I'm Happy Saturday everyone. Coming up on the show, we have an interview with Dr Rachel Lance, author of the book In the Waves, My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine. That book recounts her pH d research into the disaster aboard the h L. Hunley, And since the interview is more focused on her research than on the greater story of the Huntley and what happened, we wanted to replay that earlier episode is a Saturday classic for folks who may not know or may not remember the details. Um we briefly discuss her research from back before the book was published. At the end of the episode. One thing to note, there's discussion about one of the Hunley's predecessors, the Pioneer in this episode, which her research uncovered different information about, and we're gonna leave that for the upcoming interview, but when you get to that part, just know that we will be revisiting it in a couple of days. This episode originally came out August. Well Come to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We have a past podcast subject that has been in the news lately, that is the c s S. H L. Hunley, and that's following a newly published paper on the cause of death for the people who were inside that Confederate submarine when it was lost. And typically it's the sort of news that we would cover with an episode update, where we would either play the previous episode first and talk about the new developments afterward, or the other way around. But that previous appearance of the Hunley on our show is from the episode More Shipwrecks Stories Battleships, so it's only about eight minutes of an episode that also covers several other shipwrecks as well. So instead of doing a normal episode update that we might do typically in another circumstances, we're going to give the h L. Hunley the full treatment today. And huge, huge thanks to Rachel Lance, who dropped us a note about the Hunley a few days before we recorded this. She's one of the authors on this paper that just came out about it, which actually grew out of her pH d research, So we will be talking about that some more later in the episode, and the story of the h L. Hunley really begins with the Union blockade of the Confederacy during the Civil War, which was ordered less than a week after the fall of Fort Sumter in South Carolina. So for a quick recap. After multiple Slave states, including South Carolina, seceded after the election of Abraham Lincoln, Major Robert Anderson of the U. S Army occupied Fort Sumter and refused to hand it over to the Confederacy, and after a couple of skirmishes, a Confederate force attacked the fort on April twelfth, and the Union surrendered it on The attack on Fort Sumter is generally marked as the official beginning of the war. Almost immediately after this, the United States government started working on a plan to cut off the Southern ports from international shipping. The goal was to prevent the South from exporting its goods, including cotton and produce, and to prevent Southern states from importing trade goods, weapons, and other material that would be needed for the war. This was all part of a military strategy called the Anaconda Plan, meant to choke off the South and bring a speedy end to the conflict. There is some debate about how effective this was. It definitely made things tougher on the South, but the war was definitely not brought to a remotely speedy end by putting it into place. The government had two main options for stopping commerce at the southern ports. President Lincoln could issue an executive order closing them, or a blockade could prevent ships from entering or leaving them. Either way, though, cutting off the Southern states to shipping would have a negative impact on international trade, which meant other nations were likely to object, so the likely international response had to be part of that decision, and there were pros and cons to each of these two strategies. An executive order closing the ports would be simpler it would not require a massively huge navy to enforce, but it would also be difficult to enforce. This was especially true since violators would need to be tried in the state where they'd violated the order, which at that point would have been a state under Confederate control. That would make such a proceeding highly unlikely, so it was really easy to imagine someone just ignoring the order knowing that it wasn't likely or even impossible that they would be prosecuted for it. A blockade, on the other hand, was an internationally recognized wartime action, and standards for blockades had been outlined in the eighteen fifty six Declaration of Paris. Although the US was not a signatory of the declaration, it could expect other nations to respect the blockade as long as it was implemented and maintained in a way that followed international law. The only exception would be if other nations were willing to officially take the Southern side in the conflict, which would put them at war with the United States, but at the same time, implementing a blockade would shift the framing of the war. You might remember how in our podcast on nuclear close Calls, the United States presented its blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile crisis as a quarantine rather than as a blockade, because a blockade assumed a state of war, and the United States was not at war with Cuba at that time, so this was similar Blockading the Southern States meant that the Union was recognizing the Confederacy as an opposing belligerent. This meant the war was no longer an insurrection or a rebellion or some kind of internal matter. It was a war between two separate opposing entities. On April nineteen, President Lincoln issued a proclamation ordering the blockade of the entire Confederate coast, with the exception of North Carolina and Virginia. He issued a second proclamation eight days later which added those two states to the plan. In the words of his Shill proclamation, quote for this purpose, a competent force will be posted so as to prevent entrance and exit of vessels from the ports aforesaid. If therefore, with a view to violate such blockade, a vessel shall approach or shall attempt to leave, any of the said ports, she will be duly warned by the commander of one of the blockading vessels, who will endorse on her register the fact and date of such warning. And if the same vessel shall again attempt to enter or leave the blockaded ports, she will be captured and sent to the nearest convenient port for such proceedings against her and her cargo as prize as maybe deemed advisable. This was a colossal undertaking. The plan involved not only blocking the twelve major southern ports, but also guarding its entire coastline. This is about three thousand, five hundred miles or five thousand, six hundred kilometers, and although leaders hoped that it could be done with about thirty warships, it became clear really quickly that there was not nearly enough. Small vessels dodged the warships guarding the ports by traveling along inland waterways, and commerce continued essentially unimpeded. I mean, it was harder to do, but like they didn't make much of a dent, and getting done continued at the southern ports for months. Gideon Wells, Secretary of the Navy, then established a Blockade Strategy Board, which convened at the Smithsonian Institution and made an extensive study of Southern waterways to try to figure out how to bolster this blockade. Their research stretched from July to September of eighteen sixty one, and they ultimately issued ten total reports on how to make the blockade more effective. The number of blockading ships would grow well into the hundreds, and