The Hunley

First submarine to sink a warship; found 1995, raised 2000, still being studied

The H. L. Hunley was a Confederate submarine nearly 40 feet long, built at Mobile, Alabama, and launched in July 1863, a hand-cranked iron tube meant to break the Union blockade of Charleston. Her backer, Horace Lawson Hunley, had already financed two earlier boats with the designer James McClintock: Pioneer, scuttled at New Orleans in 1862, and American Diver, which foundered off Mobile Bay. Their third was shipped to Charleston by rail in August 1863.

She was a killer of her own crews. On 29 August 1863 she sank during a test and five men died. On 15 October she went down again with all eight aboard, Horace Hunley among them. Both times she was raised and sent back out.

On the night of 17 February 1864, under Lieutenant George E. Dixon with a crew of seven, she crept out from the east of Charleston Harbor toward the 1,240-ton sloop-of-war USS Housatonic on blockade duty. She carried her weapon on a spar at the bow, a copper torpedo the size of a keg that had to be pressed against the enemy's hull. It went off, Housatonic sank, and Hunley became the first combat submarine ever to sink a warship. A lookout on the sinking ship reported a blue light on the water afterwards, perhaps the signal Dixon was due to send. Then the Hunley vanished with all eight men. Twenty-one crewmen died in her three sinkings.

She lay lost for well over a century. A dive team led by Ralph Wilbanks and funded by the novelist Clive Cussler located her in April 1995, though the diver E. Lee Spence had claimed the find decades earlier, and the two men later sued each other over it. At 8:37 on the morning of 8 August 2000 she broke the surface before cheering crowds, and went into a tank of fresh water at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston.

Inside, under the silt, the crew were still seated at their stations, with no sign they had tried to escape. Near Dixon lay a misshapen 1860 $20 gold piece engraved "Shiloh April 6, 1862, My life Preserver"; it had stopped the bullet that struck his leg at Shiloh, and he had carried it ever since. The crew were buried at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston on 17 April 2004. Why they died puzzled researchers for years, until Rachel Lance and blast-trauma specialists at Duke University, firing scaled black-powder charges, concluded the men were killed instantly by the blast of their own torpedo. The submarine can be seen on tours at the Lasch Center.