June 22, 2020 • 39 mins
Tracy talks with biomedical engineer Dr. Rachel Lance about the cause of the H.L. Hunley disaster and the book that Dr. Lance wrote about the disaster and her research into the case.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly frying. Back In
we did an episode about the Confederate submarine h L. Hunley,
(00:22):
and at the end of that episode we talked about
some research that had been done by Dr Rachel Lance
about the cause of the disaster that killed the Hunley's
entire crew. We just replayed that episode as a Saturday
Classic this past weekend for folks who don't know that story. Uh.
Dr Lance and we had a brief email exchange after
(00:43):
that after the Friends of the Hunley issued a press
release that kind of dismissed her findings without really engaging
with her hypothesis. And now she has written a whole
book about that research, not just about the conclusions that
she came to, but also her whole process of research, experimenting,
and sifting through information to really get to the truth
(01:04):
of it. That book is called In the Waves, My
Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine.
Dr Lance was kind enough to sit down with me
to talk about it. We are sharing that interview today,
so I'm here today interviewing Dr Rachel Lance, author of
In the Waves, My Quest to Solve the Mystery of
a Civil War Submarine. That book I really loved reading.
(01:27):
It combines science and history and memoir altogether, while recounting
her PhD research and to what caused the disaster aboard
the h L. Hunley. That disaster led to the death
the whole crew during the U. S. Civil War. So welcome,
Dr Rachel Lance. Thank you. First, can you tell us
a bit about yourself and your background. Well, as you mentioned,
(01:50):
I did my PhD, and I did that at Duke University,
and what I am is a biomedical engineer, and that's
a really vague term. It can encompass a lot of things,
but I specifically study patterns of injury and trauma that
occur to people. One of the subjects I really enjoy
studying and I'm passionate about is trauma patterns from explosions.
(02:10):
And the reason for that is because not only do
I get to occasionally set explosions while I'm researching those,
but also it's a very real problem that still affects
a lot of active duty servicemen and women. So I
worked on that PhD at Duke while I was also
working for the U. S. Navy, which ties together those
two interests, and as part of that research. It started
(02:31):
out as a little bit of a side project, but
it ended up being a bit like quicksand I started
researching this case of the Civil War submarine H. L. Henley.
In this book, you talk about knowing from the start
that this project about the Hunley was going to be complex,
and that historical projects that you might work on always are.
So what are some of the complexities that are involved
(02:52):
with doing scientific research on historical projects, especially once that
folks that are outside this whole world might not think of.
The biggest complexity is always that human memory is really unreliable.
I had learned this the hard way when my advisor,
Dale Bass, and I had started working on a project
looking at shell shock two soldiers who are operatives during
(03:15):
World War One, and what we discovered over the course
of that project is that when someone is unexpectedly near
an explosion, they tend to think the exclusion is a
lot closer than it actually was. So for that case,
that was a huge complicating factor. And add that on
top of the normal issues of any history project, where
(03:35):
all of the information is buried somewhere in archives, and
to get any piece of data you have to go
through boxes and boxes of old file handwritten documents that
are not searchable. I knew that that would kind of
have to happen with the Hunley as well, that I
would be dealing with these battles between different testimonies that
disagreed with each other, with people who could be considered
(03:58):
unreliable witnesses and might not be telling things as accurately
as they actually happened when they wrote them down. And
in addition, just the general inability to type it into
Google and find the answer and instead of have to
go to an archive. That has definitely come up on
the show before when we have seen sometimes a little
surprised that people in a particular historical period did not
(04:21):
have a piece of information and it's just because like
they didn't have access to it. It was in some
archive in some other country and they had never been there,
right right. Sometimes there's also a language barrier too, Like
I would have really loved to look at some of
the old submarine prototypes from other countries. There are some
records of some from China, things like that, but I
do not speak sufficient Chinese for that research, right, right.
(04:46):
So you're talk in your book about how before shifting
your focus onto the Hunley, you had been studying blast
injuries in World War Two, specifically in people who were
in the water when they were hurt. Can you tell
me a little bit about that research and where you
were kind of thinking it might lead you before you
switched onto this other focus. Well, I started that research
(05:07):
just because, like any PhD student, I was looking for
a project. You need to pick your own dissertation project,
and it has to be a substantial enough contribution to
the world of science that they're then going to call
you doctor afterwards. So for me, as someone who had
been working for the Navy and had previously been working
building underwater breathing systems, that translation of my work into
(05:30):
looking at underwater explosions seemed really natural. And on top
of that, the more I dug into what the current
guidelines are for safety from underwater blasts, the more I
realized that we don't know very much about it. So
that's actually part of ongoing research for me. It's something
I still want to keep continue pursuing, and I've been
picking away out slowly. But the way that I was
(05:51):
doing it, and the way that I got started was
looking at World War Two soldiers who had ended up
in the water when their ships were sunk. So this
was happening in the battles in both the Atlantic and
the Pacific. Some enemy force would end up sinking their ship,
and what would happen was they often had a depth
charge that was primed and ready to go on board
the deck because they were typically fighting submarines, and as
(06:14):
their ship went down, the depth charge would slide off
the back as the rest of the vessel's sake, and
then when it got to its predetermined depth where the
trigger was set for, it would go off. Now, at
this point, it's kind of friendly fire by like an
inanimate object. And these guys would be in the water
and they've been been swimming away. They knew this was coming,
(06:34):
so they tried to get as far as possible. And
so what happened was for me as a researcher, you
have these hundreds of case reports of men who are
swimming in the water, who know about how far away
they're sinking ship is, who are aware of that distance,
which is important, and then who end up with this
variety of injuries and for an injury bou mechanist person
(06:55):
like me, you could take that and turn that into
a useful guideline for how far away you need to
be in order to be safe. So the sort of
end goal was to figure out guidelines if you're in
the water, you need to get this far away in
order to be a little safer from the blast exactly.
My work is always about safety guidelines and protective equipment,
(07:16):
which is actually part of why I like it because
I kind of feel good about that every day. Yeah,
but typically if someone is trying to do harm, they'll
just overestimate how much TNT they need or whatever explosive
they're using. But if you want to be safe, you
need to know how far away you need to evacuate
from that charge. So, yeah, that's what I was trying
(07:37):
to do, is come up with a more meaningful guideline
for how far away people need to be from these
explosions before they are at lower or zero risk of
injury and death. In your book, we will have hopefully
listeners will have listened to our H. L. Henley episode
as a Saturday classic before they come into this, or
they will already be familiar with the basics of the
(07:58):
Huntley disaster. In your book, you walk through the steps
that you took to disprove some of the proposed explanations
for what caused this disaster um as well as the
very long process of gathering the data to support the
explanation that you've concluded is the right one. How did
the process of trying to rule out what didn't happen
(08:20):
compare to the process of trying to confirm what did happen? Well,
I think it was a lot easier to rule out
the other theories because they didn't involve me getting into
a farm pond. That's the biggest difference right there is
I got to do a lot of that work in
a room with electricity. So for the two main other
(08:44):
theories that I looked at were the theories that the
crew suffocated inside the close hall, which seems like an
obvious question to ask, right, this is a homemade submarine
and so it's a very real possibility that they simply
ran out of air. And then the other question was
whether or not someone from the crew of the Housa
Tonic while shooting at the Hunley managed to hit them
and sink the vessel or at least kill the captain.
(09:06):
The first one that I did was the suffocation. The
actual word is asphyxiation. Suffocation is only when you read
out of oxygen. I don't need to get tu nitpicking,
but that's like kind of a thing I care about, um.
