The Sea Hunters Part 16

Most simply sat in a state of shock for a few moments before the triumph of their feat began to sink in. Dixon shook the cobwebs from his dazed mind and peered through a view port. Already the tide had carried Hunley another fifty yards to the southeast away from the sinking ship, but he could see that Housatonic was settling fast.

"Is anyone badly injured?" he called out.

"Simpkins was knocked senseless," reported Wicks.

"I think I broke my nose," said Collins.

"I'm missing a tooth," grunted Miller.

"What happened, lieutenant?" asked Wicks anxiously. "Did we get her?"

"Take a look through the rear view ports", replied Dixon, excitement replacing numbing shock. "We sank the d.a.m.ned Yankee."

The tension was suddenly released. Almost as if they were transformed into another life, each man shook off his lethargy and began cheering. After incredible adversity, they had put their lives on the line and won. Hunley had vindicated herself. She had finally accomplished what she had been designed to do.

"We're not out of the woods yet," cautioned Dixon. "Take up the crank. I want to put another three hundred Yards between us and Housatonic before the Union fleet is alerted to her sinking."

Their mood one of elation, seven of the crew propelled the craft as if their pain and fatigue did not exist. Simpkins began to come around, but he was too dazed to take up cranking duties. Dixon spun the wheel and steered a course eastward a quarter of a mile before he turned the bow toward Breech Inlet. Once he felt they were a Safe distance away, he ordered his crew to stop and rest.

"Three of you work in shifts to keep us in position until the tide turns, and we can head back to port. I'll crank for Simpkins until he comes back on keel."

"begging' the lieutenant's pardon," said Wicks. "But instead of going back to Battery Marshall, I say we head into Charleston and tell old General Beauregard what we done, personal like."

"I agree," Dixon said, smiling. "But that would mean going through half the Union fleet. Best we return through Breech Inlet and continue to Charleston through the back bay."

Taking turns rotating the propeller just enough to keep Hunley from being carried further out to sea until the tide turned, the men pa.s.sed out the canteens of water and relaxed with a meal of turnips and dried beef.

Dixon and Wicks opened their hatch covers to let in fresh air.

Then Dixon stood, raised his arm through the hatch tower, and waved a blue light, the signal for sentries at Battery Marshall to light a bonfire as a beacon to guide Hunley home.

At 9:20 P.m on board the Union warship Canandaigua, Captain Joseph Green was called on deck by his watch officer, who reported a boat Pulling alongside. Green immediately made his way to the railing and shouted over the side. "What boat are you?"

"From the Housatonic, " answered Seaman Robert ]Fleming. "We were sunk by a Rebel torpedo craft. What's left of our crew is clinging to the rigging."

Having heard no sound from an explosion, Green and his officers were surprised at the news. The captain immediately hoisted distress signals and sent up three rockets to alert the rest of the fleet. Then Canandaigua slipped her anchor chain and came directly to Housatonic's a.s.sistance. On the way, they picked up the second boat, with the unfortunate Captain Pickering on board.

They arrived at the sunken ship at 9:35 P.m lowered their boats, and began picking up the men clinging to the rigging. None of the officers and crew of Cananddigua reported anything unusual or out of the ordinary during their run to rescue the survivors of Housatonic.

Too late Dixon felt a vibration in the water through the iron sides of Hunley. Too late he discovered the lights of the ship coming to rescue Housatonic's survivors. Too late the hatch covers were slammed shut as he ordered the submarine to dive. Too late he shouted a warning.

Eight men desperately attacked the crank in a vain attempt to move Hunley out of the path of Canandaigua. Time had run out for the men inside the submarine.

Dixon stood frozen as he stared through the view port at the bow of the Union warship looming up in the dark. The shock of the impact rolled Hunley over on her side and pushed her deep into the sea.

Iron plates separated and water burst inside, filling the interior within seconds.

No one can be sure of the final images that pa.s.sed through the minds of the doomed crew of Hunley as she slipped beneath the waves for the final time. Dixon's last thoughts were probably of his sweetheart, Queenie Bennett, waiting for him in Alabama. James Wicks may have visualized his wife and four daughters before blackness swept over him.

Hunley's final score of her own dead now stood at 22.

In time, the bones of Dixon and his crew would be preserved by the silt that slowly filtered inside the submarine and filled her interior.

