SYMHC Classics: The Sinking of the H.L. Hunley

This 2017 episode covers the story of the H.L. Hunley, which really begins with the Union blockade of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Happy Saturday everyone. Coming up on the show, we
have an interview with Dr Rachel Lance, author of the
book In the Waves, My Quest to Solve the Mystery
of a Civil War Submarine. That book recounts her pH
d research into the disaster aboard the h L. Hunley,
And since the interview is more focused on her research
than on the greater story of the Huntley and what happened,

(00:23):
we wanted to replay that earlier episode is a Saturday
classic for folks who may not know or may not
remember the details. Um we briefly discuss her research from
back before the book was published. At the end of
the episode. One thing to note, there's discussion about one
of the Hunley's predecessors, the Pioneer in this episode, which
her research uncovered different information about, and we're gonna leave

(00:46):
that for the upcoming interview, but when you get to
that part, just know that we will be revisiting it
in a couple of days. This episode originally came out August.
Well Come to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.

(01:12):
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We have
a past podcast subject that has been in the news lately,
that is the c s S. H L. Hunley, and
that's following a newly published paper on the cause of
death for the people who were inside that Confederate submarine
when it was lost. And typically it's the sort of
news that we would cover with an episode update, where

(01:34):
we would either play the previous episode first and talk
about the new developments afterward, or the other way around.
But that previous appearance of the Hunley on our show
is from the episode More Shipwrecks Stories Battleships, so it's
only about eight minutes of an episode that also covers
several other shipwrecks as well. So instead of doing a

(01:55):
normal episode update that we might do typically in another circumstances,
we're going to give the h L. Hunley the full
treatment today. And huge, huge thanks to Rachel Lance, who
dropped us a note about the Hunley a few days
before we recorded this. She's one of the authors on
this paper that just came out about it, which actually
grew out of her pH d research, So we will
be talking about that some more later in the episode,

(02:18):
and the story of the h L. Hunley really begins
with the Union blockade of the Confederacy during the Civil War,
which was ordered less than a week after the fall
of Fort Sumter in South Carolina. So for a quick recap.
After multiple Slave states, including South Carolina, seceded after the
election of Abraham Lincoln, Major Robert Anderson of the U.

(02:38):
S Army occupied Fort Sumter and refused to hand it
over to the Confederacy, and after a couple of skirmishes,
a Confederate force attacked the fort on April twelfth, and
the Union surrendered it on The attack on Fort Sumter
is generally marked as the official beginning of the war.
Almost immediately after this, the United States government started working

(02:59):
on a plan to cut off the Southern ports from
international shipping. The goal was to prevent the South from
exporting its goods, including cotton and produce, and to prevent
Southern states from importing trade goods, weapons, and other material
that would be needed for the war. This was all
part of a military strategy called the Anaconda Plan, meant

(03:19):
to choke off the South and bring a speedy end
to the conflict. There is some debate about how effective
this was. It definitely made things tougher on the South,
but the war was definitely not brought to a remotely
speedy end by putting it into place. The government had
two main options for stopping commerce at the southern ports.
President Lincoln could issue an executive order closing them, or

(03:43):
a blockade could prevent ships from entering or leaving them.
Either way, though, cutting off the Southern states to shipping
would have a negative impact on international trade, which meant
other nations were likely to object, so the likely international
response had to be part of that decision, and there
were pros and cons to each of these two strategies.
An executive order closing the ports would be simpler it

(04:05):
would not require a massively huge navy to enforce, but
it would also be difficult to enforce. This was especially
true since violators would need to be tried in the
state where they'd violated the order, which at that point
would have been a state under Confederate control. That would
make such a proceeding highly unlikely, so it was really

(04:26):
easy to imagine someone just ignoring the order knowing that
it wasn't likely or even impossible that they would be
prosecuted for it. A blockade, on the other hand, was
an internationally recognized wartime action, and standards for blockades had
been outlined in the eighteen fifty six Declaration of Paris.
Although the US was not a signatory of the declaration,

(04:46):
it could expect other nations to respect the blockade as
long as it was implemented and maintained in a way
that followed international law. The only exception would be if
other nations were willing to officially take the Southern side
in the conflict, which would put them at war with
the United States, but at the same time, implementing a
blockade would shift the framing of the war. You might

(05:09):
remember how in our podcast on nuclear close Calls, the
United States presented its blockade of Cuba during the Cuban
Missile crisis as a quarantine rather than as a blockade,
because a blockade assumed a state of war, and the
United States was not at war with Cuba at that time,
so this was similar Blockading the Southern States meant that
the Union was recognizing the Confederacy as an opposing belligerent.