And so for that one, that was largely math. So
I was looking at the pictures of the Hunley, and
I was creating models, and I was measuring gas bass
and I was using historical research from our field of
(09:30):
respiratory physiology and trying to calculate how much oxygen they
would have used in how much carbon dioxide they would
have produced. So that one was largely math. The second one,
the lucky shot theory. We both went to a firing range,
which was it was a fun day, um, but we
got to use some historically accurate weapons and shoot at
(09:50):
cast iron samples to look at the damaging curd there.
But that was also again a largely calculation based thing.
So the Hunley was discovered meters east of the wreck
of the Hoosatonic. Now the reason that's interesting is because
that's pretty far. So if the crew of the who
Satonic was shooting at the Huntley and they hit her,
(10:12):
or they killed the lieutenant. Why did this thing drift
over three football fields further out to see before anyone
took any kind of corrected action. Um. And so then
for the blast experiments, those were wildly different, and I
kind of hinted at that, but I really can't overstate
what a weird physical setup that was. I had to
(10:32):
befriended tobacco farmer because there was no way Duke was
letting me use live explosives on campus. Um. We got
the a t F involves, so we're making sure we're
doing things legally and safely, but we were also pretty
far from any electrical outlets, and a lot of that
project was me starting with marine boat batteries and building
(10:55):
electrical harnesses to power the normal measuring equipment that I
could typically just stick into an outlet in the lab.
And so that's obviously just like a really really wild
and different type of experiment to do. So I think
that that was probably the big difference you mentioned in
(11:21):
the book. But you are not the only person to
have suggested that blast trauma could have had a role
in this disaster, just that you're the first person to
actually back that up with data. Who were some of
the other people to make that connection earlier on, the
earliest one I could find was actually from seventy seven,
and I was, yeah, I was pretty excited about running
(11:42):
across that quote because I felt like this kindred spirit
tie through the times. But um, yeah, there was a
reporter who was publishing in the New Orleans paper and
he wrote, undoubtedly the concussion produced by the exclusion of
the torpedo destroyed instantly the lives of Dixon and his crew,
So pretty early on there's this suspicion that the blast
(12:02):
might have had something to do with the crew deaths.
And personally, I think that's pretty interesting that there's ever
an argument against it, because throughout this whole project, my
family and I were jokingly referring to it as people
near a giant bumb sometimes die. Um, this this charge
was at least a hundred thirty five pounds. I think
(12:23):
there's a better historical record to show that was actually
two d pounds of black powder and it was only
sixteen feet away from the hull of the submarine. Sometimes
the Hunley as a submarine U and it's it's mission
that night is described as a David versus Goliath story,
with this tiny little submarine that was really really small
(12:45):
sinking a massive worship Um. And in some ways your
book reads to me like the whole book is that
David versus Goliath story, because you were working on a
PhD dissertation, albeit I mean at a large and wealthy university,
but like, graduate students are not known for having tons
of money and resources at their disposal all the time,
and you were trying to get access to information and
(13:08):
resources from an established organization that just did not seem
open to sharing that with you. Was this parallel that
something that occurred to you as it was happening, not
in the way you've raised it. No, if I be honest, um,
as a scientist, and like I'm still an active scientist,
they work now as faculty at Duke, but science always
(13:31):
feels like the goliath. I always feel like this one
little person who's just trying so hard to find the truth,
and every experiment I've ever set up, it's felt like
the odds were stacked against me. So I wouldn't necessarily
say I felt like a little David because I was
a graduate student working by myself, but which I wasn't.
(13:52):
I did have a great team, so that that's part
of it, like every scientist has a team, um. But
I think it's more the fact of every time you
pursue a scientific endeavor, there's this feeling of a of
a somewhat impossible mission. Um. To me, I think of
it a little bit like astronomy. Like I didn't have
(14:14):
direct access to the boat, okay, but not everyone who
studies astronomy has physically been to a star. That's a
great point. I also noticed as I was reading that
I felt in some ways that it was a celebration
of outsiders and amateurs because where you did wind up
getting some of that information was like like from a
(14:34):
person who just loved to make models of ships, like
not necessarily from a person who could could back up
with a bunch of bona fides why they love to
make these ships. What I've learned is that the Internet
is just full of nerds, and I mean that in
the best possible way, Like we're out there, guys, no
(14:54):
matter what your passion is, there's someone out there who
shares it. Yes, so you mentioned my go Christophiley, who
deserves so much credit because he's been watching the Hunley
since the day it came up from the bottom of
the ocean and just taking like screen grabs as the
friends of the Hunley and the conservation experts have webcams
as they were picking away at it, and so he
(15:16):
would like watch to take screen grabs and use it
to build this unbelievably elaborate model, which even has um
the correct number of rivets in the hall. Yeah, it's
down to the minutia. So if you don't mind his
his website where you can play with the model is
Vernian Era, which is the r N I A N.
(15:37):
I don't. I'm in no way affiliated. I just really
love it, Like um, I loved reading about it, so yeah,
I'm enthusiastic about going and looking at that later. One
are the things that we mentioned in that prior episode
that we'd already did on Huntley, was that one of
its predecessors, which was the Pioneer, had been scuttled to
(15:59):
keep it from falling into enemy hands. You actually unearthed
information working on your book that contradicts that. Can you
talk about that a little bit? Yes, So the story
of the Pioneer is a little bit muddled by the
fact that there were two submarines that were both two
man crews that were being tested in the same area,
(16:19):
which is link Pontra train in outside of New Orleans.
And this was a story that became really important to
me because I found a touch of deception about it. Um.
There is one book called The H. L. Henley. It's
by historian named Tom Chaffin, and he did a meticulous
(16:40):
and diligent job of reporting basically every historical document he
could find at the time about the Henley. And he
is the only author who I could find who accurately
reported this one letter that was written towards the tail
end of the Civil War as the Union took New
Orleans and then or did to right back about the
(17:02):
inventory of what they were finding there. And what this
letter said was they had found this submarine. It included
a very detailed drawing, so it was an engineering scaled
drawing done by a professional from the actual physical submarine.
And it also said that two contrabands were smothered to
death inside of it. And the word contraband used during
(17:24):
the Civil War was the Northern term for enslaved men
and women. Because, um, they said, if the South considered
these human beings property, then as they swept through they
could possess their so called property as the contraband of war.
And so this was kind of their sneaky way of saying, like,
of course, we get to free the slaves as we
(17:44):
come through. So they started referring to UM slaves and
former slaves as contrabands. And so what this says is,
this is a story about this prototype submarine that they
physically had in their position, and we know it was
the CSS Pioneer that had been pie litted by two
of these unfortunate enslaved men who died inside because it's
(18:06):
sank to the bottom of the lake. Now, this is
a story that's been a little bit debated. As I'm
sure you already know, Tracy, sometimes history changes. So as
we recover new documents and as people find new things
in archives all the time, we get better reinforcement of
(18:28):
what might have been previously unreliable stories. And so in
addition to this letter, there's also a third hand account
from the same thing of um someone who was going
through the South and New Orleans and was reporting the
words from a first hand witness that this was a
test by a wealthy slave owner, a plantation owner in
the area who had forced his slaves to pilot his
(18:52):
prototype submarine as part of a public demonstration with a
carnival like atmosphere, which obviously has just layers of complexity
and difficulty um And then in addition to that, as
I was researching it, I found a third reference, and
that for me was enough to reinforce those other two.