by the end of the war, the United States would have the largest navy on earth. Meanwhile, the Confederacy worked out a number of strategies to try to get around this blockade. For a time, the Confederate government tried issuing letters of mark to privateers to operate from the southern ports and try to take prizes from the Union trade ships. This was particularly effective at distracting the United States Navy for the first several months of the war, but as the blockade got tightened, privateers stopped being able to sneak out and into the Southern ports, so their usefulness declined, and eventually their use in the war really waned. Another technique was blockade runners, small lightweight sailing vessels and steamers, most of them civilian vessels that largely operated at night. Blockade runners would sneak in and out of Southern ports and carry goods to and from neutral ports like Bermuda and Nasau. Charleston, South Carolina was a hot spot for blockade runners until early eighteen sixty three, when the Union significantly reinforced the blockade there. Then most blockade running activity moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. Small vessels ran the blockade all through the Gulf Coast throughout the war as well. Having grown up in North Carolina and spent a fair amoun of time in the Wilmington's and Rightsful Beach areas in the summer, blockade runners they have kind of a folk hero quality in this like they're kind of a nod to the very romanticized idea of how the Civil War went down, have kind of a sticking it to the man running the blockade like spirit. Uh So, I have always found the story of the Blackade Runners kind of fascinating, um from that point of view and life experience. Yeah, I think it's certainly like conjurors images of just sort of some interesting stealth moving and yeah, and I can see where it gets romanticized. I think they're they're even you know, hotels and restaurants and things like that named with the Blockade runner or or nods to famous blockade runners. To me, those words will always mean star wars. So of course there were not just efforts to run the Blackade, but also to destroy the ships in the blockade themselves. And that is what brings us to the c s S. H. L. Huntley, which we will talk more about after a sponsor break. The H. L. Hounley is named for Horace Lawson Hunley, who was born in Tennessee on June three. He got a law degree from the University of Louisiana which is now to Lane University in eighteen forty nine, and he opened a law practice in New Orleans. He also worked at the New Orleans Customs House, and he'd previously served in the Louisiana legislature. In eighteen fifty nine or eighteen sixty he bought a plantation, and in addition to the enslaved labor that worked on the plantation, according to the eighteen fifty census, he enslaved eight people for domestic work at his home in New Orleans. By eighteen sixty one, he was doing pretty well financially, but he was always interested in finding new ways to bring in additional income, and one of these was the development of a submarine vessel to be used in the Confederate war effort. This really seems to have in a scheme that was driven more by money and by pride than by patriotism. Although Hunley himself was a slave owner and he supported the institution of slavery, he also thought it was really foolish and shortsighted for the South to be going to war over it. But businessman and the Confederate government had offered substantial prizes to anyone who could sink a Union warship, and Huny really hoped to get himself one of those prizes, and he was also wanting to make his own mark on history and establish a legacy for himself. In his pursuit of a workable submarine, Hunley teamed up with other financial backers and went to James McClintock, an engineer who was living in New Orleans who had also been working on a small underwater craft with Baxter Watson, and once they were all working together, their first attempt at a submarine was the Pioneer, which was a thirty five ft long, roughly cylindrical vessel with tapered ends. It was powered by two men turning a crank while a commander controlled the depth and used fins to steer. Although the Pioneer essentially worked and it was authorized for privateering with a letter of mark, it wasn't particularly refined. It moved slowly, and it leaked, and it never saw combat. When the Union captured New Orleans in April of eighteen sixty two, the team intentionally scuttled it so that it would not fall into enemy hands. This might be where things like privateers get romanticized, because you have to have nerves of steel to be like it's essentially a big barrel. I think I'll take it under water and pull a crank. Yeah, this whole they talked about in the prior episode, which I think was from Sarah and Bablina, about how nerve racking it must have been to be in any of these vessels. I mean, at this point, being in a submarine is still a pretty closed in, tight quarters experience. But these were just basically metal tubes that you had to crawl into and then crouch. Yeah. Yeah, Like, here's the submarine I built in my backyard, Go take on the war effort in it. That would be scary. And from there, Hunley, Watson and McClintock fled to Mobile, Alabama, where they met Thomas W. Park and Thomas B. Lions of the Park and Lions Machine Shop, and it was there that these five men, along with William A. Alexander, worked on another submarine, American Diver. Their efforts with the Diver weren't nearly as successful as they had been with the Pioneer, though McClintock spent months trying to develop an engine that could power the sub rather than using the power of human beings turning cranks, because moving fresh air into a submersible craft was a tricky proposition. Using an engine rather than than human exertion for propulsion would give it a greater range and more power, but he couldn't get an engine that was small enough to fit, so he ultimately gave up after having spent months trying, and then went back to the crank method that they were using before, and he wound up with a design that was slightly larger than the Pioneer and had two additional crew to power that crank. Uh It performed well enough in tests in the lake, but even with two more men working the crank, once the American Diver was launched into the sea, it wasn't powerful enough to overcome the pull of the tide. The crew had to struggle just to make it back to port, and once they did, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, the vessel was immediately swamped and sank, and it has never been recovered. So not only had the team spent months working on a vessel that didn't work in real world conditions and then lost it, they also sunk all of their capital into that venture. They would have been out of the submarine game entirely had they not found a new investor that was Edgar C. Singer of Texas, who was an expert in torpedoes and Singer arrived in Mobile in the spring of eighteen sixty three and was impressed enough with their progress that he funded work on another submarine, which took place over that spring and summer, and the result was the h L Hunley, which was originally named the fish Boat. Yeah, it's not clear to me exactly when they changed it to the HONLY Um, but the Homely was longer than the Pioneer or the American Diver, with a total length of fort or twelve meters that included a five ft long or seven point six meter main compartment, and then running all through that compartment was the crank connected to a propeller by a series of gears that would be operated by a crew of seven. Space inside of the scrap was very tight. Those men would