CSS HUNLEY
Constructed by the firm Park and Lyons in Mobile, Alabama, Hunley was the brainchild of Horace L Hunley, a lawyer, planter and innovator from New Orleans. Other experiments had been disappointing, but the Hunley design was believed workable, even after two trial deployments ended in tragedies that cost the lives 13 men, including Horace Hunley.
Under control of the Confederate Army, Hunley slipped beneath the harbour waters in Charleston, South Carolina, that fateful night on 17 February 1864 and proceeded towards a cluster of US Navy warships blockading the major Confederate seaport. Under the command of Lieutenant George E Dixon, the crew of eight steered toward the 16-gun sloop of war USS Housatonic patrolling 6km off the harbour mouth. The Hunley carried a single torpedo attached to a five-metre spar, and its mission was to shove it into the enemy ship below the waterline, inflicting a mortal wound.
In the murky darkness, Hunley crept closer to Housatonic, finally ramming the torpedo home. The resulting explosion sent Housatonic to the bottom in five minutes. However, Hunley failed to return, its crew slipping to a watery grave – probably due to the same explosion that doomed Housatonic. In 2017 researchers speculated that Hunley’s crew were killed or incapacitated by the shockwave from the blast.
the Housatonic sinking. The situation was so frantic that some of the crew rushed naked from their bunks before throwing themselves overboard. Less fortunate still were the five men who lost their lives.
What the perplexed desk officer had first thought to be a porpoise was in fact a seventon underwater vessel built of bulletproof iron. Constructed at a cost of $15,000 in private funds, the HL Hunley bore little resemblance to the submarines of today. The ‘fish boat’, as it was at first known, was 12 metres long. Seven of its crew turned a crank to power the propeller, toiling in cramped and humid conditions while an eighth man steered. A pair of diving fins manipulated the pressure of oncoming water to allow the vessel to submerge and surface.
The HL Hunley was actually the third submarine constructed by the Confederacy. In February 1862, a private consortium in New Orleans successfully tested the Pioneer, a ten-metre submarine, in the Mississippi River. The advance of Union forces on the city two months later, which culminated in its capture and occupation, compelled the inventors to abandon development and scuttle the vessel in a shipping canal.
Relocating to Mobile, Alabama, the team constructed a second submarine, the American Diver. Their experiments with electromagnetic propulsion were a failure, however, and the vessel proved powerless to withstand rough waters caused by bad weather, sinking in the bay where it was tested.
Undeterred, the engineers conceived and constructed a third vessel. Named after the cotton broker who headed the consortium, the HL Hunley was beset by misfortune. Transported by rail from Mobile to Charleston, it sank during a test on 29 August 1863 having accidentally dived with the top hatches still open. Five of the eight crewmen drowned. During a second test on 15 October the vessel successfully dived underneath the CSS
“THE HUNLEY’S FIRST SUCCESSFUL MISSION WAS ALSO ITS LAST”
Indian Chief, a ship for newly recruited sailors anchored in the Cooper River. Demonstrating that what goes down does not always come up, it failed to resurface. All of the men aboard including Hunley, who was captaining the submarine, lost their lives.
The Hunley’s attack on the Housatonic was more daring than anything tried during its test dives. The weapon with which it sank the sloop-of-war was a spar torpedo – a naval mine attached to a lance that projected from the bow of the submarine. To detonate the warhead, the Hunley needed to ram it into a target. As the submarine reversed, a line attached to the fuse would pull tight and set off the torpedo.
In theory, this would only happen once the Hunley had retreated to a safe distance. However, in reality the blast that sank the Housatonic also seems to have caused the Hunley to suffer the same fate. Although there is still some speculation over why the submarine never returned to base, its crew all died while still at their stations. The Hunley’s first successful mission was also its last. Marine archaeologists eventually raised the wreck to the surface in 2000.
The sinking of the Housatonic briefly lifted the morale of Confederates beleaguered by
the Union blockade. “This glorious success of our little torpedo boat,” proclaimed the
Charleston Daily Courier, “has raised the hopes of our people, and the most sanguine expectations are now entertained of our being able to raise the siege in a way little dreamed of by the enemy.”
Union forces on the contrary fretted that the new underwater menace could break the blockade that had helped bring the Confederate economy, and its people, close to collapse. Rear Admiral John Dahlgren, who commanded the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, feared a “series of disasters” and recommended offering a reward for information that led to the seizure or destruction of Confederate submarines. US Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles proposed the additional patrolling of southern harbours by small steamers.
These fears proved unfounded. Confederate hopes that the submarine could provide salvation from the Union blockade sank along with the Hunley. Others, however, had not abandoned faith in submersible craft.
While both sides in the American Civil War had pioneered the use of submarines, other countries including France and Russia were simultaneously conducting tests on new vessels of their own.
On 16 April 1863, the French Navy launched Le Plongeur (‘The Diver’), the world’s first mechanically propelled submarine. In July 1865, the Messager du Midi newspaper in Montpellier boasted of a submersible launched in Toulon that “thanks to the new infernal machine, we shall be able to dispense with all dykes, batteries and other odd expedients hitherto employed for the defence of the ports and roads of the empire”. With a touch of Jules Verne about it, the paper claimed that the submarine was armed with an “electric spark” able to destroy anything “with the rapidity of lightning”. Despite this claim, it would take another 23 years for the French navy to launch its first active submarine, the Gymnote.
The submarines developed during this era were almost as ahead of their time as anything imagined by Jules Verne. It would take half a century before the U-boat became an integral component of the German campaign during the First World War. In an echo of history, during January 1917 a German submarine sank a US merchant vessel named the Housatonic.