-Caveat Lector- [Unable to display image] Hunley to rise again This article was written in 1995, shortly after the rediscovery of the Wreck of the Hunley. The historical information is still valid, hence the article remains available. For more details about the recovery project, please click here. The history of the Confederate Submarine Hunley and its rediscovery by Ray Taylor When the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley sank the USS Housatonic off Charleston Harbour in 1864, it became the first submarine ever to sink an enemy ship. Unfortunately for the crew, they did not live to enjoy their fame, and mystery still surrounds the sinking of their craft. Now, that mystery looks set to be solved with the recent discovery of a wreck that is almost certain to be the remains of the Hunley. A group of scientists from the University of South Carolina first became interested in the Hunley in 1980, when American explorer and author of Raise the Titanic Clive Cussler set out to locate various Civil War wrecks off Charleston Harbour. He used a device called a Magnetometer which was towed back and forth across the harbour to help locate any large metal objects on the sea bed. A magnetometer works by measuring the Earth's natural magnetic flux and then detecting any anomalies caused by large metal objects resting on the sea bed. A good operator can detect any object, and work out the approximate shape, using the instrument. With this process, Cussler managed to map the position of eight fairly large objects. But it wasn't until 1993 that the University invited Cussler to return to Charleston Harbour to help locate these sites a second time so that a team of divers could 'ground-truth' them. This they did in 1994, but without much success. However, says Chris Amer - who is head of underwater archaeology at the University - they did find some other iron-clads, included what remains of the wreck of the Housatonic. Cussler continued with his group to look for sizeable anomalies, dropping buoys over suitable sites, allowing a team of divers to investigate. By May 3rd this year, they had pinpointed the location of what Amer believes to be the remains of the Hunley. 'An underwater video shows what could be one of the turrets,' says Amer. The wreck lies a couple of feet under sediment but a small section has been exposed to show rivets and other features. Unfortunately, now that a section has been exposed, it is likely to deteriorate much faster. Amer is quick to point out that the wreck would not have been exposed but for an over-zealous diver. Further visits to the site of the Hunley have since allowed divers to work out an outline of the craft using long probes and metal detectors. On the basis that the exact shape of the object in the mud is a close match of drawings taken from contemporary eye-witness accounts of what the Hunley looked like, Amer is confident he has found what is left of the craft. In Amer's own words, 'if it looks like an elephant, smells like an elephant and tastes like an elephant, it is an elephant.' The next phase for Amer and his team, is to take identification a stage further. Given the delicate balance of chemical forces that has stabilised around the remains, the last thing anyone wants to do is to disturb the site. Instead, electronic systems will be used to provide an ever more detailed picture of the Hunley and its immediate environment - and this will be a joint effort between Amer's team, which will provide scientific expertise, and Cussler, who will put up a lot of the money and specialised equipment required. Next, Cussler's team will investigate the site with a sonar profiling craft known as the Cherub. This will be towed from the surface at a depth of about 5-feet above the sea bed, while on-board equipment will produce many different electronic profiles of the Hunley. When pieced together by computer, the result will be a fully three dimensional image of the craft, its contents and the surrounding material, with detail resolved down to two or three cm. It will be possible to view slices through the craft in much the same way as modern computer-aided tomography allows doctors to take visual slices of the body. The archaeological team is as much interested in the sediment deposits around the hull as with the hull itself, since the ability of divers to raise the Hunley will depend a lot on how well it has, or has not, been preserved. 'We are hoping it can show the differences in sediment structure and determine the amount of corrosion,' says Amer. This will show how much metal is left. 'If there is a lot of metal there we can hook some slings under it and pull the thing up,' he says. Once this survey has been completed, Amer will pass on the results to various teams of specialists who will help assess the results to decide ,firstly, if the remains are those of the Hunley and secondly, to determine what condition they are in. There are several possibilities. At one end of the spectrum it could be found that the Hunley is sufficiently well preserved that it can be brought up and displayed. Equally, it might be decided that any attempt to raise the wreck would destroy it. If it is found that the Hunley still contains any remains of the crew members who went down with it then the site could be declared a war grave, in which case it will remain unmolested, with some sort of marker being positioned in honour of the men who died there. Since all of the members of the crew can be named, it would be possible to trace some of their descendants, whose wishes would be taken into account. The Hunley itself is still the property of the US government - having ceded to the Union as part of the spoils of war - and precedent shows that a properly qualified salvage team would be allowed to raise the wreck and preserve it for public display. In the meantime, once the wreck of the Hunley