H.L. Hunley Disappears

On the night of February 17, 1864, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley set out to break the blockade of Charleston Harbor by attacking the Union warship Housatonic. After ramming a 135-pound torpedo into the ship's wooden hull, the submarine backed away, and seconds later a massive explosion shook the Housatonic, killing five crew members and sinking the vessel in 27 feet of water. The H.L. Hunley became the first submarine in history to destroy an enemy ship, but it and its crew never returned to shore. The Hunley was the third in a series of experimental submarines, had previously sunk twice during tests with the loss of thirteen crew members, and had been built from an iron steamboiler, measuring 40 feet long and carrying a crew of nine men, with one captain navigating while the others turned the propeller shaft by crank and a torpedo mounted on a long wooden spar on the bow. In 1980, Clive Cussler and a team of underwater archeologists began searching for the lost submarine in outer Charleston Harbor, and fifteen years later they found what they believed to be the vessel buried in sediment in thirty feet of water four miles southeast of Fort Moultrie. Researchers from the National Park Service, the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Naval Historical Center confirmed the discovery, partially uncovered and mapped the vessel, and determined that its hull was strong enough for recovery, conservation, and eventual display at the Charleston Museum. In mid-summer 2000, federal, state, and private underwater archeologists, along with engineers and divers from Oceaneering International, excavated the submarine, supported it with slings attached to a specially built recovery frame, monitored hull stresses during the operation, and raised it for transport to a conservation facility in North Charleston, where preservation work would continue for years.

Sullivan's Island, South Carolina · United States