Mystery of the Hunley
American Civil War Submarine
CSS Hunley
One night, over a hundred and forty years ago, a secret weapon named The Hunley became the first ever submarine to destroy an enemy ship. But, that night The Hunley also sank, with all her crew trapped inside. Since then she's remained on the ocean floor. Novelist and adventurer Clive Cussler and divers from his non-profit National Underwater and Marine Agency found the Hunley in 1995. Now, a team of scientists are planning to raise her from her watery grave.
Off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina a team of divers, engineers and scientists are preparing to raise the wreck of the Hunley from the ocean floor. They plan to, carefully, transport it to a laboratory, and open her up to find the remains of the crew inside.
On the 17th February 1864, at the height of the American Civil War, this weapon of the Confederate South, a hand-powered submarine armed with a spar-mounted torpedo successfully attacked and sank the Union warship USS Housatonic.
The recovery team kick-off their multi-million dollar operation by diving down and scouring every inch of the Hunley submarine on the ocean floor. They're looking for anything that might reveal how and why she sank and what happened to the men on board. Archaeologist Claire Peachy has discovered holes in the submarines hull which she think may have been caused by shotgun blasts from the Housatonic.
For centuries, inventors have been trying to take war underwater. As far back as the late 1400s, Leonardo da Vinci had sketched a submersible ship. In the 1600s, a Dutch inventor built an underwater vessel to sell to the British; it never saw battle. The turtle, launched in 1776 by the Americans against the British, was a failure.
The recovery plan is to sink two giant piles into the sea bed, lower a truss on top of them and run 33 slings under the sub. Divers will fill synthetic rubber bags, between the slings and the hull, with expanding foam creating a padded hammock. When the hull is safely cradled they hope to lift it smoothly to the surface. The team has doubts about the Hunley's hull integrity which is held together by rusted rivets. The danger is that as she's lifted, sediment inside her shifts and the rivets fail.
Claie attemps to Squeeze into a mock-up of the Hull
The team's first exploration of the wreck have given them some idea of how cramped it was on the sub. At five feet five inches tall. roughly the height of the average civil war soldier, archaeologist Claire Peachy barely firs inside the hull.
The Hunley was inspired by Horace L. Hunley, an Alabama sugar planter and engineer to come up with the concept of turning some boiler tube into a submarine. Through a series of trial and error experiment, he came up with the Hunley. His ingenious brainchild is a simple, small vessel. Just 40 feet long, 4 feet wide with a beam of only 3 feet. She was hand-powered through the water at only 4 knots. The crew squeezed through two tiny hatches to get onboard. When submerged, their only air supply was the air sealed in with them. Their only light came from a single candle and when it died the crew knew that their oxygen was running out. The Hunley submerged by taking water into two ballast tanks and rose by pumping it out.
The team have made history, the Hunley is the largest iron vessel ever raised from the sea bed. They transport her to a specials conservation lab where she's kept in fresh water to maintain her condition. Now, archaeologists hope that her contents will reveal why she sank and who was on board. They want to preserve her condition, so it will take nearly a year for the full excavation to be completed.
