07/28/2026
Interesting!
https://www.facebook.com/share/19TpGk8YVV/?mibextid=wwXIfr
They Raised Her After 136 Years and Found the Crew Still at Their Stations
On the night of February 17, 1864, the hand-cranked Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley rammed a spar torpedo into the Union warship USS Housatonic off Charleston and became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy ship in combat. A lookout clinging to the sunken Housatonic's rigging later reported a blue light out on the dark water, the Hunley's prearranged signal that the mission had succeeded. Then she vanished with all eight men aboard. It took 131 years before Clive Cussler's NUMA team found her in 1995, buried under three feet of silt in just 30 feet of water, four miles off Sullivan's Island, lying on her side with her bow pointed toward home. On August 8, 2000, a crane lifted the fragile iron hull from the water intact while thousands watched from boats and shorelines.
What scientists found inside deepened the mystery. All eight crewmen were still at their stations along the crank handle. No pile of bodies at the hatches, no sign of any scramble to escape, the aft hatch still locked from within. Excavators also recovered a bent $20 gold coin from commander Lieutenant George Dixon, a gift from his sweetheart that had stopped a bullet at Shiloh, engraved with the words My life Preserver. In 2004 the eight men were buried in Charleston with full honors, 140 years after they died. In 2017, Duke researchers proposed the answer to why nobody moved: the shock wave from their own torpedo, detonating just 16 feet from the hull, likely killed every man instantly. The first submarine crew to sink a warship never knew they had succeeded, and never knew they were sinking.