A hundred and thirty-one years would pa.s.s before anyone learned where or why they died.

The story of the little undersea craft that entered the history books as the first submarine to sink a warship, a feat that would not happen again until the U-21 torpedoed the British cruiser H.M.S.

Pathfinder in World War I, began in New Orleans in early 1861.

Her grandfather and predecessor was called the Pioneer A brainchild of machinist James McClintock and built three years before Hunley, she was a cigar-shaped craft with conical ends, thirty feet long and four feet in diameter. Gaining a seventy-year jump on Howard Hughes's racing aircraft, Pioneer used countersunk rivets to join quarter-inch iron plate to her interior framework, which reduced friction as she moved under the water. Reports say she worked surprisingly well when operated by her three-man crew, who actually blew up a schooner on Lake Pontchartrain during a test run.

Two of Pioneer's financial backers, Horace L. Hunley and Baxter Watson, became very excited at the prospects of turning her into a Privateer, so they took out the necessary letters of marque for a privateer. Unfortunately, Union Admiral David Farragut had different ideas.

He ran his fleet past the forts on the lower Mississippi River and captured New Orleans before Pioneer was completed.

Hunley ordered the Pioneer scuttled to keep her from falling into Yankee hands. Many years later, a submarine reputed to be the McClintock craft was recovered in a ca.n.a.l and now sits in Jackson Square.

However, the size and shape do not match contemporary eyewitness accounts of the Pioneer Researchers also claim that Hunley and McClintock's submarine was raised and auctioned off for sc.r.a.p several years after the war.

Hunley, McClintock, and Watson escaped to Mobile, Alabama, and quickly began a.s.sembling a second submarine in a machine shop owned by Thomas W. Park and Thomas B. Lyons. They were ably a.s.sisted by two engineering officers from the 21st Alabama Regiment, Lieutenants William Alexander and George E. Dixon.

Referred to as simply Pioneer II and occasionally called the American Diver, the new craft was larger and more efficiently designed to travel under water than her predecessor. She performed well and handled without undue effort. Her trials went smoothly, but when she set out on her first mission to sink a blockading Union ship, a sudden squall blew in from the sea. While being towed across Mobile Bay by a tugboat, the waves carried over Pioneer's open hatches. Bailing Proved hopeless, and her crew abandoned the sub before she slipped beneath the sea off Fort Morgan.

With more guts than foresight, Hunley sc.r.a.ped up the funding to begin a third submarine. McClintock acted as advisor on this project while Lieutenant Alexander did the design work and directed construction.

She began life with what is thought to be an old locomotive boiler that was sliced horizontally and heightened by a one-foot strip of iron riveted between the halves. Solid iron wedge-shaped bow and stern castings were added, while bulkheads were placed three feet inside the hull to form water ballast tanks.

The craft that became famous as the Hunley torpedo boat was amazingly advanced for her time. Her hull configuration was very similar to the much later Nautilus nuclear sub designs. She had diving planes attached on each side of the hull, manual pumps to increase or decrease water bajlast, a single propeller and rudder protruding from the center of the stern, again mudh like a modern nuclear submarine.

Iron weights on the keel could be dropped with the twist of a wrench to decrease ballast during emergencies. Two small raised openings with viewing ports served as entry and exit hatch towers.

They were barely wide enough for a man to squeak through if he held his arms over his head.

There was even a rudimentary snorkel system, called an air box, with pipes that could swing vertical, their ends above the water surface.

It was almost as if Henry Ford had built a 1929 Model A sedan on his first attempt at a horseless carriage. Hunley's only shortcoming was her primitive propulsion system. Electrical battery power and diesel engines were far over the horizon. She had to rely on eight strong men to Turn the crank that rotated her propeller.

Hunley's overall length ran about thirty-five feet" while her hull rose five feet in height with a four-foot hewn. The rudder was steered by a wheel and operated by the captain, who stood and navigated through the view ports in the forward hatch tower. She carried a twenty-foot iron pipe as a spar from her bow. Slipped over the end like a sleeve was a saw-toothed barb attached to a round copper canister, containing a charge of black powder. The idea was for the crew to crank the propeller as fast as they could and drive the barb into the target's hull.

Then as she backed away, the spar would slip from the barb and canister while a firing lanyard was paid from a reel beside the forward hatch.