has been positively identified, it will be up to the US Coastguard to protect the site from trophy-hunting divers. If Cussler and Amer manage to raise the Hunley, it will not be the first time the craft has been salvaged. The submarine sank several times before it finally managed its successful voyage of destruction. After each disaster, Hunley was raised and a new and very brave crew of volunteers found. The Hunley was originally developed in an attempt to break the Union blockade of Charleston Harbour. There was very little the Confederates could do by way of conventional naval attacks against the blockading ships from the much stronger Union Navy. The South had had some success with semi-submersible craft known as Davids. These steam-driven boats ran with their decks awash, each with just the turrets and a single smoke stack protruding above the surface. But this was enough for the attacking craft to be spotted on its approach. Even so, one of the Davids was used in a successful attack on ships blockading Charleston Harbour, inflicting damage on the USS New Ironsides on the night of October 5th 1863. The weapon used with the Davids was the recently developed spar torpedo, which little more than a contact mine at the end of a long pole. The mine consisted of a cylinder containing some 50-75 lbs of gunpowder, with sensitive glass fuses protruding at different angles. The pole was intended to be lowered several feet underwater just before the attack, by means of a windlass. To detonate the mine it was only necessary to ram it into the side of the target, well below the waterline, much to the terror of the first David's crew, most of whom abandoned ship after the explosion brought a rain of water and debris crashing down around them. But the twenty or so feet between the mine and themselves was sufficient to prevent any real damage. Encouraged by the partial success of the Davids, three men began work to design and build a truly submersible attack craft. Manufacturers Baxter Watson and James R. McClintock teamed up with sugar broker Horace L. Hunley, to design and build the Confederacy's first real submarine, the Pioneer. Pioneer was 34 ft long, by 4 ft across the beam, and 4 ft in height. It weighed about 4 tons and was probably armed with a towed mine. The crew consisted of two or three men. The craft was lost with its crew during trials in lake Pontchartrain, off New Orleans. Some time after the war the rusty remains were discovered by swimmers and raised. The craft is now on public display. A larger and improved Pioneer was then built to the design of Hunley, McClintock and Watson at the Parks & Lyons engineering works in Mobile, Alabama. This too sank, when it was swamped during a storm while under tow from Mobile to Fort Morgan, to do battle against the Union blockade. This time, there were no deaths. When Hunley and his colleagues first submitted plans for a third boat, the Confederate authorities at first refused to allow yet another submarine project to be started. It was only when the Hunley offered to finance the venture himself, aware of the big prizes on offer for sinking Union ships, that permission to continue was given. Parks & Lyons constructed the submarine from Hunley's plans. it was a simple underwater boat constructed from a steam engine boiler cut lengthways, and with a 12 inch strip of iron tightly riveted to each side. Rounded fore and aft sections completed the water-tight craft, ending up some 30 ft long and 5 feet high, with 4 ft on the beam. A small conning tower was added to each end and a ventilation pipe along the centre line. The craft was propelled by a helical screw that was hand-cranked by eight men, crouched along the length of the hull. The hatches were placed at the top of each conning tower allowing only the captain and one other officer to stand, the captain with his head inside the fore conning tower, using tiny glass observation ports to guide the boat. The second officer doubled as the eighth member of the cranking team. The craft was submerged by means of variable ballast tanks combined with the action of a vertical rudder or hydroplane. The only instruments available to the captain were a magnetic compass and a mercury depth gauge. But the H.L. Hunley, as it later became known, had all the most important features of submarines used in the first half of this century, albeit in a rudimentary form. The biggest drawback of the Hunley was that in order to cover any distance it had to run on the surface with ventilation pipe open to allow the crew to crank the boat forward until they were close enough to the target to submerge for attack. This meant that the craft, sitting low in the water, was in constant danger of being swamped by any moderate sea. And this it did with a vengeance. As soon as Parks & Lyons had completed work on the Hunley in September 1863, it was taken out into the Mobile river for trials and, having passed with flying colours, was shipped out to Charleston, South Carolina, Where General P.G.T. Beauregard was keen to deploy it against the Union fleet blockading the harbour. But soon after the Hunley arrived in Charleston, disaster struck . Confederate Navy Lieutenant John Payne was appointed to command Hunley and was ordered to take Hunley and its crew of raw recruits out into the harbour on a trial run. But as soon as the boat had left the dockside, it was caught in the wake of a paddle steamer. Water immediately gushed down into the open hatches, plunging the helpless crew to their deaths, although Payne managed to climb free in time to save himself. The boat was easily raised and the dead men removed to allow Payne to take another trainee crew out for sea trials. This time, Payne managed to reach as far as the outer harbour before a sudden squall blew up, swamping the again-open hatches. Miraculously, Payne escaped for a second time, this time