Time Capsule From the Sea
Artifacts from the South's Submarine are Turning Fable into Fact
Hunley's team quickly applied the lessons learned from the first two subs-hand-cranked propulsion worked better than a steam engine, for example-to the construction of the Hunley, finishing it in July 1863. After a quick test in Mobile, it was shipped north to Charleston. The city's military commander, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, skeptically referred to it as "the fish torpedo boat." Once thought to be a converted steam boiler, the sub was actually quite sophisticated. Nearly 40 feet long but just 4 feet high, it had 10 sealed portholes, two narrow hatches, and a smooth, flat, streamlined shape that resembles a World War II-era German U-Boat. It used a snorkel system for piping air into the vessel, possibly using bellows for pumping. With seven men cranking a propeller shaft, the Hunley could cruise at 3 knots, or 3.5 miles per hour. The craft's commander sat in front, steering with a primitive joystick. Water tanks at either end could be filled and emptied with hand pumps to move the ship up and down. Even the exterior rivets were ground down to make the sub's skin smooth as a fish's scales. "It represents a quantum leap to the modern 20th-century submarine," McConnell says.
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Barbed bomb. Despite all of these technological advances, operating the sub involved a lethal learning process. Shortly after its arrival in Charleston, the sub sank during a test run due to a crewman's error, killing five of the sailors on board. A few months later, Hunley himself was on the ship when it sank a second time, killing everyone inside. The sub-and its dead crew and inventor-remained at the bottom for days before the Confederate Navy salvaged it.
Despite the reservations of Beauregard and others, Charleston's situation was desperate enough to organize one more try. The target was the Housatonic, an 11-gun Union steamship stationed at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. The plan was simple: The crew would crank its way more than 5 miles out to the Housatonic, ram a barbed bomb into the ship's wooden hull, and detonate it. On a cold night in February, the Hunley set out on the attack.
Just before 9 p.m., lookouts on the Housatonic spotted something slipping through the water nearby. Within minutes, an explosion ripped the Housatonic in half and killed five Union sailors. It was the first time a submarine sank a warship. "That night, she changed forever the way war was fought in the water," McConnell says.
It's what happened next that remains shrouded in mystery. After the Housatonic exploded, the Hunley surfaced long enough to send up a blue flare. Then it disappeared without a trace. For more than a century, Charlestonians and others obsessed over the demise of the Hunley. At one point, circus impresario P.T. Barnum offered a $100,000 prize to anyone who could find the ship. But it wasn't until 1970 that someone succeeded, when underwater archaeologist E. Lee Spence plotted the ship's location with a compass and maps. Then it took another 25 years before permission was granted by South Carolina to salvage the wreck. Divers feeling their way through murky water exposed part of the sub's hull. In 30 feet of water and beneath 3 feet of fine silt lay an almost perfectly preserved craft, listing at a slight angle.
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