At 150 yards, the line would trigger the firing mechanism, detonating the charge, with Hunley a safe distance away.

She was described in the flowery journalistic prose of the era as an "infernal contraption," more appropriately, the "peripatetic [or itinerant] coffin." To newspapers in the North, after news of her construction was leaked by spies, she was considered "the South's secret weapon."

The choppy waters of Mobile Bay proved too rough for the submarine, and Union ships remained too distant to reach in a single night's attempt, so Hunley and his a.s.sociates began to forget any hopes of lucrative privateering. Then an offer they couldn't refuse came in.

General Pierre Beauregard, commanding the Charleston, South Carolina, defenses, requested the submarine be transported to his district to eliminate the Union fleet blockading the harbor. Horace Hunley and his co-builders jumped at the opportunity, especially since a wealthy merchant and owner of several blockade runners, John Fraser, offered a prize of $ 100,000 to any vessel that could destroy the Union admiral's flagship, the New Ironsides, or $50,000 for every monitor or other armed warship sent to the bottom.

The sub was soon hoisted onto two railroad flatcars, tied down, and sent across the forested Southern countryside to the hotbed of secession. She must have presented quite a sight to the gawking residents of the cities and towns along the way. Hunley was no giant cork, and the flatcars groaned under her iron ma.s.s. Estimates have placed her gross weight anywhere between four and ten tons.

Horace Hunley placed McClintock in command of the sub. The operation got off to a less than auspicious start. McClintock and his civilian crew tried several times to leave the harbor and attack the Union fleet, but failed owing to mechanical problems and rough seas.

The military were not impressed. When they strongly suggested sending along a naval officer as an observer, McClintock turned them down cold. Not a wise move. Hunley was promptly commandeered in the name of the Confederacy, McClintock was given his walking papers, and a crew of navy men from the harbor ironclad fleet, under the command of Lieutenant John Payne, came aboard to try their luck.

They drew a losing hand.

A short time later, through inexperience, Payne caused the boat to dive while he was caught in a rope snarled in the hatch cover. The open hatches tilted under water, and the submarine sank. Payne leaped free, shouting for his men to abandon ship. That was easy for him to say. He was already standing half out of the forward hatch tower. The poor souls in the interior behind him stood a better chance of swimming the English Channel handcuffed than escaping the iron coffin.

Lieutenant Charles Hasker, who was standing in the aft hatch tower manning the ballast pump, was carried to the bottom when the suction of the water pulled the cover closed, trapping his leg and breaking the bone. As the sub filled with water, the inside Pressure equalized and Hasker pulled his fractured leg free. He stroked for the surface forty-two feet away, miraculously reaching air and sun Without drowning or suffering an embolism. After the Civil War, Hasker liked to boast that he was the only man to go down on the Hunley and survive.

Five men drowned. Hunley was on the scoreboard with her first victims.

She was raised, her dead removed, and the interior dried out.

Horace Hunley volunteered the services of the team who created her, including Thomas Park, in whose shop the craft had been constructed, and Lieutenant Dixon. Beauregard accepted. Hunley and his people arrived and promptly put the submarine back in diving order.

Practice maneuvers began in the Ashley and Cooper rivers and proved quite impressive. On a number of occasions, Hunley and her crew slipped underwater a hundred yards away from an anch.o.r.ed ship and popped up the same distance away on the other side within ten or fifteen minutes.

On October 15, 1863, the sun was covered by a thick morning haze.

Dixon, who normally commanded the sub, was not present that day, and Hunley took the helm for a practice dive. For some unknown reason the boat was also short by one other member of her crew, who now totaled eight.

The men stepped off the wharf onto the small planks leading to Hunley's open hatch towers. They squeezed through the tight openings and took their places at the propeller crank, sitting in staggered rows and crowding the narrow confines. Then 'Ibomas Park entered through the aft hatch and sealed it while Hunley did the same forward.

Hunley steered for the Indian Chief, a receiving ship used by the Confederate Navy to support the harbor mine operations. The sub's commander had two options for underwater running. He could flood the ballast tanks until the hatch towers were barely above water, and then take her down by tilting the diving planes, thereby controlling the angle for desired depth. His second choice, and the easiest for his human propulsion system, was to flood the tanks until he achieved neutral buoyancy at the correct depth, the same basic method used on all modern submarines. Trim was stabilized by Park, who worked the valves and pump for the aft ballast tank. When Hunley was ready to come up, he and Park pumped the water ballast from the tanks in unison, and the sub rose to the surface. Providing all went smoothly.