basically, one at a time, crawl or sort of sidle their way in and then cunch over this central crank. Uh An eighth man who was the one in the in command of the vessel controlled the depth and the direction. I'm so claustrophobic just hearing that description. Tracy's watching me wins and squirm, and the artwork for this episode on that will be on our website is like a diagram of what the thing looked like. It is very it's very it's very tight and there. Out of the water, the hunley looked like a giant metal tube with tapered ends and fins and a couple of domes on top. But in the water it was pretty easy to mistake for a porpoise or a dolphin. Bellows and snorkel tubes were used to move fresh air into the craft, with a lit candle, providing an early warning system for oxygen getting too low. It's one of the things that previous hosts remarked on as being little nerve racking to have to keep an eye on a candle to know if you had enough air. The craft's buoyancy and depth were controlled through a pair of ballast tanks, one four and one aft, and each of them was equipped with its own pump. The pumps were also capable of removing water out from the crew compartment, which was somewhere it should not be. The vessel's buoyancy was a very delicate balance, and too much water collecting in the main compartment would cause the vessel to sink. They began testing the Hunley in the Mobile River in July of eighteen sixty three, working the bugs out before inviting Confederate military officials to observe. They conducted a successful demonstration on July thirty one, which involved approaching a barge in the river while towing a mine, and when it got close to the barge, the Hunley submerged, passed under it, and resur fist farther up the river. Meanwhile, once the Mind came in contact with the barge, it exploded and sank it. This demonstration was a clear success, but it was not met with the unanimous approval among the Confederate Navy. Submarine technology in general was viewed with some suspicion, and a lot of people thought it was dishonorable or underhanded to sneak up on an enemy and attack it in a way that had no hope at all of defense. Uh The whole the whole collection of torpedoes and mines and things like that that exploded in the water were all known as infernal machines at this point in history. Um The counter argument to the idea that it was dishonorable to be using these things to blow up a ship when people had no way of defending themselves. Was basically that, as underdogs with fewer naval resources than the Union the Confederates, that you basically had to use whatever tools they had at hand. Rear Admiral Franklin Buchanan, commander of the Naval District of the Gulf, was one military figure who not entirely trust submarines. Yet he was the one who contacted Flag Officer John Randolph Tucker, who was in command of the Confederate Navy and Charleston, to unreservedly recommend the Huntley's use against the blockade there. Tucker passed the recommendation on to General p. G. T. Beauregard, who immediately requested that the Hunley be sent to Charleston. Tucker had apparently been confident enough that Beauregard would want to take this infernal submarine off of his hands that he had already made arrangements to transport it to Charleston before he actually got that permission. The Hunley went to Charleston by train, where it arrived in August. Soon the Confederate Navy took control of it, feeling the civilian team's progress was too slow, but on August twenty nine, eighteen sixty three, while at the dock being prepared for a training mission, the Hunley sank and five of the eight crew aboard were killed. Horace Hunley then demanded that the control of the submarine be returned back to him from the Confederate military, and this was granted, but it did not end well for him either. On October fifteenth, he planned a demonstration and in which he would dive under a Confederate vessel and then surface again on the other side, with himself in command of the vessel. But after the dive, the Hunley did not come back up again. Hunley himself, along with the rest of the crew were all killed, and due to bad weather, the vessel wasn't recovered for weeks. When it was recovered, it turned out a valve on the ballast tank was open, which had allowed water from the sea into the crew compartment, which had sunk the vessel and killed everyone aboard, although they had managed to raise the h L. Hunley from the sea floor. After both of these incidents, General Beauregard was understandably reluctant to allow the vessel to be used again, but Lieutenant George Dixon, who had previously lived in Mobile and had worked at the Parking Lions machine shop when the Hunley was built, asked to be put in charge of it. Dixon was finally given permission to target the U. S. S. Housa Tonic, which was part of the Union blockade at Charles Sston Fix and carried out this operation on February eighteen sixty four after about two months of training and practice for the crew, and we will talk about the mission and how it went both well and poorly. After a sponsor break. When the h L. Hunley embarked on its mission to destroy the unionship He's a Tonic, it was no longer towing a mind behind it as it had done in that initial demonstration in the Mobile River. Instead, it was equipped with a black powder torpedo attached to the end of a twenty ft spar so for the sake of clarity. Torpedoes at this point generally did not have any kind of propulsion or guidance like they do today. They were a lot more like mines than modern torpedoes. They usually had to just be rammed into their target in some physical way. The plan for The Hunley was to do exactly that and then raise a blue phosphorus lamp to signal at the mission was complete, and after seeing the signal, men on shore would light a fire that the Hunley could use to navigate home. The Hunley approached the Housatonic at about eight pm on February eighteen sixty four. Robert F. Fleming, one of the few black men stationed aboard, spotted something odd in the water. He alerted Acting Master's mate Louis a Compwait, who observed the object and so that it was a log. Fleming did not agree with this assessment, given the objects shape and the fact that it was traveling quickly across the tide instead of with the tide. He alerted another sailor on watch that there was a torpedo incoming. The Housatonic was prepared for a submarine attack. Thanks to word carried by Confederate deserters, the Union knew that the Confederate Navy had a vessel that could approach ships while partially or entirely submerged. The semi submersible David had also attacked the U s s New Iron Sides the previous October, so all the blockade ships in the area. It took the precaution of anchoring in fairly shallow water and keeping the boilers ready to move if necessary. Even so, the response aboard the Housatonic was kind of sluggish. Fleming's observations weren't readily heated, leading him to say he was going to slip the anchor chain himself if he had to. It was only after Compway took a second look with binoculars that he actually sent word up the chain of command that an incoming vessel was on the way. Eventually, Acting Master John Crosby alerted the Captain Charles Pickering. As the rest of the crew began trying to take evasive action. Pickering began firing on the Hunley with his shotguns, since the Hunley had already gotten too close for them to hit it with a cannon. In spite of the efforts aboard the Housatonic, the Hunley successfully deployed its torpedo, blowing a huge hole in the side of the ship and causing it to rapidly sink since it had been in shallow water with the hope of deterring