with two other men, leaving six to plunge to the depths with their craft. Later, the submarine was raised for a second time and towed back to Charleston from where more volunteers were recruited to replace the men who had died. But the third crew was no luckier than the first two, and a further five men died when the ship that the Hunley was tied to pushed the smaller craft under, again flooding the open hatches, plunging the boat to the bottom. And again, Payne saved himself, this time with three of his crew. With nineteen men dead, Beauregard was losing patience with experimental submarines, or at least the ability of Navy crews to man them. Thinking that the people that built the craft might best be able to control it, Beauregard sent a request to Horace Hunley in Mobile to bring a team to Charleston to help make a success out of the venture. So McClintock was joined by Hunley, Thomas Parks, and some of the men from Parks & Lyons. With Hunley at the captain's turret, the boat was taken out to the Stone river to perform a series of successful trials. These tests included dummy attacks on the C.S.S. Indian Chief. But their undoubted experience did not save them. During another dummy attack on the Indian Chief, Hunley, at the controls, secured the hatches and started to open the forward sea cocks on the final approach. But Hunley either opened the cock too far, or failed to close it properly, as water started to cascade into the boat. The boat hit the bottom, with Hunley feverishly working the pump as water swirled around the crews legs. Subsequent investigations showed that the forward cock was still open, so no matter how hard Hunley tried, he could not empty the water from the boat. As Hunley worked the forward pump, so Parks worked the pump aft, causing the boat to lighten by the stern, raising it to a near vertical angle. The crew worked frantically to release bolts holding the iron ballast bars, without success, and in a last-ditched attempt to escape, Hunley and Parks tried to open the hatches. But the water pressure was too great, and when, several days later, the boat was raised and opened, Hunley was found with a terrible expression of despair on his blackened face. The crew had all suffocated. Command of the H.L. Hunley, as it had now been named, passed to infantry lieutenant George E. Dixon, who proceeded on an extensive course of instruction for his newly-recruited crew, determined to have no more disasters. One of the trails was an endurance test, during which the boat was secured and taken down to the bottom to see how long a crew could last without fresh air. They managed an incredible two hours and 35 minutes before surfacing and almost suffered another disaster, when the after pump became clogged with seaweed and had to be dismantled. Events surrounding the H.L. Hunley's final mission differ to a large degree. It is known that the Hunley set out on the evening of February 17, 1864, under the command of Lieut. Dixon, to attack the Union USS Housatonic, moored off Beach Inlet, just outside the Harbour. Making full use of the receding tide, Dixon was able to catapult the Hunley out into the waters surrounding the Harbour, to where he found the USS Housatonic at anchor. Diving the boat, Dixon continued on a straight course for the target, estimating progress with a stopwatch, until he was able to ram the spar torpedo into the hull of his victim. At 8.45pm, lookouts on the Housatonic spotted a strange object in the water, which they reported to acting master of their ship, J.R.Crosby. He gave the order to raise the anchor, and the ship began to move astern, but not in time to be saved. As the torpedo exploded, it ignited the magazine, devastating the ship. But what happened to the Hunley is not clear, for it never returned. Some authors believe it was immediately sunk, either as a result of blowing its own bows off, or by becoming entangled in the wreckage of the Housatonic. But eye witnesses insisted that the Hunley signalled its successful attack to the shore, as planned, as it returned to the harbour. It is quite feasible that as the Housatonic began to make way astern, it ran over the Hunley. It is also possible that the boat was sunk and the crew taken away into captivity. Equally, the submarine could have escaped, only to suffer yet another disaster on the way back into the harbour. Confusion over the fate of the Hunley may have been introduced when, in 1876, the US Army Corp of Engineers commissioned a Mr Maillefert to help them clear Charleston Harbour of wrecks. Maillefert was paid $1000 to clear the harbour down to a depth of 20 feet and allowed to keep any material that he salvaged. He managed to clear a large part of the wreck of the Housatonic and claimed that he had found the Hunley inside the hull. He was almost certainly mistaken. Given the resemblance of the Hunley to a steam boiler, what Maillefert found was more likely the Housatonic's own boiler. Now that the Hunley has been located, new light will be shed on the fate of the submarine on its final voyage, regardless of whether or not the remains are strong enough to be raised. But one thing is certain -- even though the H.L. Hunley did not survive its first war mission, it did become the first submarine to strike a successful blow against an enemy by sinking one of his ships. Above or below the waves, the wreck of the H.L. Hunley will still stand a lasting memorial to the bravery of the men who, despite knowing the danger involved, dared to venture out in her. The author would be interested to hear from anyone who has any further information on this subject, or who has any comments to make about this article. This article was first published in Military Illustrated (UK) ©Ray Taylor 1995, 1996, all rights reserved **COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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