Time Capsule From the Sea
Artifacts from the South's Submarine are Turning Fable into Fact
Inside, excavators knew, artifacts and human remains would be suspended in a soup of mud. Disturbing the contents would erase volumes of information about the sub's final moments. Even the metal exterior of the craft was tremendously fragile. Project organizers had to throw out the rule book. "Normally when you have a shipwreck, you do the excavation underwater," Jacobsen says. "There was no way we could conduct a standard forensic excavation underwater and still gather the data we would need down the road."
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So on Aug. 8, 2000, after years of planning, the Hunley was carefully lifted whole from its resting place and moved to a specially prepared tank. The effort was unique in the history of under water archaeology, involving 40 divers working around the clock and millions of dollars in equipment.
But the hull's corrosion also meant the researchers couldn't relax once it was out of the water. "Once you bring it up to the surface you have a ticking time bomb on your hands," says Jacobsen. "In a water-filled tank, you could have more corrosion in one year than in 140 years on the bottom." To deal with the challenge, the tank was constructed and filled with chilled water. A mild electrical current runs through the water, slowing the corrosion of the metal.
In 2001, researchers started to remove the iron plates from the top of the submarine. The ship's interior was filled with mud and sediment, some of which had hardened over time to the consistency of concrete. Everything inside-the crew's bones, the ship's controls, and any artifacts the sailors had brought aboard with them-had to be chipped out of this cement-like layer. As excavators pulled out artifacts, each item's location was plotted on a three-dimensional diagram of the Hunley's interior, creating a map of thousands of separate objects, including more than 1,600 bones.
The story the artifacts revealed has dramatically changed the way historians see the sub-and the society that sent it on its final mission. Though excavators still don't know for certain why the sub sank, the distribution of the bones inside shows that the men made no move to escape. "Each was found more or less where that individual would have been stationed," says forensic genealogist Linda Abrams, who is researching the Hunley's crew. "Either it happened so fast they were unable to react in time, or it happened in such a way that they were unable to react. Maybe they were unconscious."
Genealogy. To flesh out the backgrounds of the dead sailors, forensic experts were brought in to analyze the sub's interior as though it were a crime scene. Historians had long assumed the Hunley's crew would fit a certain mold: "We thought they'd be young-expendable, in other words-shorter than average, naïve," Jacobsen says. But the bones told a very different story. All were taller than average, and two topped 6 feet; the ages ranged from 20 to late 40s. Says Jacobsen: "These men were a hand-picked, crack team."
While the archaeologists worked their way through the sediment inside the sub, Abrams delved into archives and history books on two continents to figure out who these sailors might have been. Piecing together everything from crew manifests to English immigration re cords to European census lists, Abrams discovered that half the crew was foreign-born. Abrams has tracked two-Arnold Becker and J.F. Carlsen-all the way to Germany. "How do you explain four foreigners volunteering for what they knew was probably a suicide mission?" asks Abrams. "It's almost like those who became involved in the Confederacy had different motivation than those in the North."
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