a submarine attack. It came to rest with its rigging above the waterline line, and those crew not able to make it to lifeboats were able to cling to the rigging while waiting for rescue by other ships in the blockade. Although the Housatonic sank and very little aboard was salvageable afterward, most of the crew did survive, five were killed out of a total of about a hundred and fifty five. Fleming reported that while awaiting rescue, he saw a blue light on the water, presumably the Hunley signal of success, and there's some debate about what he might have seen them. He wouldn't have had knowledge of the Hunley signal plans, and he wouldn't have had reason to make it up, but it seems likely that the only light actually burning aboard the Hunley was the candle that was used to monitor the oxygen level. Fumily also never made it back to port due to elapse in communication there on. Shore officials in Charleston didn't actually realize the ship was missing for days, and with no surviving witnesses on their side, it took the Confederate Navy a while to confirm that the Housatonic had been sunk as well. The Confederate Navy try to keep the word of the Hunley's loss from spreading. It would have been impossible to try to locate or raise the ship, since it had gone down in the vicinity of the blockade and no one aboard had survived to give its precise location, But it was useful to the Confederacy for the Union to believe it still had the capability of a surprised submarine attack, and believing the Hunley or at least the crew, were still out there was also a boost to flagging Confederate morale. Once it was clear that no one had survived, theories abounded about what might have happened that night aboard the Huntley. Perhaps too much water had gotten into the Huntley when the hatch was open to raise that blue light and it had sunk. Perhaps the explosion had damaged the vessel, or gunfire from the ship had pierced the hull. Or maybe in the thrill of the moment, that candle had burned out and nobody had noticed. Since the captain of the vessel was the only one who could really control its direction or its depth, if he had been killed or injured somehow, then his loss would have doomed the whole crews. There was a lot of speculation, but no one had any idea. The Hunley stayed in its place on the sea floor long beyond the end of the Civil War in eighteen sixty five. More than a hundred and thirty years later, on May third, an expedition by the National Underwater and Marine Agency, which you'll see abbreviated to NUMA spearheaded by author Clive Cussler, discovered it in the Charleston Harbor. It was raised from the seafloor on August eighth, two thousand, but when it was open, things became even more mysterious. The entire crew were still at their stations, apparently having made no effort at all to escape, and showing no evidence of serious injury among what remained of their corpses. Dixon's pocket watch was stopped at eight three, leading to questions of whether it had been running slowly and had stopped at the moment of impact, or if it had just run down and the time was a coincidence in terms of it being close to the time of day that they attack the housa Tonic Dixon's lucky twenty dollar coin, which he had held onto you after it partially deflected a musket ball that struck him in the leg, and the Battle of Shiloh was recovered from the wreck as well. Apart from the condition of the crew, the vessel itself was also intact, with nothing to indicate that it had been taking on water or incapacitated in some way. There were two large holes in its sides and missing glass panes from one of the viewports, but this was eventually determined to have happened long after the Hunley came to rest on the ocean floor. And this all brings us to the new research that made headlines in August. While doing work on a PhD dissertation about injury and trauma patterns from underwater explosions, Rachel Lance looked at data from several famous historical battles that involved underwater explosions, and one of these was the h L. Hunley. This eventually led to a paper published in Plus one on augusten entitled quote air last injuries killed the crew of the submarine h L. Hunley. Since the Huntley was on the seafloor for more than a hundred years, coming to this conclusion required construction of a one six scale model of the ship, which they nicknamed the CSS Tiny. The CSS tiny was exposed to a variety of underwater blasts in a pond in St. Louis, North Carolina, with the data from all those explosions collected and analyzed. You can read this entire paper online and we will link to it in the show notes. But to sum it up, quote, the blast produced likely caused flection of the ship hall to transmit the blast wave. The secondary wave transmitted inside the crew compartment was of sufficient magnitude that the calculated chances of survival were less than six for each crew member. The submarine drifted to its resting place after the crew died of air blast trauma within the hull. The blast wave wasn't enough to physically throw the crew around or damage their skeletons, but it was enough to cause massive lethal pulmonary trauma, which either killed the crew instantly or incapacitated them beyond the ability to try and escape. This paper, of course, does have some limitations. No matter how accurate, a scale model is still a scale model, and the analyzes required proportionately scaled down blasts to be done in that lake. There's also some debate about exactly how large the payload of the Hunley's black powdered torpedo was, and also to confirm these findings, a modern autopsy would have needed to have been performed on the bodies of the crew when they initially died more than a hundred years ago. Obviously that's not gonna happen. So when time travel gets invented, we are going to sess this out. We have so many terrible uses of time travel that come up on our show and I'm like, could you maybe have like prevented this from her? Oh? No, We're just going to figure out what happened. But given all the other factors about how the event transpired and all the other unanswered questions and how the crew was found, it does make a lot of sense as an explanation. Today, d H. L. Hunley has been through a massive conservation that has removed more than one thousand, two hundred pounds, or about five of concretion from the vessel, and it's at the War and Lash Conservation Center in North Charleston, South Carolina, where conservation work is still ongoing. Tours are available, but only on the weekends to allow for conservation work. During the week. The Hunley's crew were also given a funeral and buried on April seventeen, two thousand four, in the same cemetery as the men killed in its prior sinkings had been laid to rest. The next successful attack by a submarine during wartime would be on September five, when the German U twenty one hit the British Pathfinder with a torpedo, sinking it and killing two hundred and fifty six. So that as the h L Hunley. We've gotten several requests for the h L Hunley over the years, and it was only more recently than I realized that that it had been in that one eight minute segment earlier. Yeah, So thanks again to Rachel Lampce for sending us a note about this yeah, where we will link to the paper which does have other authors in addition to her as well. We will link to that from the show notes for folks who want to read it. It It is very interesting. Thank you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of the episode that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again. You can now reach us at history podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm

I'm Happy Saturday everyone. Coming up on the show, we have an interview with Dr Rachel Lance, author of the book In the Waves, My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine. That book recounts her pH d research into the disaster aboard the h L. Hunley, And since the interview is more focused on her research than on the greater story of the Huntley and what happened, we wanted to replay that earlier episode is a Saturday classic for folks who may not know or may not remember the details. Um we briefly discuss her research from back before the book was published. At the end of the episode. One thing to note, there's discussion about one of the Hunley's predecessors, the Pioneer in this episode, which her research uncovered different information about, and we're gonna leave that for the upcoming interview, but when you get to that part, just know that we will be revisiting it in a couple of days. This episode originally came out August. Well Come to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We have a past podcast subject that has been in the news lately, that is the c s S. H L. Hunley, and that's following a newly published paper on the cause of death for the people who were inside that Confederate submarine when it was lost. And typically it's the sort of news that we would cover with an episode update, where we would either play the previous episode first and talk about the new developments afterward, or the other way around. But that previous appearance of the Hunley on our show is from the episode More Shipwrecks Stories Battleships, so it's only about eight minutes of an episode that also covers several other shipwrecks as well. So instead of doing a normal episode update that we might do typically in another circumstances, we're going to give the h L. Hunley the full treatment today. And huge, huge thanks to Rachel Lance, who dropped us a note about the Hunley a few days before we recorded this. She's one of the authors on this paper that just came out about it, which actually grew out of her pH d research, So we will be talking about that some more later in the episode, and the story of the h L. Hunley really begins with the Union blockade of the Confederacy during the Civil War, which was ordered less than a week after the fall of Fort Sumter in South Carolina. So for a quick recap. After multiple Slave states, including South Carolina, seceded after the election of Abraham Lincoln, Major Robert Anderson of the U. S Army occupied Fort Sumter and refused to hand it over to the Confederacy, and after a couple of skirmishes, a Confederate force attacked the fort on April twelfth, and the Union surrendered it on The attack on Fort Sumter is generally marked as the official beginning of the war. Almost immediately after this, the United States government started working on a plan to cut off the Southern ports from international shipping. The goal was to prevent the South from exporting its goods, including cotton and produce, and to prevent Southern states from importing trade goods, weapons, and other material that would be needed for the war. This was all part of a military strategy called the Anaconda Plan, meant to choke off the South and bring a speedy end to the conflict. There is some debate about how effective this was. It definitely made things tougher on the South, but the war was definitely not brought to a remotely speedy end by putting it into place. The government had two main options for stopping commerce at the southern ports. President Lincoln could issue an executive order closing them, or a blockade could prevent ships from entering or leaving them. Either way, though, cutting off the Southern states to shipping would have a negative impact on international trade, which meant other nations were likely to object, so the likely international response had to be part of that decision, and there were pros and cons to each of these two strategies. An executive order closing the ports would be simpler it would not require a massively huge navy to enforce, but it would also be difficult to enforce. This was especially true since violators would need to be tried in the state where they'd violated the order, which at that point would have been a state under Confederate control. That would make such a proceeding highly unlikely, so it was really easy to imagine someone just ignoring the order knowing that it wasn't likely or even impossible that they would be prosecuted for it. A blockade, on the other hand, was an internationally recognized wartime action, and standards for blockades had been outlined in the eighteen fifty six Declaration of Paris. Although the US was not a signatory of the declaration, it could expect other nations to respect the blockade as long as it was implemented and maintained in a way that followed international law. The only exception would be if other nations were willing to officially take the Southern side in the conflict, which would put them at war with the United States, but at the same time, implementing a blockade would shift the framing of the war. You might remember how in our podcast on nuclear close Calls, the United States presented its blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile crisis as a quarantine rather than as a blockade, because a blockade assumed a state of war, and the United States was not at war with Cuba at that time, so this was similar Blockading the Southern States meant that the Union was recognizing the Confederacy as an opposing belligerent. This meant the war was no longer an insurrection or a rebellion or some kind of internal matter. It was a war between two separate opposing entities. On April nineteen, President Lincoln issued a proclamation ordering the blockade of the entire Confederate coast, with the exception of North Carolina and Virginia. He issued a second proclamation eight days later which added those two states to the plan. In the words of his Shill proclamation, quote for this purpose, a competent force will be posted so as to prevent entrance and exit of vessels from the ports aforesaid. If therefore, with a view to violate such blockade, a vessel shall approach or shall attempt to leave, any of the said ports, she will be duly warned by the commander of one of the blockading vessels, who will endorse on her register the fact and date of such warning. And if the same vessel shall again attempt to enter or leave the blockaded ports, she will be captured and sent to the nearest convenient port for such proceedings against her and her cargo as prize as maybe deemed advisable. This was a colossal undertaking. The plan involved not only blocking the twelve major southern ports, but also guarding its entire coastline. This is about three thousand, five hundred miles or five thousand, six hundred kilometers, and although leaders hoped that it could be done with about thirty warships, it became clear really quickly that there was not nearly enough. Small vessels dodged the warships guarding the ports by traveling along inland waterways, and commerce continued essentially unimpeded. I mean, it was harder to do, but like they didn't make much of a dent, and getting done continued at the southern ports for months. Gideon Wells, Secretary of the Navy, then established a Blockade Strategy Board, which convened at the Smithsonian Institution and made an extensive study of Southern waterways to try to figure out how to bolster this blockade. Their research stretched from July to September of eighteen sixty one, and they ultimately issued ten total reports on how to make the blockade more effective. The number of blockading ships would grow well into the hundreds, and