carolina. Without steam up, the expedition's leader, Commander John Taylor Wood, determined that the prize could not be sailed away and ordered her burned. Confederate losses were five killed. (By John Osborne)