The Hunley

BEFORE DEPARTING ON HIS DOOMED MISSION ON FEB ruary 17, 1864, Lt. George Dixon slipped a $20 gold piece into his pocket. The young Confederate’s sweetheart had given him the coin for good luck, and so far it had worked better than she could have dreamed. At the Battle of Shiloh the coin had deflected a Union bullet and saved Dixon’s life. The lieutenant called the dented disk his “life preserver.”

As commander of an unusual and dangerous vessel, Dixon would need all the luck he could get. The CSS H. L. Hunley was a submarine, and it had already been deadlier for its own crews than for the enemy. The vessel had sunk twice and drowned 13 men, including the person for whom it was named, Horace Lawton Hunley. After each sinking it had been hauled up from the bottom and returned to service.

Now, after weeks of practice, Dixon and his seven-man crew were going to attack the USS Housatonic , a Union sloop of war anchored almost four miles away outside Charleston Harbor. At about seven on a calm, moonlit evening, the men set out from their base at Battery Marshall on Sullivan’s Island and laboriously propelled their sub through the water by turning a crank that passed through its cramped interior. Projecting from the Hunley’s bow was a long iron spar, a deadly stinger with 90 pounds of explosives at its tip. Dixon planned to ram the spar into the Housatonic , back away, and pull a lanyard to set off the explosive.

Sometime around eight forty-five the Housatonic’s officer of the deck, John Crosby, sighted what looked like “a tide ripple or a porpoise.” Union sailors knew that danger lurked in Charleston’s waters. In October 1863 a very low-lying explosivecarrying boat called the David had badly damaged the ironclad New Ironsides , and Rebel deserters had warned authorities about an underwater boat. Several men began firing rifles and pistols at the thing as it backed away from the ship. The Housatonic’s captain, Charles W. Pickering, appeared on deck and fired buckshot from a double-barreled shotgun. “I thought of going forward myself to get clear of the torpedo,” he reported, “but, reflecting that my proper station was aft, I remained there, and was blown into the air the next instant from where I stood on the port side abreast of the mizzenmast.” The Housatonic was on the shallow bottom within minutes. Five men died, and the others scrambled into the rigging. As they clung there and waited for rescue, they didn’t likely realize that they had just witnessed a historic event. The Hunley had become the first submarine ever to sink a vessel in combat.

But the attack turned out to be a murder-suicide, for the Hunley never returned to Battery Marshall. It vanished in the night, and its disappearance became one of the great mysteries of the Civil War, a story shrouded in legend. One report claimed that Dixon had survived the mission and been spotted afterward in Charleston. Another said the submarine had been sucked inside the Housatonic and shared its victim’s watery grave. Details about the Hunley ’s design and construction also remained obscure. According to most histories, the Hunley was hardly a sophisticated killing machine; in fact, they said it had been thrown together from an iron boiler.

The Hunley ’s true story finally began to emerge in 1995, when searchers funded by the novelist Clive Cussler discovered the submarine buried in mud 27 feet underwater outside Charleston Harbor. In August 2000 a recovery team raised the vessel and brought it to the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, a multimillion-dollar facility at the former Charleston Naval Base especially equipped to study the Hunley . Today the submarine rests in 90,000 gallons of fresh water in a huge tank, heeled over onto its starboard side as it sat on the harbor bottom, the concretions accumulated over more than a century still crusting most of its slim form. Investigators have removed several of the hull’s iron plates to gain access to the cramped chamber that became a tomb for George Dixon and his crew. As conservators have taken steps to protect the fragile iron hull and its contents, archeologists have painstakingly recovered and preserved thousands of artifacts, including buttons, wallets, the sub’s signal lantern, and even Dixon’s lucky coin. They have also found the skeletal remains of the crew, including some preserved brain tissue still inside skulls. The remains were carefully studied and then laid to rest in Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery in April 2004.

“It was not just a piece of metal, it was a tomb,” says the senior conservator, Paul Mardikian, a Frenchman who previously worked on ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and the Confederate raider CSS Alabama . “There is nothing like this project, where you raise an artifact—a real time capsule- and bring it into a facility where you’re going to do the forensic work on the vessel and the crew.” He compares the painstaking work to the excavation of a Paleolithic cave.