by the end of the war, the United States would have the largest navy on earth. Meanwhile, the Confederacy worked out a number of strategies to try to get around this blockade. For a time, the Confederate government tried issuing letters of mark to privateers to operate from the southern ports and try to take prizes from the Union trade ships. This was particularly effective at distracting the United States Navy for the first several months of the war, but as the blockade got tightened, privateers stopped being able to sneak out and into the Southern ports, so their usefulness declined, and eventually their use in the war really waned. Another technique was blockade runners, small lightweight sailing vessels and steamers, most of them civilian vessels that largely operated at night. Blockade runners would sneak in and out of Southern ports and carry goods to and from neutral ports like Bermuda and Nasau. Charleston, South Carolina was a hot spot for blockade runners until early eighteen sixty three, when the Union significantly reinforced the blockade there. Then most blockade running activity moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. Small vessels ran the blockade all through the Gulf Coast throughout the war as well. Having grown up in North Carolina and spent a fair amoun of time in the Wilmington's and Rightsful Beach areas in the summer, blockade runners they have kind of a folk hero quality in this like they're kind of a nod to the very romanticized idea of how the Civil War went down, have kind of a sticking it to the man running the blockade like spirit. Uh So, I have always found the story of the Blackade Runners kind of fascinating, um from that point of view and life experience. Yeah, I think it's certainly like conjurors images of just sort of some interesting stealth moving and yeah, and I can see where it gets romanticized. I think they're they're even you know, hotels and restaurants and things like that named with the Blockade runner or or nods to famous blockade runners. To me, those words will always mean star wars. So of course there were not just efforts to run the Blackade, but also to destroy the ships in the blockade themselves. And that is what brings us to the c s S. H. L. Huntley, which we will talk more about after a sponsor break. The H. L. Hounley is named for Horace Lawson Hunley, who was born in Tennessee on June three. He got a law degree from the University of Louisiana which is now to Lane University in eighteen forty nine, and he opened a law practice in New Orleans. He also worked at the New Orleans Customs House, and he'd previously served in the Louisiana legislature. In eighteen fifty nine or eighteen sixty he bought a plantation, and in addition to the enslaved labor that worked on the plantation, according to the eighteen fifty census, he enslaved eight people for domestic work at his home in New Orleans. By eighteen sixty one, he was doing pretty well financially, but he was always interested in finding new ways to bring in additional income, and one of these was the development of a submarine vessel to be used in the Confederate war effort. This really seems to have in a scheme that was driven more by money and by pride than by patriotism. Although Hunley himself was a slave owner and he supported the institution of slavery, he also thought it was really foolish and shortsighted for the South to be going to war over it. But businessman and the Confederate government had offered substantial prizes to anyone who could sink a Union warship, and Huny really hoped to get himself one of those prizes, and he was also wanting to make his own mark on history and establish a legacy for himself. In his pursuit of a workable submarine, Hunley teamed up with other financial backers and went to James McClintock, an engineer who was living in New Orleans who had also been working on a small underwater craft with Baxter Watson, and once they were all working together, their first attempt at a submarine was the Pioneer, which was a thirty five ft long, roughly cylindrical vessel with tapered ends. It was powered by two men turning a crank while a commander controlled the depth and used fins to steer. Although the Pioneer essentially worked and it was authorized for privateering with a letter of mark, it wasn't particularly refined. It moved slowly, and it leaked, and it never saw combat. When the Union captured New Orleans in April of eighteen sixty two, the team intentionally scuttled it so that it would not fall into enemy hands. This might be where things like privateers get romanticized, because you have to have nerves of steel to be like it's essentially a big barrel. I think I'll take it under water and pull a crank. Yeah, this whole they talked about in the prior episode, which I think was from Sarah and Bablina, about how nerve racking it must have been to be in any of these vessels. I mean, at this point, being in a submarine is still a pretty closed in, tight quarters experience. But these were just basically metal tubes that you had to crawl into and then crouch. Yeah. Yeah, Like, here's the submarine I built in my backyard, Go take on the war effort in it. That would be scary. And from there, Hunley, Watson and McClintock fled to Mobile, Alabama, where they met Thomas W. Park and Thomas B. Lions of the Park and Lions Machine Shop, and it was there that these five men, along with William A. Alexander, worked on another submarine, American Diver. Their efforts with the Diver weren't nearly as successful as they had been with the Pioneer, though McClintock spent months trying to develop an engine that could power the sub rather than using the power of human beings turning cranks, because moving fresh air into a submersible craft was a tricky proposition. Using an engine rather than than human exertion for propulsion would give it a greater range and more power, but he couldn't get an engine that was small enough to fit, so he ultimately gave up after having spent months trying, and then went back to the crank method that they were using before, and he wound up with a design that was slightly larger than the Pioneer and had two additional crew to power that crank. Uh It performed well enough in tests in the lake, but even with two more men working the crank, once the American Diver was launched into the sea, it wasn't powerful enough to overcome the pull of the tide. The crew had to struggle just to make it back to port, and once they did, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, the vessel was immediately swamped and sank, and it has never been recovered. So not only had the team spent months working on a vessel that didn't work in real world conditions and then lost it, they also sunk all of their capital into that venture. They would have been out of the submarine game entirely had they not found a new investor that was Edgar C. Singer of Texas, who was an expert in torpedoes and Singer arrived in Mobile in the spring of eighteen sixty three and was impressed enough with their progress that he funded work on another submarine, which took place over that spring and summer, and the result was the h L Hunley, which was originally named the fish Boat. Yeah, it's not clear to me exactly when they changed it to the HONLY Um, but the Homely was longer than the Pioneer or the American Diver, with a total length of fort or twelve meters that included a five ft long or seven point six meter main compartment, and then running all through that compartment was the crank connected to a propeller by a series of gears that would be operated by a crew of seven. Space inside of the scrap was very tight. Those men would