But this day something went terribly wrong.

Witnesses recall watching the sub dive beneath the surface, and then waiting in vain for it to reappear. After a few hours it became apparent that Horace Hunley, along with his crew inside the "infernal contraption," was lost.

It was another case of human error. Hunley had miscalculated his angle of descent and allowed the forward ballast tank to overflow. The sub lost trim and rammed its nose deep into the bottom mud, her stern raised slightly toward the surface, 145 feet away. Now, one of the engineering defects came into play. The bulkheads for the ballast tanks did not extend to the top of the hull roof, and the forward tank began to overflow, the water pouring into the main compartment.

Frantically, Hunley slammed the pump handle back and forth, ordering Park to blow the aft tank in a desperate effort to increase the buoyancy.

Park kept his head and the stern lifted until it rose at the steep angle of thirty degrees. Hunley, unfortunately, panicked and forgot to close his valve, and despite his efforts at the pump the water continued to pour in.

He shouted for the crew to drop the iron ballast plates attached to the keel. Working off balance, they struggled to Turn the rusting bolts but only succeeded in twisting them halfway before the relentless flow of water crept over their heads. In a last-ditch attempt to save themselves, the men made an effort to escape through the hatches and swim to the surface. The covers would not budge, sealed tight by the water pressure. When their bodies were recovered, most still clutched candles in their hands.

The score was now Hunley 13, the Confederacy 0.

The story traveled around the city that "the Hunley would sink at a moment's notice and sometimes without it." The Confederate Navy took the stance "I told you so," and washed their hands of the submarine.

Despite his reservations, Beauregard ordered the Hunley to be salvaged.

Divers led by Captain Angus Smith were engaged to bring up the sub for the second time. Hunley was found with his head raised in the forward hatch tower, one arm lifted as though pushing against the cover.

Thomas Park was found in the same position in the aft hatch tower.

Both had suffocated. The other six men had drowned.

Those who saw the blackened and distorted faces on the bodies never forgot the ghastly sight. The blood and gore of the battlefield was a horror they could accept, even understand. But death in an iron box under the sea filled them with a loathing far worse than any nightmare.

The funeral took place the following Sunday. The body of Hunley was escorted to Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston by two companies Of soldiers and a band. After a solemn ceremony, he was laid to rest, followed by his ill-fated crew the following day.

The sub was propped on a wharf until Beauregard could figure out what to do with her. A Southern artist, Conrad Wise Chapman, wandered by, sketched the torpedo boat, and later painted a small picture of her that now hangs in the Confederate Museum at Richmond. Primitive in her construction though surprisingly modern in shape, she sits like the proverbial fish out of water, her torpedo spar aimed forlomly across the water at the enemy fleet.

Hunley was d.a.m.ned as a Jonah, and the majority of those who voiced criticism demanded that now her crew was recovered she should be dumped back on the bottom and left there. Beauregard called a halt to any further underwater operations, seeing rlo reason to throw more lives away on a "contraption that had yet to leave the harbor." There were only two who argued with his decision.

Lieutenants George Dixon and William Alexander, who helped construct Pioneer II, upon hearing of the tragedy hurried to Charleston from Mobile. Both refused to accept defeat.

Together, they persuaded a reluctant Beauregard that it was a terrible waste to forget the heroic efforts of the dead and ignore the potential threat of the submarine to the blockading Union fleet. Less than enthusiastic, Beauregard finally gave in, but only on the condition that any attacks on the enemy be made with the sub afloat, not submerged.

The two enterprising young engineering officers quickly overhauled the boat and, what is most incredible, a.s.sembled a new crew from a host of volunteers before the ground settled over Hunley and his comrades'

graves. Perhaps the tantalizing offer, still in effect, of $100,000 for sinking the New Ironsides fogged over the ever-hovering threat of a horrible death. It has never been known for certain if the reward was in gold or Confederate currency.