Maria Jacobsen, the senior archeologist, echoes Mardikian’s assessment: “This is a truly unique find. It’s a true time capsule in every sense of the word. It’s immensely complex.” That complexity has demanded that work on the Hunley proceed methodically, and the slow pace means that the submarine has not yet yielded all its secrets. What the investigators have learned is that the Hunley was much more than an improvised weapon of last resort, and that it certainly was not a converted boiler. “As a matter of fact,” says Jacobsen, “it’s like nothing anybody had ever seen at this point.”

“This point,” the American Civil War, was a great incubator for battlefield innovations like the Hunley . The war was the first time trains transported troops long distances to the battlefield and the first time repeating rifles were used in combat. The ironclads Merrimack and Monitor made wooden ships obsolete overnight when they dueled at Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862. The war speeded the development of underwater mines, and some inventors sought to wage war underwater with submersible “infernal machines” that could strike surface ships without warning.

“The Hunley , for all of the justifiable attention she has received, was but one of perhaps two dozen underwater boats constructed during the conflict by both sides,” writes Mark K. Ragan in his fascinating book, Union and Confederate Submarine Warfare in the Civil War . “Most of these experimental boats failed to meet expectations, and several proved fatal to their operators. Some, however, were so advanced in their design they had functioning lockout chambers that enabled divers to leave and operate under the keels of unsuspecting warships. Others experimented with air purification systems, crude periscopes, underwater lights, self-propelled torpedoes, electric batteries, and steam power” (see “The Hunley Was Not Alone,” page 45).

The concept of an underwater righting boat goes back at least to the American Revolution. In 1776 David Bushnell of Connecticut designed and built a hand-powered one-man sub he called the Turtle to sink British warships. The Turtle was certainly pioneering, but strong river currents and a drill that couldn’t pierce the copper sheathing of the target ship thwarted its only attempt to attack an enemy vessel. In 1800 Robert Fulton built a submarine called the Nautilus and tried to sell it to Napoleon Bonaparte. “The weapon conceived by Citizen Fulton is a means of terrible destruction,” wrote the French commissioners who studied the proposal, but in the end they rejected the vessel, as did France’s archenemy, Britain, to which FuIton took it next. President Thomas Jefferson was more forwardlooking when Fulton approached the United States with designs for underwater mines. “I have ever looked to the submarine boat as most to be depended on for attaching [mines],” Jefferson wrote to him. “I should wish to see a corps of young men trained to this service.”

Jefferson’s wish finally came true during the Civil War, and as is often the case, necessity was the mother of invention. After the war got under way in 1861, a gradually tightening Union blockade of Southern ports began squeezing the Confederacy to death even as it suffered reverses on the battlefields. The Rebels couldn’t compete above water, so why not go below?

James McClintock and Baxter Watson intended to do just that. They were New Orleans-based engineers who built steam gauges and had invented an improved process for manufacturing minié balls (a kind of bullet). They began work on a submarine sometime in 1861. The next February they launched the Hartley ’s first direct predecessor, the Pioneer , a black, cigar-shaped vessel 34 feet long and 4 feet wide. It had a crew of three: a commander and two men who turned its propeller by hand with a crank. Navigating in it proved difficult. The sub had a mercury device that determined depth by measuring water pressure, but the iron hull wreaked havoc on its compass. Sometimes the crew ran their plodding vessel aground but kept laboring away at the crank, oblivious. They did manage to destroy a barge in a test on Lake Pontchartrain: The Pioneer approached its target on the surface, dragging an explosive on a long rope, and then descended and passed under the target. When the “torpedo” hit the barge, it created such a satisfying explosion that “only a few splinters were heard from.”

At some point McClintock and Watson were joined by Horace Lawton Hunley, a wealthy lawyer, politician, and collector at the New Orleans customhouse. Hunley probably saw the Pioneer as both a way to aid the rebellion and a potential source of profit, for its builders intended to use it as a privateer. But the Union Navy under Admiral Farragut captured New Orleans before the Pioneer could go into service, and it ended its short life scuttled in a canal. Union sailors later found it, salvaged it, and then did nothing with it but study it. After the war it was sold as scrap for $43.