This the reference was a diary of a man named
(19:13):
John Roy, and he was a known associate of the
people who built the Hunley, one of whom was James
McLintock and John Roy, around the time of this supposed demonstration,
was invited to go watch a demonstration of a submarine
in Lake Country train and that, to me, that third
(19:35):
source was enough to reinforce that this story really actually
occurred and not unfortunately, two enslaved men were forced inside
and lost their lives as a result of the failure
of the submarine to operate as planned. But the reason
that I really wanted to dedicate more time to finding
additional sources, and this is actually something that I planned
(19:56):
to continue picking away at, and I hope other historians
also keep an eye out these resources too, is because
there is an author who has modern day publications about
the Huntley who decided to change the wording in that
historical letter, so instead of two contramands, he wrote that
it was just two normal men, and then he discussed
(20:20):
how they were actually Confederate volunteers, which is obviously not true.
And to me, it's an appalling misuse of history when
you try and cover up something like that. Just just
acknowledge what happened, um, and be honest. Yeah, I would
agree with that. Um. When when you and I were
(20:40):
arranging this interview and I got the review copy of
the book, um, you sent me an email that said
something like buckle up for chapter three. And when I
was reading chapter three and I got to this part
that we just talked about. I think chapter three was
the chapter I was like, I think this is what
that was in reference to you. Yes, I have never
(21:05):
so badly. I just wanted to like pick up my
phone and somehow text to the author of a book
and be likely serious that. I have had people tweet
at me that they're like, oh my god, yeah, yeah
that just happened. Yeah. So yeah, for that recent Saturday
classic that that folks have may have listened to, where
(21:28):
we said that it was scuttled to keep it from
falling into enemy hands, not correct. Yeah, but like I said,
there's still some debate because there was a second two
man submarine in the area at the same time. But yea,
so those two sometimes get confused with each other in
the historical record. Um, but yeah, it seems like a
(21:48):
story that definitely happened in that area. When talking about
your blast experiments in the book, you draw on a
quote from one of the sailors who died aboard the
Huntley about what they had done was quote considerable of
(22:11):
an undertaking and one that I never wished to undertake again.
So when you were, uh, what were you imagining that
these experiments were going to be like before you started,
because that makes it kind of clear how you felt
about them afterward. Yes, Um, that is how I felt
about them afterward, And now I enjoy telling the story
(22:32):
that I don't know that I would sign up for
them again. But when when I first started the project,
I honestly was just planning and looking at suffocation, So
calculations of oxygen and carbon dioxide or something that I
used to do all the time when I was building
underwater breathing systems. There's still something to do all the
time now that I work more in a respiratory physiology aspect,
(22:54):
and that was originally the goal. And then as I
got more into the blast aspects of it and more
engaged with this blast problem, the second goal was to
build a computer model. So I was still gonna be
sitting comfortably in my office and just letting my computer
run away over the weekend. But because of some of
the complexities of black powder and the way that that
(23:16):
is just an unbelievably difficult substance, that didn't work out either,
and it ended up becoming necessary to do a live experiment.
Well at that point, I'm kind of an addict when
when I get a puzzle, like if there's a if
there's a puzzle question, I'm I'm engaged with that until
I starved to death or I solve it, and so
I sort of had to keep going, and that's how
(23:37):
I ended up in a muddy pod with a scale model.
So there are so many fascinating historical tidbits scattered all
through this book, like how black powder was made, and
information about other submarines and other submarine accidents in history.
We'll reach some of your favorite historical details that you
came across while working on this. My favorite thing that
(23:59):
I discus heard of I was researching was actually about
the Rains brothers. So I ended up writing a whole
chapter on black powder, which is, I promise, so fascinating.
It was one of my favorite chapters. But the Rains brothers,
who are Gabriel and George Washington, were responsible for a
lot of the black powder and the explosives that the
Confederacy had. And I had originally written like this whole
(24:22):
multi page thing just about George Washington Rains, but I
ended up taking it out. It was just too much
of a sidebar um. But this guy was intense and
he was he just cracks me up because he was
on a mission to start the black powder mill for
the Confederacy. So they're short on black powder. There's no
(24:43):
black powder manufacturing to speak of down there, and the
black hate is limiting how much they can import. And
so this guy is like sleeping on railway cars. He's
never made black powder before, and this is an incredibly
dangerous thing to try to do, Like they build these
mills planning for explosion is to happen. And this guy's like,
it's cool, I've got a pamphlet. And so he's like
(25:05):
riding around, doesn't have a home on these real cars,
looking for a place to build a mike powder mill
for the first time in his entire life, just with
so much confidence that I lack. But on top of that,
I got to go through a lot of his letters
to his brother Gabriel Reigns. Gabriel is his much much
older brother, something like fifteen and twenty years older. I'd
(25:27):
have to look up the exact numbers. And Gabriel was
the one who really joined the military first and became
the munition experts first. He's actually the person who invented
land mines. So obviously this is an interesting family. But
as George Washington's reigns starts to become more involved in
the military, he is writing about his activities in battle
(25:50):
to his older brother. And now since it's over outer
fifty years later, we can fact check him, and as
it turns out, he was just straight lying. Oh no, yeah,
I was sitting in these archives like reading these Georgia,
I did raise letters and like googling the battles, and
he was just making things up. And he was there
(26:13):
there tens of pages long where he describes in detail
like how what numbered they were and how the opposing
forces had all ammunitions and then you look it up
and they're like, at this battle, the Americans, oh numbered
the Mexican forces by three to one. Like so I
think that was probably one of my favorite things that
I discovered was this guy was just so excited about
(26:33):
telling his older brother about his war experiences that he
was just making stories. We're not real, that we're not real.
What surprised you the most when doing this research into
the Hunley or or just in generally when writing the book,
what surprised me was the amount of This is gonna
(26:53):
sound so cheesy, okay, but it's the true answer. It's
it's the amount of kindness that I found. So this
whole project was like me with four thousand dollars at
the beginning, and that was from a historical foundation at
Duke as well as the Hagley Library and Delaware, which
they just do black powder um, a lot of black
powder stuff, but that's not very much like in science.
(27:16):
That's like a comically small amount. And so I was
really dependent on the charity of other people. And it
was really really moving to me how many people were
willing to volunteer their time and resources so um, you know,
I start writing to the a t F about permitting,
and immediately I'm on the phone with this a t
F agent who's just excited about this project. And he's
(27:38):
remained a friend. Um, so we're still in touch all
the time, as well as this medical student who's a
former Army explosives ordinance disposal operator and he was so
excited about it. And both of these guys were just
willing to like show up at five am and jump
into forty degree water and I never heard one complaint
and we've just become friends from that. And the same
(28:01):
goes for like the farmer who let us use his land,
and as well as the people you mentioned, like people
I found just on the internet, people who have contacted
me about the Hunley even recently as yesterday, I had
someone who's passionate about collecting old currency email me just
to talk about like Dixon's mythological gold coin and so um,
(28:21):
that's when I think my favorite part of the project
and the thing that surprised me most is how many
people are willing to kind of volunteer a little piece
of themselves to help solve this question. That's awesome. Uh.
By coincidence. While I was preparing for this interview, I
found the text of the address that John R. McNeil
(28:43):
gave at the American Historical Association's annual meeting in January UM.
