Time Capsule From the Sea
Artifacts from the South's Submarine are Turning Fable into Fact
In a war filled with amazing stories, the H.L. Hunley's is one of the standouts. An invention born of desperation, the Confederacy's secret weapon was the first submarine ever to sink an enemy warship. The craft was an example of tremendous creativity and engineering under tremendously difficult circumstances.
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The Hunley is also one of the biggest Civil War mysteries left. Since the conflict ended in 1865, an estimated 50,000 books have been published on nearly every aspect of its politics, strategies, tactics, daily life, combat, and civilian experiences-at least a book a day for a century and a half, or one for every 10 men killed in America's most costly war. But in that avalanche of words, the complete story of the Hunley submarine has never been told.
That started to change in August 2000 when the submarine was raised from the bottom of the Atlantic near Charles ton, S.C. Since then, researchers have been pulling together the story of the Hunley's final moments from the artifacts and remains preserved inside. "It's a true time capsule, preserved intact from the Civil War," says Maria Jacobsen, the archaeologist in charge of the Hunley project run by South Carolina. "It's the entire crew, with everything they carried with them that day. It's a treasure for illuminating Civil War history and maritime archaeology."
Hunleytized. Today, that time capsule sits in a tank of near-freezing fresh water. It's not exactly on the beaten path for any of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit Charleston each year. Located on a decommissioned naval base 5 miles north of the city's famed waterfront, the Hunley can be viewed by visitors only on weekends. And yet thousands manage to find it, crowding the walkway above the tank to stare down at its debris-encrusted hull. "When you stand over that tank and look at her, she speaks to you," says Glenn McConnell, a South Carolina state legislator and the head of the Friends of the Hunley nonprofit. "We like to say that's when you've been 'Hunleytized.'"
This isn't the first time the people of Charleston have been Hunleytized. When the sub arrived on a railcar in 1864, rumors of the new secret weapon flew through the besieged city like wildfire. Three years into the war, the Confederacy's situation was dire. Economically reliant on cotton exports and imported manufactured goods, the South depended on its ports. From the war's first days, the Union targeted Southern cities such as Charleston and Savannah with naval blockades dedicated to starving the rebel states out of resistance. With these ports hemmed in by Union warships, trade was impossible. The Southern populace was struggling just to stay alive, let alone wage war.
Into these desperate straits waded Horace Lawson Hunley, a New Orleans inventor and investor. Hunley and his partners saw lifting the blockades as a combination of patriotic duty and business opportunity. With the Confederacy offering bounties for each Union ship sunk, Hunley and his partners decided a submarine could bring in big bucks. A prototype was tested in 1862 near New Orleans; a more advanced machine called the American Diver was launched in January 1863 near Mobile, Ala., but it soon sunk during a storm.
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.
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.
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."
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."
The researchers were even able to confirm an old legend. Thesub marine's final commander, Lt. George Dixon, was already a veteran of several battles by the time he squeezed through the hatch of the Hunley. At the battle of Shiloh, Dixon was shot in the hip, but the bullet was stopped by a gold coin he was carrying. Excavating the ship's prow, Jacobsen found a $20 gold piece from 1860, badly bent. "My life preserver" was engraved on the back. "When we started the project, that was historical legend," McConnell says. "When we went to lift the remains out, historical fable became fact."
Now that the sub's interior has been cleared, researchers intend to go to work on the hull, which is still covered in a hard layer of sand, silt, and rust. When they start removing this concretion later this year, Jacobsen hopes they'll find the answer to the Hunley's biggest secret: What sank the sub on that February night? "It's a forensic site 140 years old," Jacobsen marvels. "People died, and we don't know how."
That sense of enduring mystery is part of the sub's magnetism. Since the project began more than a decade ago, tens of millions of dollars have been donated to fund the excavation and research. Organizers hope to open a museum in 2013, showcasing a conserved submarine. "Never when we started the project did we think we'd find it with that little corrosion and with that kind of preservation inside her," McConnell says. "The Hunley has all the history and romanticism of something lost at sea like the Titanic."