Undaunted, McClintock, Baxter, and Hunley relocated to Mobile, Alabama, and started work on a second submarine at the Park and Lyons machine shop there. They secured the engineering help of William Alexander, an Englishman who had been assigned to Park and Lyons to work on muskets. McClintock wanted to give his second submarine a better propulsion system. “There was much time and money lost in efforts to build an electromagnetic engine for propelling this boat, but without success,” he wrote after the war. “I afterwards fitted cranks to turn the propeller by hand, working four men at a time. But, the air being so close and the work so hard, we were unable to get a speed sufficient to make the boat of service against vessels blockading this port.”

This second sub, which different sources call either the Pioneer II or the American Diver , was launched in Mobile in February 1863. Franklin Buchanan, who had commanded the ironclad Merrimack and was now in command of the naval forces at Mobile, reported on the tests. “I have witnessed the operations of the boat in the water,” he wrote. ”… Its speed was not more than two miles per hour. Since then other trials have been made all proving failures.” On its last trial the Pioneer II sank in Mobile Harbor, though without loss of life.

Apparently hoping that the third try would be the charm, McClintock, Watson, and Hunley embarked on yet another submarine. This time they organized a group of investors called the Singer Submarine Corps (after one of it members) to help absorb the $15,000 cost. They also brought a new member to their team, George Dixon, a Kentucky native and former river-boat engineer. Wounded at Shiloh in April 1862, Dixon arrived in Mobile still suffering from the effects of his injuries.

The team launched the third submarine, the Hunley , in Mobile in July 1863. The vessel was small—only about 40 feet long. Two conning towers protruded from the top of its hull, each crowned by a hatchway just 15 inches wide, barely enough for crew members to squeeze through into a cramped compartment about 4 feet tall and 3½ feet wide. The commander stood with his head in the forward conning tower while his crew of seven sat on a plank on the port side and operated the propeller with a zigzag crank that ran through the interior. To descend, the commander and first officer filled ballast tanks that lay fore and aft of the crew compartment, separated by bulkheads with an 8½-inch gap at the top. Water simply flowed in when seacocks were open. To surface, the commander and first mate emptied the tanks with hand-powered pumps. It was a simple design. Sealed tanks would have required a method of forcing the water inside; the open tanks simply allowed the displaced air to flow out into the crew compartment. That simplicity, however, would have fatal consequences.

Near the bow a pair of long, narrow dive planes—fins that could be angled up or down—allowed the sub to rise and descend. The commander operated them with a lever. In an emergency the crew could surface by unscrewing bolts and releasing portions of the weighted keel. The sub also had a crude snorkel system, two metal pipes that protruded from a box behind the forward conning tower, with a bellows inside to pump in air.

McClintock and company sought to design the craft to slip easily through the water. They constructed the hull with 16 castiron plates riveted end to end, not overlapped and riveted as in ship construction. To make the boat even more streamlined, the builders carefully hammered all the external rivets until they were flush with the surface. Iron ring stiffeners strengthened the hull and helped it resist the water pressure below the surface. The Hunley ’s designers also contoured the keel to match the hull’s curves. They attached solid cast-iron caps at the bow and stern that tapered to nearly knife-blade points and built the two conning towers with almost teardrop shapes, with sharp iron cutwaters mounted ahead of them. They even installed small iron fins in front of the dive planes to deflect seaweed or ropes that might entangle them.

The vessel’s two dive planes reveal further sophisticated thinking. The rod connecting them was not mounted in the center of the planes but slightly toward the front. “That actually makes sense,” says Jacobsen. “You don’t want the dive plane to pivot too easily or it will rotate every time it hits the resistance of the water. So you want that aft plane to be a little heavier.” The commander’s dive-plane lever was counterweighted to compensate for the off-center connecting rod.

The Hunley ’s least sophisticated element was its propulsion system. Like the Pioneers , the Hunley relied on manpower. “One of the things the sketches indicated,” Jacobsen says, “was that the crew did indeed sit on one side, and we couldn’t understand: How did they deal with weight distribution if you had all these guys sitting on one side? At first we thought maybe they had a counterweight system, but it doesn’t make sense to have fixed counterweights, because when the crew is not there, your submarine won’t sit properly in the water. Well, what they actually did was … nothing.” They didn’t have to do anything. When the crew worked the crank, the tight quarters forced them to hunch over, placing their center of gravity right over the keel.