basically, one at a time, crawl or sort of sidle their way in and then cunch over this central crank. Uh An eighth man who was the one in the in command of the vessel controlled the depth and the direction. I'm so claustrophobic just hearing that description. Tracy's watching me wins and squirm, and the artwork for this episode on that will be on our website is like a diagram of what the thing looked like. It is very it's very it's very tight and there. Out of the water, the hunley looked like a giant metal tube with tapered ends and fins and a couple of domes on top. But in the water it was pretty easy to mistake for a porpoise or a dolphin. Bellows and snorkel tubes were used to move fresh air into the craft, with a lit candle, providing an early warning system for oxygen getting too low. It's one of the things that previous hosts remarked on as being little nerve racking to have to keep an eye on a candle to know if you had enough air. The craft's buoyancy and depth were controlled through a pair of ballast tanks, one four and one aft, and each of them was equipped with its own pump. The pumps were also capable of removing water out from the crew compartment, which was somewhere it should not be. The vessel's buoyancy was a very delicate balance, and too much water collecting in the main compartment would cause the vessel to sink. They began testing the Hunley in the Mobile River in July of eighteen sixty three, working the bugs out before inviting Confederate military officials to observe. They conducted a successful demonstration on July thirty one, which involved approaching a barge in the river while towing a mine, and when it got close to the barge, the Hunley submerged, passed under it, and resur fist farther up the river. Meanwhile, once the Mind came in contact with the barge, it exploded and sank it. This demonstration was a clear success, but it was not met with the unanimous approval among the Confederate Navy. Submarine technology in general was viewed with some suspicion, and a lot of people thought it was dishonorable or underhanded to sneak up on an enemy and attack it in a way that had no hope at all of defense. Uh The whole the whole collection of torpedoes and mines and things like that that exploded in the water were all known as infernal machines at this point in history. Um The counter argument to the idea that it was dishonorable to be using these things to blow up a ship when people had no way of defending themselves. Was basically that, as underdogs with fewer naval resources than the Union the Confederates, that you basically had to use whatever tools they had at hand. Rear Admiral Franklin Buchanan, commander of the Naval District of the Gulf, was one military figure who not entirely trust submarines. Yet he was the one who contacted Flag Officer John Randolph Tucker, who was in command of the Confederate Navy and Charleston, to unreservedly recommend the Huntley's use against the blockade there. Tucker passed the recommendation on to General p. G. T. Beauregard, who immediately requested that the Hunley be sent to Charleston. Tucker had apparently been confident enough that Beauregard would want to take this infernal submarine off of his hands that he had already made arrangements to transport it to Charleston before he actually got that permission. The Hunley went to Charleston by train, where it arrived in August. Soon the Confederate Navy took control of it, feeling the civilian team's progress was too slow, but on August twenty nine, eighteen sixty three, while at the dock being prepared for a training mission, the Hunley sank and five of the eight crew aboard were killed. Horace Hunley then demanded that the control of the submarine be returned back to him from the Confederate military, and this was granted, but it did not end well for him either. On October fifteenth, he planned a demonstration and in which he would dive under a Confederate vessel and then surface again on the other side, with himself in command of the vessel. But after the dive, the Hunley did not come back up again. Hunley himself, along with the rest of the crew were all killed, and due to bad weather, the vessel wasn't recovered for weeks. When it was recovered, it turned out a valve on the ballast tank was open, which had allowed water from the sea into the crew compartment, which had sunk the vessel and killed everyone aboard, although they had managed to raise the h L. Hunley from the sea floor. After both of these incidents, General Beauregard was understandably reluctant to allow the vessel to be used again, but Lieutenant George Dixon, who had previously lived in Mobile and had worked at the Parking Lions machine shop when the Hunley was built, asked to be put in charge of it. Dixon was finally given permission to target the U. S. S. Housa Tonic, which was part of the Union blockade at Charles Sston Fix and carried out this operation on February eighteen sixty four after about two months of training and practice for the crew, and we will talk about the mission and how it went both well and poorly. After a sponsor break. When the h L. Hunley embarked on its mission to destroy the unionship He's a Tonic, it was no longer towing a mind behind it as it had done in that initial demonstration in the Mobile River. Instead, it was equipped with a black powder torpedo attached to the end of a twenty ft spar so for the sake of clarity. Torpedoes at this point generally did not have any kind of propulsion or guidance like they do today. They were a lot more like mines than modern torpedoes. They usually had to just be rammed into their target in some physical way. The plan for The Hunley was to do exactly that and then raise a blue phosphorus lamp to signal at the mission was complete, and after seeing the signal, men on shore would light a fire that the Hunley could use to navigate home. The Hunley approached the Housatonic at about eight pm on February eighteen sixty four. Robert F. Fleming, one of the few black men stationed aboard, spotted something odd in the water. He alerted Acting Master's mate Louis a Compwait, who observed the object and so that it was a log. Fleming did not agree with this assessment, given the objects shape and the fact that it was traveling quickly across the tide instead of with the tide. He alerted another sailor on watch that there was a torpedo incoming. The Housatonic was prepared for a submarine attack. Thanks to word carried by Confederate deserters, the Union knew that the Confederate Navy had a vessel that could approach ships while partially or entirely submerged. The semi submersible David had also attacked the U s s New Iron Sides the previous October, so all the blockade ships in the area. It took the precaution of anchoring in fairly shallow water and keeping the boilers ready to move if necessary. Even so, the response aboard the Housatonic was kind of sluggish. Fleming's observations weren't readily heated, leading him to say he was going to slip the anchor chain himself if he had to. It was only after Compway took a second look with binoculars that he actually sent word up the chain of command that an incoming vessel was on the way. Eventually, Acting Master John Crosby alerted the Captain Charles Pickering. As the rest of the crew began trying to take evasive action. Pickering began firing on the Hunley with his shotguns, since the Hunley had already gotten too close for them to hit it with a cannon. In spite of the efforts aboard the Housatonic, the Hunley successfully deployed its torpedo, blowing a huge hole in the side of the ship and causing it to rapidly sink since it had been in shallow water with the hope of deterring