The H.L. Hunley by Conrad Wise Chapman
The submarine H.L. Hunley was built in 1863 in Alabama and shipped by rail to South Carolina, where it sank on its first training mission. Five men drowned with the ship, but the Hunley was raised for a second chance. The submarine set out again a couple months later for another test run. This time H.L. Hunley, the creator of the ship, was on board even though he wasn’t part of the Confederate troops. The submarine sank again and took all eight crewmen with it. When the divers found the ship, its nose was buried right into the mud and stuck at an angle. Somehow it was driven straight to the ground.
The submarine was raised one last time and sent into battle on 17 February 1864 with Lieutenant George E. Dixon at the helm. The submarine approached the USS Housatonic and attacked with a new weapon called a spar torpedo. The spar torpedo was essentially a long pole with a torpedo on its end that was rammed into the enemy ship and detonated by a trigger chord once the submarine reached a safe distance.
Spar torpedo in transport
The mission for the Hunley seemed to be going quite well, as the crew was able to embed the spar torpedo and quickly move away from the weapon. The Housatonic “could not target an object so low in the water. Shots rang out and bullets ricocheted as other Union sailors joined in the frantic firing of revolvers and rifles.” The iron submarine suffered no damage from the shots as it continued to back up and then detonate the deadly torpedo. Only five sailors were killed in the attack on the Housatonic, but the sloop sank in three minutes, becoming the first ship to be sunk by a submarine. The Hunley then surfaced and signaled that they completed the mission, and then the crew was never heard from again.
The technology to surface the Hunley wasn’t available at the time, and the submarine wasn’t found until 1995 near Charleston Harbor. The Hunley is still being researched in order to find the exact cause of the sinking. Many hypothesize that the explosion from the torpedo had something to do with it, along with other theories.
Find out more about the H.L. Hunley on Fold3′s topic page created by bgill.