The crank turned the propeller via two reduction gears. “They’re reduction gears because the gear on the propeller shaft is smaller in diameter than the one on the cranks,” says Jacobsen. “That makes for a very smooth, very fast-operating propeller, obviously.” This rudimentary propulsion system also apparently employed a large flywheel, but its exact details are still hidden behind layers of marine growth that the Hunley team has yet to remove. “Now the flywheel—and here I’m guessing— has two functions,” Jacobsen says, “to make the propeller operate smoothly and laso to counter the propeller’s inertia. The heavier the flywheel, the better. They basically made it as big as they could within the parameters of the crew compartment.” The propeller had three blades and looked “eerily similar to propelers that are used on modern submarines,” Jacobsen adds. It rotated inside a metal shroud that incresed its efficiency and also protected it from snagging on nets or lines.

As a designer McClintok was ahead of his time; as a commander he proved timid. In August 1863 the Hunley travelled by rail to Charleston so its civilian crew could operate against the Union blockade there. Later that month the Confederate military authorities under Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, frustrated by McClintock’s apparent unwillingness to confront the enemy, seized the Hunley and assigned it to a military crew under the command of Lt. John Payne. Within a week of the takeover the submarine was on the bottom of Charleston Harbor and five of its crew were dead.

The causes of that accident remain a mystery. Some accounts say the wake of a passing vessel simply swamped the submarine. Or the catastrophe may have been Payne’s fault. According to one crewman, Charles Hasker, Payne was sitting in the forward hatch as a steamer began to tow the Hunley ; he became tangled in a line, and as he struggled to extricate himself, his foot struck a prop that kept the diving planes level, dropping the fins into the dive position. The Hunley plunged beneath the surface. Whatever the cause, water rushed in through the open hatches and the submarine sank. Payne escaped, as did Hasker and another man who managed to exit the aft hatch. Five others were not so lucky.

Undeterred by the disaster, Horace Hunley volunteered to take command of the salvaged submarine. Beauregard accepted the offer, and Hunley recruited another volunteer crew from workers in Mobile familiar with the boat. Among them was Lt. George Dixon. On October 15 Hunley took this new crew—Dixon was absent for some reason—on another training mission. At 9:35 A.M. observers saw the submarine descend. It did not surface. Once again the Hunley was salvaged. This time Beauregard was present when the submarine was opened. “The unfortunate men were contorted into all kinds of horrible attitudes,” Beauregard recalled, “some clutching candles, evidently endeavoring to force open the man-holes; others lying on the bottom, tightly grappled together, and the blackened faces of all presented the expression of their despair and agony.” The salvagers had to amputate arms before they could remove the bloated bodies through the submarine’s narrow hatches.

William Alexander deduced what had probably happened, a chain of blunders and mishaps. Hunley had flooded his ballast tank to dive but then became distracted by lighting a candle and allowed the tank to overflow. The bow-heavy submarine plunged into the harbor mud with its stern raised. Now the ballast tank’s simple design proved deadly. The water spilled from the tank into the crew compartment. Hunley tried to pump out the tank but forgot to close his seacock. As the submarine filled with water, the crew tried but failed to release the weighted keel. Hunley and his first officer kept their heads in the conning towers, but the water pressure outside prevented them from opening the hatches. Eventually they died of asphyxiation. The rest of the crew drowned.

The “indescribably ghastly” scene was too much for Beauregard. “I can have nothing more to do with that Submarine boat,” he told Dixon. “It is more dangerous to those who use it than to the enemy.” But Dixon was a “brave and determined man,” and he got Beauregard to relent. However, the general did order the lieutenant to remain above water and attack as a low-lying surface ship.

That approach had worked for the David , the small steamer that had successfully struck the New Ironsides . But after the David ’s attack, Rear Adm. John A. Dahlgren ordered his ironclads in Charleston Harbor to take defensive precautions, including protecting their undersides with booms and weighted nets. Vigilance increased more when a pair of Confederate deserters warned about a “fish-boat” within the Confederate lines. Dixon now realized that his only hope of success lay in attacking wooden ships outside the harbor’s mouth.