a submarine attack. It came to rest with its rigging above the waterline line, and those crew not able to make it to lifeboats were able to cling to the rigging while waiting for rescue by other ships in the blockade. Although the Housatonic sank and very little aboard was salvageable afterward, most of the crew did survive, five were killed out of a total of about a hundred and fifty five. Fleming reported that while awaiting rescue, he saw a blue light on the water, presumably the Hunley signal of success, and there's some debate about what he might have seen them. He wouldn't have had knowledge of the Hunley signal plans, and he wouldn't have had reason to make it up, but it seems likely that the only light actually burning aboard the Hunley was the candle that was used to monitor the oxygen level. Fumily also never made it back to port due to elapse in communication there on. Shore officials in Charleston didn't actually realize the ship was missing for days, and with no surviving witnesses on their side, it took the Confederate Navy a while to confirm that the Housatonic had been sunk as well. The Confederate Navy try to keep the word of the Hunley's loss from spreading. It would have been impossible to try to locate or raise the ship, since it had gone down in the vicinity of the blockade and no one aboard had survived to give its precise location, But it was useful to the Confederacy for the Union to believe it still had the capability of a surprised submarine attack, and believing the Hunley or at least the crew, were still out there was also a boost to flagging Confederate morale. Once it was clear that no one had survived, theories abounded about what might have happened that night aboard the Huntley. Perhaps too much water had gotten into the Huntley when the hatch was open to raise that blue light and it had sunk. Perhaps the explosion had damaged the vessel, or gunfire from the ship had pierced the hull. Or maybe in the thrill of the moment, that candle had burned out and nobody had noticed. Since the captain of the vessel was the only one who could really control its direction or its depth, if he had been killed or injured somehow, then his loss would have doomed the whole crews. There was a lot of speculation, but no one had any idea. The Hunley stayed in its place on the sea floor long beyond the end of the Civil War in eighteen sixty five. More than a hundred and thirty years later, on May third, an expedition by the National Underwater and Marine Agency, which you'll see abbreviated to NUMA spearheaded by author Clive Cussler, discovered it in the Charleston Harbor. It was raised from the seafloor on August eighth, two thousand, but when it was open, things became even more mysterious. The entire crew were still at their stations, apparently having made no effort at all to escape, and showing no evidence of serious injury among what remained of their corpses. Dixon's pocket watch was stopped at eight three, leading to questions of whether it had been running slowly and had stopped at the moment of impact, or if it had just run down and the time was a coincidence in terms of it being close to the time of day that they attack the housa Tonic Dixon's lucky twenty dollar coin, which he had held onto you after it partially deflected a musket ball that struck him in the leg, and the Battle of Shiloh was recovered from the wreck as well. Apart from the condition of the crew, the vessel itself was also intact, with nothing to indicate that it had been taking on water or incapacitated in some way. There were two large holes in its sides and missing glass panes from one of the viewports, but this was eventually determined to have happened long after the Hunley came to rest on the ocean floor. And this all brings us to the new research that made headlines in August. While doing work on a PhD dissertation about injury and trauma patterns from underwater explosions, Rachel Lance looked at data from several famous historical battles that involved underwater explosions, and one of these was the h L. Hunley. This eventually led to a paper published in Plus one on augusten entitled quote air last injuries killed the crew of the submarine h L. Hunley. Since the Huntley was on the seafloor for more than a hundred years, coming to this conclusion required construction of a one six scale model of the ship, which they nicknamed the CSS Tiny. The CSS tiny was exposed to a variety of underwater blasts in a pond in St. Louis, North Carolina, with the data from all those explosions collected and analyzed. You can read this entire paper online and we will link to it in the show notes. But to sum it up, quote, the blast produced likely caused flection of the ship hall to transmit the blast wave. The secondary wave transmitted inside the crew compartment was of sufficient magnitude that the calculated chances of survival were less than six for each crew member. The submarine drifted to its resting place after the crew died of air blast trauma within the hull. The blast wave wasn't enough to physically throw the crew around or damage their skeletons, but it was enough to cause massive lethal pulmonary trauma, which either killed the crew instantly or incapacitated them beyond the ability to try and escape. This paper, of course, does have some limitations. No matter how accurate, a scale model is still a scale model, and the analyzes required proportionately scaled down blasts to be done in that lake. There's also some debate about exactly how large the payload of the Hunley's black powdered torpedo was, and also to confirm these findings, a modern autopsy would have needed to have been performed on the bodies of the crew when they initially died more than a hundred years ago. Obviously that's not gonna happen. So when time travel gets invented, we are going to sess this out. We have so many terrible uses of time travel that come up on our show and I'm like, could you maybe have like prevented this from her? Oh? No, We're just going to figure out what happened. But given all the other factors about how the event transpired and all the other unanswered questions and how the crew was found, it does make a lot of sense as an explanation. Today, d H. L. Hunley has been through a massive conservation that has removed more than one thousand, two hundred pounds, or about five of concretion from the vessel, and it's at the War and Lash Conservation Center in North Charleston, South Carolina, where conservation work is still ongoing. Tours are available, but only on the weekends to allow for conservation work. During the week. The Hunley's crew were also given a funeral and buried on April seventeen, two thousand four, in the same cemetery as the men killed in its prior sinkings had been laid to rest. The next successful attack by a submarine during wartime would be on September five, when the German U twenty one hit the British Pathfinder with a torpedo, sinking it and killing two hundred and fifty six. So that as the h L Hunley. We've gotten several requests for the h L Hunley over the years, and it was only more recently than I realized that that it had been in that one eight minute segment earlier. Yeah, So thanks again to Rachel Lampce for sending us a note about this yeah, where we will link to the paper which does have other authors in addition to her as well. We will link to that from the show notes for folks who want to read it. It It is very interesting. Thank you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of the episode that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again. You can now reach us at history podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm