Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2013 - 47

O N FEBRUARY 17, 1864, the Confederate submarine Hunley attacked the Union sloop of war USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor. Hunley’s eight-person crew became the ﬁrst submariners to sink another vessel, but they were never heard from again. What happened to them remained a mystery, even after the rediscovery of the sub in 1995. Hunley was ﬁnally raised from the seabed in 2000 and placed in a conservation tank, where it continued to guard its secrets. Archaeologists have studied the vessel for more than a decade, and now the recent ﬁnd of traces of the weapon Hunley carried into battle has dramatically altered how we under- spar, which archaeologists found still attached to the submarine, Jacobsen and her colleagues now know that scenario is wrong. The 16-foot-long pole—made of iron, not wood—was encased in a dense jacket of concretion, a hard mixture of rust, sand, and shell. After Hunley was raised, chief conservator Paul Mardikian placed the spar in a separate tank containing a preservative solution of sodium hydroxide. It lay there for more than a decade while the team excavated the silt-packed interior of Hunley itself. Last year, Mardikian ﬁnally began removing the concretion. X-rays had shown it was covering something that looked like a bolt at the spar’s tip, but the images weren’t clear. “The object had been encrypted by the environment,” says Mardikian. “My job HUNLEY DECODED The discovery of a simple piece of copper is changing how we understand the legendary vessel’s last moments by E A. P stand the submarine’s ﬁnal moments. “This changes everything,” says Hunley Project senior archaeologist Maria Jacobsen. Until now, the conventional narrative of Hunley’s attack was based on newspaper accounts dating to the turn of the last century. “The idea has been that Hunley rammed a wooden spar with a torpedo at the tip into Housatonic’s hull and somehow implanted the torpedo in the enemy vessel,” says Jacobsen. Hunley was then supposed to have pulled away, unspooling a long rope, or lanyard, attached to the torpedo’s trigger mechanism. “Once Hunley was a safe distance away,” says Jacobsen, “the notion was that they pulled the lanyard to ignite the weapon.” Housatonic sank in ﬁve minutes, and Hunley disappeared. One theory about the crew’s fate had them setting the hand-crank-powered submarine on the seabed for a rest and then succumbing to bad air. But thanks to recent conservation work done on Hunley’s Hunley has been in a conservation tank (left) since it was raised in 2000. It carried a 16-foot-long spar attached to the bow. 3-D scans of the spar’s tip show it before cleaning (above top) and after (above). The metal on the left end of the cleaned spar is a remnant of the sub’s torpedo. www.archaeology.org Technical drawings of the Singer torpedo Hunley used to sink USS Housatonic were found in the National Archives. in conserving it was essentially to decode the spar.” Over several months, he used dental tools and a pneumatic chisel to “deconcrete” the artifact, eventually revealing a piece of deformed copper held in place by a rusted bolt. When he called Jacobsen to examine it, she was stunned. “ soon as I As saw it,” she recalls, “the hair stood up on my head. I knew immediately we were looking at the weapons system. That is something I never thought we would have.” Jacobsen soon found that the remains matched technical drawings of a torpedo designed by Confederate gunsmith Edgar Singer that held 135 pounds of gunpowder, twice as much as standard torpedoes of the time. The discovery of traces of the Singer torpedo shows it was not detonated remotely, but was still attached to the spar, and thus to the submarine, at the instant it exploded. The ﬁnd means Hunley’s mission was far riskier than anyone had guessed. It will also allow the team to accurately simulate the ﬁnal desperate moments of the attack. “We knew soldiers on Housatonic were shooting at them,” says Mardikian. “Now we can say that they also had 135 pounds of black powder going oﬀ just 16 feet away. The odds of surviving that are not good.” Mardikian is now preparing to chisel away concretions covering Hunley itself, which could be concealing evidence of breaches in the hull caused by the explosion. That would be the ﬁnal proof that Hunley’s own torpedo sent it to the bottom. ■ Eric A. Powell is online editor at Archaeology. 47 http://www.archaeology.org

Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2013