War at Sea: A Shipwrecked History From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century by James P. Delgado

Author:James P. Delgado [Delgado, James P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Maritime History & Piracy, Social Science, Archaeology, Military, General, World, Naval
ISBN: 9780190888039
Google: 1CieDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-06-27T00:30:29.301552+00:00

The second accident, in October 1863, with another crew, this time commanded by Horace L. Hunley, one of the financial backers for the sub, also ended badly when the sub dived at too sharp an angle because the crew mistakenly flooded the bow ballast tank too quickly, sending the sub slamming into the muddy bed of the Cooper River. Half buried in the river bottom, 15 meters down with the stern rising out of the mud at a 35-degree angle, the sub was trapped, and the crew slowly suffocated. Three weeks later, when the Confederates were finally able to raise the sub, the scene inside when the hatches were opened was “indescribably ghastly; the unfortunate men were distorted into all kinds of horrible attitudes … the blackened faces of all presented the expression of their despair and agony.”

Undeterred, another crew readied the craft for a submerged attack on the Union fleet off Charleston Harbor. On February 17, 1864, the submarine, now formally named for its dead backer and captain as CSS H. L. Hunley, slowly moved out to sea under the command of Lieutenant George Dixon. Instead of towing a torpedo, Hunley carried a charge at the tip of an iron spar attached to the sub’s bow. Heading into the night and toward the sloop-of-war USS Housatonic, two and a half miles away, Dixon brought his sub and crew right up the starboard side of the Union warship. Lookouts spotted the sub and raised the alarm. As the crew beat to quarters, sentries opened fire, hitting the exposed upper works of the sub with musket fire. Captain Charles Pickering, Housatonic’s commander, fired his double-barreled shotgun into the conning tower, which may have been open.

Then, just as Housatonic started to back away from the attacking sub, the spar torpedo exploded. Housatonic sank in about six minutes. H. L. Hunley slowly backed away from the sinking vessel, and then disappeared, not to be seen for over 130 years. The success of the small sub, the first to sink an enemy warship in combat, was as striking an example of the potential of the new technology to change naval warfare as the clash between the ironclads. That and the mysterious disappearance of H. L. Hunley inspired numerous searches for the lost submarine that began in 1873 and continued into the next century.

In May 1995, archaeologists Ralph Wilbanks and Wes Hall, working under contract for Clive Cussler’s National Underwater and Maritime Agency (NUMA), discovered the wreck of H. L. Hunley in nine meters of water, completely buried in sediment. Dixon and his crew had not gotten very far from Housatonic: the two wrecks lay about 300 meters apart. Wilbanks and Hall removed enough sediment to expose a diving plane and one of the hatches, verifying that this was in fact the lost submarine. In 1996, archaeologists from the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) and the Submerged Resources Center from the National Park Service (NPS) returned to the site and did a more extensive test excavation of portions of H.

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