He's the past president of the American Historical Association. And
this address was called Peak Document and the Future of
Historical Research, and it was about how historians who are
working with primarius documents can, in his words, come up
with new wrinkles that breathe new meaning into old and
(29:07):
familiar documents, but that this gets harder and harder to
do when historians are going back to the exact same
documents over and over and over. So he talks a
lot about increasing contributions to the field of history that
are coming from science, from things like DNA analysis and
light our and other remote sensing and studying objects with
electron microscopes, and what all of this means in terms
(29:31):
of training future historians and their scientific literacy. You as
as like a scientist and engineer, how do you think
the study of science or engineering can benefit historians or
can affect the field of history. Well, he's already listed
a couple of really great examples of the way that
(29:51):
technology alone can kind of revive things that we can access. Right,
So for example, if you have the Dead Sea scrolls
where no, you can visibly read it, but now we
have advanced new imaging techniques that can be applied to
reading those words, then I'll automatically of a really obvious combination.
My personal favorite way that science and history get combined
(30:13):
is when we can kind of fact check our ancestors. Um.
So I really love these problems where for example, like
with the Hunley there were these cases of testimony of
seeing this blue light from shore that said, hey, we're
coming back, and I, as a scientist, can look at
that and be like did you see it though, and
(30:36):
then do some math and be like, oom I somehow
doubt this is physically possible based on the capabilities of
the human eye. And so I think that that really
lends insight into the way that we interpret things, because
then once you do that calculation and you say, Okay,
this is probably not a plausible story, you go back
(30:57):
to the original document and you're like, oh, well, this
wording could actually be interpreted in a different way. So
we're still going back to the same primary source documents,
but now we're coming back from a place of being
more informed instead of just trying to rehash the words
in a hypothetical fashion. Awesome. So this book and your
(31:18):
research into the Huntley that all came out of your
your pH d work. You are now Dr Rachel Lance.
That's that's finished. Yes, um so technically Tracy, technically now
I'm Professor Rachel Lance. But Rachel signed. So so what
are you doing now and what's next for you? Well,
(31:39):
Duke couldn't get rid of me. I sort of just
moved in there and refused sleep. Um no, I'm just kidding.
After I graduated, I did go back to work for
the Navy, which was a job that I was extremely
passionate about and love very much. But there was one
particular project that was near and dear to me because
it was based on um a man who died diving
(32:01):
on one of my projects. And he didn't Yeah, he
didn't dive because of the thing I had built, but
he was still um, he still died because of a
thing that kills a lot of unfortunately a lot of divers.
And so I received a little bit of an ultimatum
that would have had end that project, and I decided
that I would rather quit my job than quit that work.
(32:24):
So Duke thankfully took me in. They gave me, they
gave me a home. I was a home of scientist
for a little while. So now I officially have a
title and a faculty position, but I am continuing to
do dive medical research and underwater respiratory physiology research and
I'm loving every second of it and my requirement to them.
(32:44):
They actually laughed at me for because they were like,
you're the only one who's never who's requested not to
ever get tenure because I wanted to work part time.
So I'm already working on a second book as well,
and that's what I'm being with my time. Yeah, can
you can you tell us what the second book is about?
Or is that a little under wraps right now. I'm
actually hoping to hear back about it today, so by
(33:06):
the time this by the time this airs, hopefully I'll
have heard back about whether or not there's official deal.
But it will be another combination of science and history.
So you've already started doing a lot more archival work, um,
and it's a lot more military related medicine, and it's
about a group of scientists who were doing some pretty
crazy experiments on themselves and what they ended up discovering
(33:30):
from the damage they did to their own body really
really helped make D Day a success. I am intrigued
by that. Before we wrap up, is like, is there
anything you just wish I had asked about or that
you just really want to make sure everyone knows about
about your work or this book. I think you've hit
(33:51):
all of the major ones. Is that a bad answer?
I'm sorry. I like to give folks the chance, if
you know, if there's some glaring thing that I really
need to need it to have been more on the
ball about. No, I think you did a great job.
I just want to mention um one thing that I've
really tried very hard to do about this book, and
(34:11):
I have chronic feelings of insufficiency about it, but I
think it's really important to remember with this story that
the Civil War is a fascinating period of history, but
it's something that we all really need to talk about, honestly,
and I tried very, very hard to do that in
this book. I tried very hard to pull in new
(34:33):
primary sist documents so that I could tell the story
of you know, some of the black men on board
the housatonic and things like that, and to try and
give a more complete version of that. And I think
that's just one of my big hopes moving forward, is
that people will start to discuss the Huntley as the
historically fascinating object it is, but in the proper context.
(34:56):
Thank you so much. Thank you for being here today,
and we're forgiving us your time again for folks who
are interested. This book is called In the Waves, My
Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine.
Thank you, thank you. Thank you again to Dr Rachel
Lance for UH for sitting down to talk with me
(35:16):
about her book, also for being patient with me when
about three minutes elapsed before I realized I had only
started the recording on one side of our session. It
had been a while since I had done UH an interview,
and it was also the first time that I had
done it with the setup we're using with everybody recording
(35:36):
from their own homes because of the ongoing pandemic. So
thank you again UM for that. And I also have
a little bit of listener mail to take us out perfection.
This email is from Janine, who says, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I just listened to your podcast on holmech and practice
babies and found them fascinating. I had the same response
(35:57):
as Tracy to practice babies on hearing about and for
the first time, all right, those flower sack babies, I
remember that. Wait what, I'm so glad you went on
to talk about them. In particular. I thought it was
funny that neither of you took homech I'm about ten
years younger than you, and my school required both holmec
and shop for everyone in eighth grade. What I mostly
remember was making biscuits and sewing stuffed animals from kits.
(36:20):
They did let us use the power tools in the shops,
so it wasn't as useless as Tracy's experience. I have
a background in anthropology, so as I was listening to
the discussion on whether having that many caregivers was bad
for babies, all I could think was, well, it works
great and plenty of cultures. My main thought on hearing
the schedule the students kept with the baby was well,
(36:41):
that's not going to prepare you for parenting. You need
to be the sole caregiver to really get the experience.
Probably a good idea. They didn't go that route, though,
there are a lot of issues with exploitation and consent
around the practice baby situation, which I think you both
did an excellent job unpacking both in the episode and
in the behind the scene. But I actually think the
fact that they were inexperienced students learning by doing is
(37:04):
the least problematic part. In addition to what Tracy said
about other fields that allow students to practice, there's the
basic fact that in our culture of nuclear family living,
most babies go home with parents who have little to
no experience with babies. I remember vividly leaving the birth
center with my first child and thinking in a panic,
They're just gonna send this baby home with us. But
(37:25):
but I've never taken care of a baby. It's a tiny,
helpless human. What do I even do? And we didn't
even have a professor of mothercraft to keep an eye
on how we were doing. Thanks Holly and Tracy. Love
the show. Especially appreciated your COVID chat when the closures
first happened. I really enjoyed the balance of topical episodes
and distracting episodes. I hope you're well and healthy, Janine.
(37:47):
Janine also had a ps saying that Janine wrote ages
ago about girl Scouting. We read the letter on the
Juliet Gordon Lowe episode. UM, and then goes on to say, Tracy,
you were surprised that Juliet spent so much of her
life chasing after a man, and such an unworthy one
at that. I think of that part of her life
in a different way to me. Her pursuit of and
(38:09):
marriage to William Lowe shows many of the same qualities
that she showed in founding Girl Scouts, and qualities that
she encouraged in girls through scouting. Tenacity, theiring, and a
commitment to doing what she felt was right, regardless of
the disapproval of society or people around her. So thank
you so much, Janine for this email. I had never
thought of the Juliet Gordon Lowe's life and her Ill
(38:33):
Fadd relationship that way at all. So UM, thank you
for that counterpoint. UH. If you'd like to write to
us about this or any other podcast, we're a history
podcast that I Heart radio dot com. We're all over
social media at missed in History. That's where you'll find
her Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe
to our show on the I Heart Radio app and
(38:54):
Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcast Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly frying. Back In
we did an episode about the Confederate submarine h L. Hunley,
(00:22):
and at the end of that episode we talked about
some research that had been done by Dr Rachel Lance
about the cause of the disaster that killed the Hunley's
entire crew. We just replayed that episode as a Saturday
Classic this past weekend for folks who don't know that story. Uh.
Dr Lance and we had a brief email exchange after
(00:43):
that after the Friends of the Hunley issued a press
release that kind of dismissed her findings without really engaging
with her hypothesis. And now she has written a whole
book about that research, not just about the conclusions that
she came to, but also her whole process of research, experimenting,
and sifting through information to really get to the truth
(01:04):
of it. That book is called In the Waves, My
Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine.
Dr Lance was kind enough to sit down with me
to talk about it. We are sharing that interview today,
so I'm here today interviewing Dr Rachel Lance, author of
In the Waves, My Quest to Solve the Mystery of
a Civil War Submarine. That book I really loved reading.
(01:27):
It combines science and history and memoir altogether, while recounting
her PhD research and to what caused the disaster aboard
the h L. Hunley. That disaster led to the death
the whole crew during the U. S. Civil War. So welcome,
Dr Rachel Lance. Thank you. First, can you tell us
a bit about yourself and your background. Well, as you mentioned,
(01:50):
I did my PhD, and I did that at Duke University,
and what I am is a biomedical engineer, and that's
a really vague term. It can encompass a lot of things,
but I specifically study patterns of injury and trauma that
occur to people. One of the subjects I really enjoy
studying and I'm passionate about is trauma patterns from explosions.
(02:10):
And the reason for that is because not only do
I get to occasionally set explosions while I'm researching those,
but also it's a very real problem that still affects
a lot of active duty servicemen and women. So I
worked on that PhD at Duke while I was also
working for the U. S. Navy, which ties together those
two interests, and as part of that research. It started
(02:31):
out as a little bit of a side project, but
it ended up being a bit like quicksand I started
researching this case of the Civil War submarine H. L. Henley.
In this book, you talk about knowing from the start
that this project about the Hunley was going to be complex,
and that historical projects that you might work on always are.
So what are some of the complexities that are involved
(02:52):
with doing scientific research on historical projects, especially once that
folks that are outside this whole world might not think of.
The biggest complexity is always that human memory is really unreliable.
I had learned this the hard way when my advisor,
Dale Bass, and I had started working on a project
looking at shell shock two soldiers who are operatives during
(03:15):
World War One, and what we discovered over the course
of that project is that when someone is unexpectedly near
an explosion, they tend to think the exclusion is a
lot closer than it actually was. So for that case,
that was a huge complicating factor. And add that on
top of the normal issues of any history project, where
(03:35):
all of the information is buried somewhere in archives, and
to get any piece of data you have to go
through boxes and boxes of old file handwritten documents that
are not searchable. I knew that that would kind of
have to happen with the Hunley as well, that I
would be dealing with these battles between different testimonies that
disagreed with each other, with people who could be considered
(03:58):
unreliable witnesses and might not be telling things as accurately
as they actually happened when they wrote them down. And
in addition, just the general inability to type it into
Google and find the answer and instead of have to
go to an archive. That has definitely come up on
the show before when we have seen sometimes a little
surprised that people in a particular historical period did not
(04:21):
have a piece of information and it's just because like
they didn't have access to it. It was in some
archive in some other country and they had never been there,
right right. Sometimes there's also a language barrier too, Like
I would have really loved to look at some of
the old submarine prototypes from other countries. There are some
records of some from China, things like that, but I
do not speak sufficient Chinese for that research, right, right.
(04:46):
So you're talk in your book about how before shifting
your focus onto the Hunley, you had been studying blast
injuries in World War Two, specifically in people who were
in the water when they were hurt. Can you tell
me a little bit about that research and where you
were kind of thinking it might lead you before you
switched onto this other focus. Well, I started that research
(05:07):
just because, like any PhD student, I was looking for
a project. You need to pick your own dissertation project,
and it has to be a substantial enough contribution to
the world of science that they're then going to call
you doctor afterwards. So for me, as someone who had
been working for the Navy and had previously been working
building underwater breathing systems, that translation of my work into
(05:30):
looking at underwater explosions seemed really natural. And on top
of that, the more I dug into what the current
guidelines are for safety from underwater blasts, the more I
realized that we don't know very much about it. So
that's actually part of ongoing research for me. It's something
I still want to keep continue pursuing, and I've been
picking away out slowly. But the way that I was
(05:51):
doing it, and the way that I got started was
looking at World War Two soldiers who had ended up
in the water when their ships were sunk. So this
was happening in the battles in both the Atlantic and
the Pacific. Some enemy force would end up sinking their ship,
and what would happen was they often had a depth
charge that was primed and ready to go on board
the deck because they were typically fighting submarines, and as
(06:14):
their ship went down, the depth charge would slide off
the back as the rest of the vessel's sake, and
then when it got to its predetermined depth where the
trigger was set for, it would go off. Now, at
this point, it's kind of friendly fire by like an
inanimate object. And these guys would be in the water
and they've been been swimming away. They knew this was coming,
(06:34):
so they tried to get as far as possible. And
so what happened was for me as a researcher, you
have these hundreds of case reports of men who are
swimming in the water, who know about how far away
they're sinking ship is, who are aware of that distance,
which is important, and then who end up with this
variety of injuries and for an injury bou mechanist person
(06:55):
like me, you could take that and turn that into
a useful guideline for how far away you need to
be in order to be safe. So the sort of
end goal was to figure out guidelines if you're in
the water, you need to get this far away in
order to be a little safer from the blast exactly.
My work is always about safety guidelines and protective equipment,
(07:16):
which is actually part of why I like it because
I kind of feel good about that every day. Yeah,
but typically if someone is trying to do harm, they'll
just overestimate how much TNT they need or whatever explosive
they're using. But if you want to be safe, you
need to know how far away you need to evacuate
from that charge. So, yeah, that's what I was trying
(07:37):
to do, is come up with a more meaningful guideline
for how far away people need to be from these
explosions before they are at lower or zero risk of
injury and death. In your book, we will have hopefully
listeners will have listened to our H. L. Henley episode
as a Saturday classic before they come into this, or
they will already be familiar with the basics of the
(07:58):
Huntley disaster. In your book, you walk through the steps
that you took to disprove some of the proposed explanations
for what caused this disaster um as well as the
very long process of gathering the data to support the
explanation that you've concluded is the right one. How did
the process of trying to rule out what didn't happen
(08:20):
compare to the process of trying to confirm what did happen? Well,
I think it was a lot easier to rule out
the other theories because they didn't involve me getting into
a farm pond. That's the biggest difference right there is
I got to do a lot of that work in
a room with electricity. So for the two main other
(08:44):
theories that I looked at were the theories that the
crew suffocated inside the close hall, which seems like an
obvious question to ask, right, this is a homemade submarine
and so it's a very real possibility that they simply
ran out of air. And then the other question was
whether or not someone from the crew of the Housa
Tonic while shooting at the Hunley managed to hit them
and sink the vessel or at least kill the captain.
(09:06):
The first one that I did was the suffocation. The
actual word is asphyxiation. Suffocation is only when you read
out of oxygen. I don't need to get tu nitpicking,
but that's like kind of a thing I care about, um.