The boat was officially renamed the Horace L Hunley, with Lieutenant Dixon as its commander. It now came under the wing of the army, with the navy acting as support. Mooring the boat in the backwater channel behind Battery Marshall on Sullivan's Island, Dixon and Alexander set up quarters at Mount Pleasant and launched what has to be the world's first submarine school. The crew were instructed in the basics of underwater operation by diagrams traced in wet beach sand.

They were also ordered to do nineteenth-century calisthenics. If only we had videos of that. Afternoons were spent in practice dives and long-distance runs. In the last light of day, the two young officers would lie on the beach and take compa.s.s sightings of the Union ships riding at anchor. When they agreed that sub and crew were in a state of readiness, they began to make nightly runs against the enemy fleet, leaving on the ebb and returning with the incoming tide.

Admiral John Dahlgren, Union commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Fleet, was kept well informed of the Hunley's progress by Confederate deserters. He instructed his ship captains to keep a sharp eye while they were anch.o.r.ed at night. Floating booms with dangling chains were placed around the ships as a primitive form of ant.i.torpedo netting. Bright calcium lights were primed and ready to flare, and manned picket boats constantly moved around the mooring sites.

Dahlgren also ordered his ironclad monitors to anchor in shallow water so there could be no room for Hunley to maneuver from below.

Night after night, the ungainly submarine and her hardened crew churned into the sea off Charleston to sink a Yankee ship. And each time they returned empty-handed, racing the dawn to avoid discovery, beaten by choppy water, adverse currents, and high winds, or by arms too weary to Turn the propeller crank another stroke.

Winter brought cold, miserable weather, and the Hunley's forays became even more difficult. More than once contrary currents almost swept them out to sea. On other occasions they were still within range of Union guns when the sun rose. An exhausted Dixon decided to give his crew a rest while conducting further underwater experiments in the calm waters behind Sullivan's Island. One such experiment that intrigued him was an endurance dive.

If they were apprehended by a picket boat or were under fire by a blockading vessel, there would be no escape except by diving and waiting it out on the bottom. Their lives might depend on knowing how long they could stay down in order to throw the Union picket boats off their trail.

After agreeing on a coordinated plan, Dixon and Alexander waved to the soldiers lining the dock at Battery Marshall. Then they closed and bolted the forward and aft hatch covers. Then they checked the time on their watches. The ballast tanks were flooded and the sub slowly settled into the mud of the back channel. To simulate actual running conditions, the men slowly rotated the propeller, each steeling himself not to be the first to shout, l,up!" Twenty-five minutes later, the candles refused to burn. Each second pa.s.sed by like an eternity- The dampness from their breathing raised the humidity inside to an intolerable level. Blackness lay like a smothering blanket. The usual joking conversation died into silence, broken only by an occasional "How is it?" followed by "All right" that pa.s.sed between Dixon and Alexander.

The interior became stifling from the used-up air mixed with the smell of sweat. Never in history had humans remained submerged underwater so long. And still none begged for deliverance.

They far exceeded any limit expected of them. At last, as if preordained, all nine men gasped in chorus, "Up!" Quickly, Dixon pumped out the water ballast forward. But Alexander's aft pump was not operating. With incredible coolness, he a.n.a.lyzed the problem.

Working by feel, he unscrewed the cap on the pump, twisted out the valve, and pulled out a wad of seaweed that had plugged the inlet.

By now, the bow had ascended while the stern remained firmly mired in the mud. The others fought against creeping panic as grim visions of Hunley and Park and their crew's final moments materialized in their minds. Death stared them square in the eye, and yet none blinked.

Unconsciousness was edging into Alexander's brain as he rea.s.sembled the pump and frantically worked the lever. For an agonizing moment the bottom mud refused to release its grip. Then suddenly the stern broke free and the Hunley leveled out just as the hatch towers broke the surface. The covers were unbolted and thrown back. To a man, the crew sagged in exhaustion and immense relief as they inhaled the cool, brisk air.

The sun was shining when they began the test, and now it was dark.

Only one solitary soldier remained on the dock. The rest had dispersed, certain the Hunley was up to her old tricks. He whooped in happy realization at her sudden resurrection when Alexander yelled for him to take a mooring line.

A match was struck and timepieces were checked. They had remained underwater for two hours and thirty-five minutes. An astonishing feat when considering the small cubic displacement of the sub's interior.