Charleston, 1863: the Hunley submarine sinks with its inventor. Then it will kill 8 more men. Why didn’t the sailors try to save themselves?
Charleston, South Carolina. October 15, 1863. The submarine H. L. Hunley dives into the harbor in front of onlookers and does not resurface. There are eight men on board. One is Horace Lawson Hunley, the inventor who gave the machine its name.
According to reconstructions, he had volunteered: another crew, on August 29, had drowned during a test and no one wanted to board anymore. Five dead then, eight now. And the worst was yet to come.
The Hunley was an iron cylinder about 12 meters long: seven men turned a crank, the eighth steered. On February 17, 1864, with a new crew led by Lieutenant George Dixon, it struck the Union steamship USS Housatonic, armed with 12 cannons, with a charge mounted on a pole, which sank in about three minutes.
It was the first time a submarine sank a warship in battle. Then the Hunley disappeared, with all eight men. Among the three shipwrecks, twenty-one died.
The wreck was located in 1995 and brought to the surface on August 8, 2000. The skeletons were still at their posts along the crank, with no broken bones; the pumps had not been used and the hatches were closed. Why did no one try to save themselves?
In 2017, researcher Rachel Lance, from Duke University, proposed in PLOS ONE that the shockwave from their own charge killed them instantly. American Navy archaeologists dispute the conclusion. Was it really their own weapon that killed them?
Wikipedia – H. L. Hunley – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunley
History – C.S.S. Hunley sinks during tests – https://loki.editorial.aetnd.com/this-day-in-history/c-s-s-hunley-sinks-during-tests
Duke Today – Confederate submarine crew killed by their own weapon – https://today.duke.edu/2017/08/confederate-submarine-crew-killed-their-own-weapon
PLOS ONE (Lance et al., 2017) – https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0182244