And so for that one, that was largely math. So
I was looking at the pictures of the Hunley, and
I was creating models, and I was measuring gas bass
and I was using historical research from our field of
(09:30):
respiratory physiology and trying to calculate how much oxygen they
would have used in how much carbon dioxide they would
have produced. So that one was largely math. The second one,
the lucky shot theory. We both went to a firing range,
which was it was a fun day, um, but we
got to use some historically accurate weapons and shoot at
(09:50):
cast iron samples to look at the damaging curd there.
But that was also again a largely calculation based thing.
So the Hunley was discovered meters east of the wreck
of the Hoosatonic. Now the reason that's interesting is because
that's pretty far. So if the crew of the who
Satonic was shooting at the Huntley and they hit her,
(10:12):
or they killed the lieutenant. Why did this thing drift
over three football fields further out to see before anyone
took any kind of corrected action. Um. And so then
for the blast experiments, those were wildly different, and I
kind of hinted at that, but I really can't overstate
what a weird physical setup that was. I had to
(10:32):
befriended tobacco farmer because there was no way Duke was
letting me use live explosives on campus. Um. We got
the a t F involves, so we're making sure we're
doing things legally and safely, but we were also pretty
far from any electrical outlets, and a lot of that
project was me starting with marine boat batteries and building
(10:55):
electrical harnesses to power the normal measuring equipment that I
could typically just stick into an outlet in the lab.
And so that's obviously just like a really really wild
and different type of experiment to do. So I think
that that was probably the big difference you mentioned in
(11:21):
the book. But you are not the only person to
have suggested that blast trauma could have had a role
in this disaster, just that you're the first person to
actually back that up with data. Who were some of
the other people to make that connection earlier on, the
earliest one I could find was actually from seventy seven,
and I was, yeah, I was pretty excited about running
(11:42):
across that quote because I felt like this kindred spirit
tie through the times. But um, yeah, there was a
reporter who was publishing in the New Orleans paper and
he wrote, undoubtedly the concussion produced by the exclusion of
the torpedo destroyed instantly the lives of Dixon and his crew,
So pretty early on there's this suspicion that the blast
(12:02):
might have had something to do with the crew deaths.
And personally, I think that's pretty interesting that there's ever
an argument against it, because throughout this whole project, my
family and I were jokingly referring to it as people
near a giant bumb sometimes die. Um, this this charge
was at least a hundred thirty five pounds. I think
(12:23):
there's a better historical record to show that was actually
two d pounds of black powder and it was only
sixteen feet away from the hull of the submarine. Sometimes
the Hunley as a submarine U and it's it's mission
that night is described as a David versus Goliath story,
with this tiny little submarine that was really really small
(12:45):
sinking a massive worship Um. And in some ways your
book reads to me like the whole book is that
David versus Goliath story, because you were working on a
PhD dissertation, albeit I mean at a large and wealthy university,
but like, graduate students are not known for having tons
of money and resources at their disposal all the time,
and you were trying to get access to information and
(13:08):
resources from an established organization that just did not seem
open to sharing that with you. Was this parallel that
something that occurred to you as it was happening, not
in the way you've raised it. No, if I be honest, um,
as a scientist, and like I'm still an active scientist,
they work now as faculty at Duke, but science always
(13:31):
feels like the goliath. I always feel like this one
little person who's just trying so hard to find the truth,
and every experiment I've ever set up, it's felt like
the odds were stacked against me. So I wouldn't necessarily
say I felt like a little David because I was
a graduate student working by myself, but which I wasn't.
(13:52):
I did have a great team, so that that's part
of it, like every scientist has a team, um. But
I think it's more the fact of every time you
pursue a scientific endeavor, there's this feeling of a of
a somewhat impossible mission. Um. To me, I think of
it a little bit like astronomy. Like I didn't have
(14:14):
direct access to the boat, okay, but not everyone who
studies astronomy has physically been to a star. That's a
great point. I also noticed as I was reading that
I felt in some ways that it was a celebration
of outsiders and amateurs because where you did wind up
getting some of that information was like like from a
(14:34):
person who just loved to make models of ships, like
not necessarily from a person who could could back up
with a bunch of bona fides why they love to
make these ships. What I've learned is that the Internet
is just full of nerds, and I mean that in
the best possible way, Like we're out there, guys, no
(14:54):
matter what your passion is, there's someone out there who
shares it. Yes, so you mentioned my go Christophiley, who
deserves so much credit because he's been watching the Hunley
since the day it came up from the bottom of
the ocean and just taking like screen grabs as the
friends of the Hunley and the conservation experts have webcams
as they were picking away at it, and so he
(15:16):
would like watch to take screen grabs and use it
to build this unbelievably elaborate model, which even has um
the correct number of rivets in the hall. Yeah, it's
down to the minutia. So if you don't mind his
his website where you can play with the model is
Vernian Era, which is the r N I A N.
(15:37):
I don't. I'm in no way affiliated. I just really
love it, Like um, I loved reading about it, so yeah,
I'm enthusiastic about going and looking at that later. One
are the things that we mentioned in that prior episode
that we'd already did on Huntley, was that one of
its predecessors, which was the Pioneer, had been scuttled to
(15:59):
keep it from falling into enemy hands. You actually unearthed
information working on your book that contradicts that. Can you
talk about that a little bit? Yes, So the story
of the Pioneer is a little bit muddled by the
fact that there were two submarines that were both two
man crews that were being tested in the same area,
(16:19):
which is link Pontra train in outside of New Orleans.
And this was a story that became really important to
me because I found a touch of deception about it. Um.
There is one book called The H. L. Henley. It's
by historian named Tom Chaffin, and he did a meticulous
(16:40):
and diligent job of reporting basically every historical document he
could find at the time about the Henley. And he
is the only author who I could find who accurately
reported this one letter that was written towards the tail
end of the Civil War as the Union took New
Orleans and then or did to right back about the
(17:02):
inventory of what they were finding there. And what this
letter said was they had found this submarine. It included
a very detailed drawing, so it was an engineering scaled
drawing done by a professional from the actual physical submarine.
And it also said that two contrabands were smothered to
death inside of it. And the word contraband used during
(17:24):
the Civil War was the Northern term for enslaved men
and women. Because, um, they said, if the South considered
these human beings property, then as they swept through they
could possess their so called property as the contraband of war.
And so this was kind of their sneaky way of saying, like,
of course, we get to free the slaves as we
(17:44):
come through. So they started referring to UM slaves and
former slaves as contrabands. And so what this says is,
this is a story about this prototype submarine that they
physically had in their position, and we know it was
the CSS Pioneer that had been pie litted by two
of these unfortunate enslaved men who died inside because it's
(18:06):
sank to the bottom of the lake. Now, this is
a story that's been a little bit debated. As I'm
sure you already know, Tracy, sometimes history changes. So as
we recover new documents and as people find new things
in archives all the time, we get better reinforcement of
(18:28):
what might have been previously unreliable stories. And so in
addition to this letter, there's also a third hand account
from the same thing of um someone who was going
through the South and New Orleans and was reporting the
words from a first hand witness that this was a
test by a wealthy slave owner, a plantation owner in
the area who had forced his slaves to pilot his
(18:52):
prototype submarine as part of a public demonstration with a
carnival like atmosphere, which obviously has just layers of complexity
and difficulty um And then in addition to that, as
I was researching it, I found a third reference, and
that for me was enough to reinforce those other two.
