Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 11, 1995 TAG: 9505110125
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN NOBLE WILFORD THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Divers exploring off the coast of Charleston, S.C., say they have discovered the long-sought sunken iron hull of a Confederate submarine, the Hunley, which was the first submarine in history to sink a warship.
As ill-starred a vessel as ever put out to sea, the Hunley was built by private investors, commanded by army lieutenants and driven by volunteers turning a propeller shaft with hand cranks.
She sank like a rock on three trial runs, killing three crews, including one of the investors, Horace Hunley. Grim experience earned for the little submarine the nickname Peripatetic Coffin.
On the night of Feb. 17, 1864, the submarine torpedoed and destroyed the USS Housatonic, one of the Union warships blockading Charleston harbor.
This introduced submarines as weapons of war, although it was the only such action in the Civil War. Not until the closing months of World War I would the Hunley's achievement be repeated, when a German U-boat sank a British cruiser in the North Sea.
The Hunley's crew had no time to savor their historic triumph. They cranked furiously, trying to reach the safety of Sullivans Island, but were never seen again. The Hunley disappeared without a trace, with the loss of yet another crew. P.T. Barnum once offered $100,000 for the vessel's recovery. Divers, Civil War buffs and nautical archeologists have made many futile attempts to find the sunken remains.
Last week, a team of divers - part of a joint venture of Clive Cussler, the underwater adventurer and author of the novel ``Raise the Titantic,'' and the University of South Carolina - dug through three feet of silt and came upon what they said was one of the Hunley's conning towers.
They said the submarine was intact and remarkably well preserved, lying a few miles off Sullivans Island.
``There's absolutely no doubt,'' Cussler said Wednesday in a telephone interview from Charleston. ``It's the Hunley.''
The discovery is to be announced formally at a news conference Thursday in Charleston. More detailed examination of the wreck is planned in the next few weeks, with a view to solving the mystery of the submarine's fate and eventually raising the ship.
Dr. Mark Newell, a nautical archeologist with the Institute of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, said that a positive identification of the wreck could not be made until it had been thoroughly examined by archeologists.
``We have every reason to believe the identification is accurate,'' said Newell, who has been searching for the Hunley since the early 1980s and who worked with the divers and magnetic-survey team Cussler assembled and financed for the hunt. Newell has not inspected the wreck and, in fact, knew nothing of the results, he said, until called by a reporter.
One of the divers, Ralph Wilbanks, a former archeologist for the state of South Carolina, reported several details corresponding with descriptions of the Hunley, including a forward hatch tower, diving fins and an air box, a pipe that could be raised above the water to draw in air while the submarine was submerged.
``She can easily be raised using proper engineering and marine salvage technology,'' Wilbanks was quoted as saying in a statement issued for Cussler's organization, the National Underwater and Marine Agency in Austin, Texas.
Newell said that South Carolina would probably request permission to raise the submarine and restore it for museum display. All abandoned Confederate property falls under the jurisdiction of the General Services Administration in Washington. Cussler, who has organized dozens of searches for sunken warships, said that his only interest in the Hunley was its discovery.
by CNB