The Hunley ’s plan to attack by using a towed torpedo wouldn’t work if the sub was going to stay on the surface, so Dixon opted to attach the explosive to a spar on the Hunley ’s bow, as the David had. The Hunley would ram the spar’s harpoonlike tip into an enemy’s hull, attaching the explosive, and then back away to a safe distance, from which Dixon would yank a 150-foot lanyard to set off the explosive.

But first they had to reach a target, and that required backbreaking effort, as Dixon and his crew found during practice runs. “Many times it taxed our utmost exertions to keep from drifting out to sea, daylight often breaking while we were yet in range,” Alexander recalled. “On several occasions we came to the surface for air, opened the cover and heard the men in the Federal picket boats talking and singing.”

While he waited for proper conditions— a smooth sea, an outgoing tide, and a moonless night- Dixon conducted a test to see how long the Hunley could remain submerged. He told his crew that he would surface as soon as any man shouted out, “Up!” Then he and Alexander filled their ballast tanks and settled the Hunley on the bottom near shore. Their candle went out after only 25 minutes. Two more hours passed as the air grew increasingly stale in the dark sub. “Not a word was said, except the occasional, ‘How is it,’ between Dixon and myself,” Alexander recalled, “until it was as the voice of one man, the word ‘up’ came from all nine.” Dixon and Alexander immediately started pumping out the ballast tanks, but Alexander’s pump didn’t work. “From experience I guessed the cause of the failure, took off the cap of the pump, lifted the valve, and drew out some seaweed that had choked it,” Alexander wrote. This final delay was almost too much for the crew. “All hands had already endured what they thought was the utmost limit. Some of the crew almost lost control of themselves.” The submarine finally broke the surface after remaining underwater for 2 hours and 35 minutes—so long, in fact, that observers onshore had sent word to Beauregard that the Hunley had once again killed its crew.

On February 5 William Alexander received orders to report to Mobile to help construct a breech-loading repeating gun. It was “a terrible blow” for him, but it also saved his life. Twelve days later Dixon decided that despite a full moon, conditions were good enough for an attack. That night the men of the Hunley squirmed down through the hatches, assumed their positions, and headed out to sea for their fatal rendezvous with the Housatonic .

The Hunley did survive the attack, but not for long. After the Housatonic sank, a crew member spotted a blue light shining not far away. A sentry at the sub’s base at Battery Marshall saw it too. It was a prearranged signal from Dixon to kindle a bonfire to help guide the sub home. Shortly after Dixon gave the signal, the Hunley and its crew were on the bottom.

The teams working on the submarine since its recovery have been gradually unveiling its secrets, but the process has been slow and painstaking. Their top priority is preserving the submarine and its relics; the investigation into its design and demise are undertaken with that in mind. They expect to learn more as the work proceeds, but they will have to wait until all the concretion is removed before they can study the hull closely.

The information they have gathered already, though, has ended once and for all the myth that the submarine was little more than a crudely improvised weapon. “It has the hallmarks of a modern submarine,” says Jacobsen. “The elongated, probably fairly hydrodynamic hull shape, the elliptical cross section, the conning towers, the weight, the ballast, the way the propulsion is in the stern, the bow planes, all of these features are the birth, if you will, of modern submarine design.”

Yet one major question remains unanswered: Why did the Hunley sink? Did it succumb to damage it suffered during the attack, either from the explosion’s concussion or from the Housatonic ’s small-arms fire? Did a Union ship rushing to the Housatonic ’s aid collide with the low-lying sub and send it to the bottom? “There are clues, but I would rather not talk about it at this point,” Jacobsen says. “We have only begun that investigation.” She does reveal, however, that the positions of the human remains indicated the water entered the sinking submarine fairly quickly, and sediment patterns indicate that it came in from the bow. “It’s a giant forensic puzzle,” she says, as she stands on the catwalk above the Hunley’s tank, gazing through the clear water at the historic submarine. “The traces are there, but they have grown a bit cold. But we will have the answers.”