This the reference was a diary of a man named
(19:13):
John Roy, and he was a known associate of the
people who built the Hunley, one of whom was James
McLintock and John Roy, around the time of this supposed demonstration,
was invited to go watch a demonstration of a submarine
in Lake Country train and that, to me, that third
(19:35):
source was enough to reinforce that this story really actually
occurred and not unfortunately, two enslaved men were forced inside
and lost their lives as a result of the failure
of the submarine to operate as planned. But the reason
that I really wanted to dedicate more time to finding
additional sources, and this is actually something that I planned
(19:56):
to continue picking away at, and I hope other historians
also keep an eye out these resources too, is because
there is an author who has modern day publications about
the Huntley who decided to change the wording in that
historical letter, so instead of two contramands, he wrote that
it was just two normal men, and then he discussed
(20:20):
how they were actually Confederate volunteers, which is obviously not true.
And to me, it's an appalling misuse of history when
you try and cover up something like that. Just just
acknowledge what happened, um, and be honest. Yeah, I would
agree with that. Um. When when you and I were
(20:40):
arranging this interview and I got the review copy of
the book, um, you sent me an email that said
something like buckle up for chapter three. And when I
was reading chapter three and I got to this part
that we just talked about. I think chapter three was
the chapter I was like, I think this is what
that was in reference to you. Yes, I have never
(21:05):
so badly. I just wanted to like pick up my
phone and somehow text to the author of a book
and be likely serious that. I have had people tweet
at me that they're like, oh my god, yeah, yeah
that just happened. Yeah. So yeah, for that recent Saturday
classic that that folks have may have listened to, where
(21:28):
we said that it was scuttled to keep it from
falling into enemy hands, not correct. Yeah, but like I said,
there's still some debate because there was a second two
man submarine in the area at the same time. But yea,
so those two sometimes get confused with each other in
the historical record. Um, but yeah, it seems like a
(21:48):
story that definitely happened in that area. When talking about
your blast experiments in the book, you draw on a
quote from one of the sailors who died aboard the
Huntley about what they had done was quote considerable of
(22:11):
an undertaking and one that I never wished to undertake again.
So when you were, uh, what were you imagining that
these experiments were going to be like before you started,
because that makes it kind of clear how you felt
about them afterward. Yes, Um, that is how I felt
about them afterward, And now I enjoy telling the story
(22:32):
that I don't know that I would sign up for
them again. But when when I first started the project,
I honestly was just planning and looking at suffocation, So
calculations of oxygen and carbon dioxide or something that I
used to do all the time when I was building
underwater breathing systems. There's still something to do all the
time now that I work more in a respiratory physiology aspect,
(22:54):
and that was originally the goal. And then as I
got more into the blast aspects of it and more
engaged with this blast problem, the second goal was to
build a computer model. So I was still gonna be
sitting comfortably in my office and just letting my computer
run away over the weekend. But because of some of
the complexities of black powder and the way that that
(23:16):
is just an unbelievably difficult substance, that didn't work out either,
and it ended up becoming necessary to do a live experiment.
Well at that point, I'm kind of an addict when
when I get a puzzle, like if there's a if
there's a puzzle question, I'm I'm engaged with that until
I starved to death or I solve it, and so
I sort of had to keep going, and that's how
(23:37):
I ended up in a muddy pod with a scale model.
So there are so many fascinating historical tidbits scattered all
through this book, like how black powder was made, and
information about other submarines and other submarine accidents in history.
We'll reach some of your favorite historical details that you
came across while working on this. My favorite thing that
(23:59):
I discus heard of I was researching was actually about
the Rains brothers. So I ended up writing a whole
chapter on black powder, which is, I promise, so fascinating.
It was one of my favorite chapters. But the Rains brothers,
who are Gabriel and George Washington, were responsible for a
lot of the black powder and the explosives that the
Confederacy had. And I had originally written like this whole
(24:22):
multi page thing just about George Washington Rains, but I
ended up taking it out. It was just too much
of a sidebar um. But this guy was intense and
he was he just cracks me up because he was
on a mission to start the black powder mill for
the Confederacy. So they're short on black powder. There's no
(24:43):
black powder manufacturing to speak of down there, and the
black hate is limiting how much they can import. And
so this guy is like sleeping on railway cars. He's
never made black powder before, and this is an incredibly
dangerous thing to try to do, Like they build these
mills planning for explosion is to happen. And this guy's like,
it's cool, I've got a pamphlet. And so he's like
(25:05):
riding around, doesn't have a home on these real cars,
looking for a place to build a mike powder mill
for the first time in his entire life, just with
so much confidence that I lack. But on top of that,
I got to go through a lot of his letters
to his brother Gabriel Reigns. Gabriel is his much much
older brother, something like fifteen and twenty years older. I'd
(25:27):
have to look up the exact numbers. And Gabriel was
the one who really joined the military first and became
the munition experts first. He's actually the person who invented
land mines. So obviously this is an interesting family. But
as George Washington's reigns starts to become more involved in
the military, he is writing about his activities in battle
(25:50):
to his older brother. And now since it's over outer
fifty years later, we can fact check him, and as
it turns out, he was just straight lying. Oh no, yeah,
I was sitting in these archives like reading these Georgia,
I did raise letters and like googling the battles, and
he was just making things up. And he was there
(26:13):
there tens of pages long where he describes in detail
like how what numbered they were and how the opposing
forces had all ammunitions and then you look it up
and they're like, at this battle, the Americans, oh numbered
the Mexican forces by three to one. Like so I
think that was probably one of my favorite things that
I discovered was this guy was just so excited about
(26:33):
telling his older brother about his war experiences that he
was just making stories. We're not real, that we're not real.
What surprised you the most when doing this research into
the Hunley or or just in generally when writing the book,
what surprised me was the amount of This is gonna
(26:53):
sound so cheesy, okay, but it's the true answer. It's
it's the amount of kindness that I found. So this
whole project was like me with four thousand dollars at
the beginning, and that was from a historical foundation at
Duke as well as the Hagley Library and Delaware, which
they just do black powder um, a lot of black
powder stuff, but that's not very much like in science.
(27:16):
That's like a comically small amount. And so I was
really dependent on the charity of other people. And it
was really really moving to me how many people were
willing to volunteer their time and resources so um, you know,
I start writing to the a t F about permitting,
and immediately I'm on the phone with this a t
F agent who's just excited about this project. And he's
(27:38):
remained a friend. Um, so we're still in touch all
the time, as well as this medical student who's a
former Army explosives ordinance disposal operator and he was so
excited about it. And both of these guys were just
willing to like show up at five am and jump
into forty degree water and I never heard one complaint
and we've just become friends from that. And the same
(28:01):
goes for like the farmer who let us use his land,
and as well as the people you mentioned, like people
I found just on the internet, people who have contacted
me about the Hunley even recently as yesterday, I had
someone who's passionate about collecting old currency email me just
to talk about like Dixon's mythological gold coin and so um,
(28:21):
that's when I think my favorite part of the project
and the thing that surprised me most is how many
people are willing to kind of volunteer a little piece
of themselves to help solve this question. That's awesome. Uh.
By coincidence. While I was preparing for this interview, I
found the text of the address that John R. McNeil
(28:43):
gave at the American Historical Association's annual meeting in January UM.
He's the past president of the American Historical Association. And
this address was called Peak Document and the Future of
Historical Research, and it was about how historians who are
working with primarius documents can, in his words, come up
with new wrinkles that breathe new meaning into old and
(29:07):
familiar documents, but that this gets harder and harder to
do when historians are going back to the exact same
documents over and over and over. So he talks a
lot about increasing contributions to the field of history that
are coming from science, from things like DNA analysis and
light our and other remote sensing and studying objects with
electron microscopes, and what all of this means in terms
(29:31):
of training future historians and their scientific literacy. You as
as like a scientist and engineer, how do you think
the study of science or engineering can benefit historians or
can affect the field of history. Well, he's already listed
a couple of really great examples of the way that
(29:51):
technology alone can kind of revive things that we can access. Right,
So for example, if you have the Dead Sea scrolls
where no, you can visibly read it, but now we
have advanced new imaging techniques that can be applied to
reading those words, then I'll automatically of a really obvious combination.
My personal favorite way that science and history get combined
(30:13):
is when we can kind of fact check our ancestors. Um.
So I really love these problems where for example, like
with the Hunley there were these cases of testimony of
seeing this blue light from shore that said, hey, we're
coming back, and I, as a scientist, can look at
that and be like did you see it though, and
(30:36):
then do some math and be like, oom I somehow
doubt this is physically possible based on the capabilities of
the human eye. And so I think that that really
lends insight into the way that we interpret things, because
then once you do that calculation and you say, Okay,
this is probably not a plausible story, you go back
(30:57):
to the original document and you're like, oh, well, this
wording could actually be interpreted in a different way. So
we're still going back to the same primary source documents,
but now we're coming back from a place of being
more informed instead of just trying to rehash the words
in a hypothetical fashion. Awesome. So this book and your
(31:18):
research into the Huntley that all came out of your
your pH d work. You are now Dr Rachel Lance.
That's that's finished. Yes, um so technically Tracy, technically now
I'm Professor Rachel Lance. But Rachel signed. So so what
are you doing now and what's next for you? Well,
(31:39):
Duke couldn't get rid of me. I sort of just
moved in there and refused sleep. Um no, I'm just kidding.
After I graduated, I did go back to work for
the Navy, which was a job that I was extremely
passionate about and love very much. But there was one
particular project that was near and dear to me because
it was based on um a man who died diving
(32:01):
on one of my projects. And he didn't Yeah, he
didn't dive because of the thing I had built, but
he was still um, he still died because of a
thing that kills a lot of unfortunately a lot of divers.
And so I received a little bit of an ultimatum
that would have had end that project, and I decided
that I would rather quit my job than quit that work.
(32:24):
So Duke thankfully took me in. They gave me, they
gave me a home. I was a home of scientist
for a little while. So now I officially have a
title and a faculty position, but I am continuing to
do dive medical research and underwater respiratory physiology research and
I'm loving every second of it and my requirement to them.
(32:44):
They actually laughed at me for because they were like,
you're the only one who's never who's requested not to
ever get tenure because I wanted to work part time.
So I'm already working on a second book as well,
and that's what I'm being with my time. Yeah, can
you can you tell us what the second book is about?
Or is that a little under wraps right now. I'm
actually hoping to hear back about it today, so by
(33:06):
the time this by the time this airs, hopefully I'll
have heard back about whether or not there's official deal.
But it will be another combination of science and history.
So you've already started doing a lot more archival work, um,
and it's a lot more military related medicine, and it's
about a group of scientists who were doing some pretty
crazy experiments on themselves and what they ended up discovering
(33:30):
from the damage they did to their own body really
really helped make D Day a success. I am intrigued
by that. Before we wrap up, is like, is there
anything you just wish I had asked about or that
you just really want to make sure everyone knows about
about your work or this book. I think you've hit
(33:51):
all of the major ones. Is that a bad answer?
I'm sorry. I like to give folks the chance, if
you know, if there's some glaring thing that I really
need to need it to have been more on the
ball about. No, I think you did a great job.
I just want to mention um one thing that I've
really tried very hard to do about this book, and
(34:11):
I have chronic feelings of insufficiency about it, but I
think it's really important to remember with this story that
the Civil War is a fascinating period of history, but
it's something that we all really need to talk about, honestly,
and I tried very, very hard to do that in
this book. I tried very hard to pull in new
(34:33):
primary sist documents so that I could tell the story
of you know, some of the black men on board
the housatonic and things like that, and to try and
give a more complete version of that. And I think
that's just one of my big hopes moving forward, is
that people will start to discuss the Huntley as the
historically fascinating object it is, but in the proper context.
(34:56):
Thank you so much. Thank you for being here today,
and we're forgiving us your time again for folks who
are interested. This book is called In the Waves, My
Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine.
Thank you, thank you. Thank you again to Dr Rachel
Lance for UH for sitting down to talk with me
(35:16):
about her book, also for being patient with me when
about three minutes elapsed before I realized I had only
started the recording on one side of our session. It
had been a while since I had done UH an interview,
and it was also the first time that I had
done it with the setup we're using with everybody recording
(35:36):
from their own homes because of the ongoing pandemic. So
thank you again UM for that. And I also have
a little bit of listener mail to take us out perfection.
This email is from Janine, who says, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I just listened to your podcast on holmech and practice
babies and found them fascinating. I had the same response
(35:57):
as Tracy to practice babies on hearing about and for
the first time, all right, those flower sack babies, I
remember that. Wait what, I'm so glad you went on
to talk about them. In particular. I thought it was
funny that neither of you took homech I'm about ten
years younger than you, and my school required both holmec
and shop for everyone in eighth grade. What I mostly
remember was making biscuits and sewing stuffed animals from kits.
(36:20):
They did let us use the power tools in the shops,
so it wasn't as useless as Tracy's experience. I have
a background in anthropology, so as I was listening to
the discussion on whether having that many caregivers was bad
for babies, all I could think was, well, it works
great and plenty of cultures. My main thought on hearing
the schedule the students kept with the baby was well,
(36:41):
that's not going to prepare you for parenting. You need
to be the sole caregiver to really get the experience.
Probably a good idea. They didn't go that route, though,
there are a lot of issues with exploitation and consent
around the practice baby situation, which I think you both
did an excellent job unpacking both in the episode and
in the behind the scene. But I actually think the
fact that they were inexperienced students learning by doing is
(37:04):
the least problematic part. In addition to what Tracy said
about other fields that allow students to practice, there's the
basic fact that in our culture of nuclear family living,
most babies go home with parents who have little to
no experience with babies. I remember vividly leaving the birth
center with my first child and thinking in a panic,
They're just gonna send this baby home with us. But
(37:25):
but I've never taken care of a baby. It's a tiny,
helpless human. What do I even do? And we didn't
even have a professor of mothercraft to keep an eye
on how we were doing. Thanks Holly and Tracy. Love
the show. Especially appreciated your COVID chat when the closures
first happened. I really enjoyed the balance of topical episodes
and distracting episodes. I hope you're well and healthy, Janine.
(37:47):
Janine also had a ps saying that Janine wrote ages
ago about girl Scouting. We read the letter on the
Juliet Gordon Lowe episode. UM, and then goes on to say, Tracy,
you were surprised that Juliet spent so much of her
life chasing after a man, and such an unworthy one
at that. I think of that part of her life
in a different way to me. Her pursuit of and
(38:09):
marriage to William Lowe shows many of the same qualities
that she showed in founding Girl Scouts, and qualities that
she encouraged in girls through scouting. Tenacity, theiring, and a
commitment to doing what she felt was right, regardless of
the disapproval of society or people around her. So thank
you so much, Janine for this email. I had never
thought of the Juliet Gordon Lowe's life and her Ill
(38:33):
Fadd relationship that way at all. So UM, thank you
for that counterpoint. UH. If you'd like to write to
us about this or any other podcast, we're a history
podcast that I Heart radio dot com. We're all over
social media at missed in History. That's where you'll find
her Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe
to our show on the I Heart Radio app and
(38:54):
Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcast Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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