(05:33):
This meant the war was no longer an insurrection or
a rebellion or some kind of internal matter. It was
a war between two separate opposing entities. On April nineteen,
President Lincoln issued a proclamation ordering the blockade of the
entire Confederate coast, with the exception of North Carolina and Virginia.

(05:53):
He issued a second proclamation eight days later which added
those two states to the plan. In the words of
his Shill proclamation, quote for this purpose, a competent force
will be posted so as to prevent entrance and exit
of vessels from the ports aforesaid. If therefore, with a
view to violate such blockade, a vessel shall approach or

(06:14):
shall attempt to leave, any of the said ports, she
will be duly warned by the commander of one of
the blockading vessels, who will endorse on her register the
fact and date of such warning. And if the same
vessel shall again attempt to enter or leave the blockaded ports,
she will be captured and sent to the nearest convenient
port for such proceedings against her and her cargo as

(06:36):
prize as maybe deemed advisable. This was a colossal undertaking.
The plan involved not only blocking the twelve major southern ports,
but also guarding its entire coastline. This is about three thousand,
five hundred miles or five thousand, six hundred kilometers, and
although leaders hoped that it could be done with about

(06:56):
thirty warships, it became clear really quickly that there was
not nearly enough. Small vessels dodged the warships guarding the
ports by traveling along inland waterways, and commerce continued essentially unimpeded.
I mean, it was harder to do, but like they
didn't make much of a dent, and getting done continued

(07:16):
at the southern ports for months. Gideon Wells, Secretary of
the Navy, then established a Blockade Strategy Board, which convened
at the Smithsonian Institution and made an extensive study of
Southern waterways to try to figure out how to bolster
this blockade. Their research stretched from July to September of
eighteen sixty one, and they ultimately issued ten total reports

(07:40):
on how to make the blockade more effective. The number
of blockading ships would grow well into the hundreds, and
by the end of the war, the United States would
have the largest navy on earth. Meanwhile, the Confederacy worked
out a number of strategies to try to get around
this blockade. For a time, the Confederate government tried issuing
letters of mark to privateers to operate from the southern

(08:02):
ports and try to take prizes from the Union trade ships.
This was particularly effective at distracting the United States Navy
for the first several months of the war, but as
the blockade got tightened, privateers stopped being able to sneak
out and into the Southern ports, so their usefulness declined,
and eventually their use in the war really waned. Another
technique was blockade runners, small lightweight sailing vessels and steamers,

(08:27):
most of them civilian vessels that largely operated at night.
Blockade runners would sneak in and out of Southern ports
and carry goods to and from neutral ports like Bermuda
and Nasau. Charleston, South Carolina was a hot spot for
blockade runners until early eighteen sixty three, when the Union
significantly reinforced the blockade there. Then most blockade running activity

(08:50):
moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. Small vessels ran the blockade
all through the Gulf Coast throughout the war as well.
Having grown up in North Carolina and spent a fair
amoun of time in the Wilmington's and Rightsful Beach areas
in the summer, blockade runners they have kind of a
folk hero quality in this like they're kind of a

(09:10):
nod to the very romanticized idea of how the Civil
War went down, have kind of a sticking it to
the man running the blockade like spirit. Uh So, I
have always found the story of the Blackade Runners kind
of fascinating, um from that point of view and life experience. Yeah,
I think it's certainly like conjurors images of just sort

(09:31):
of some interesting stealth moving and yeah, and I can
see where it gets romanticized. I think they're they're even
you know, hotels and restaurants and things like that named
with the Blockade runner or or nods to famous blockade runners.
To me, those words will always mean star wars. So
of course there were not just efforts to run the Blackade,

(09:53):
but also to destroy the ships in the blockade themselves.
And that is what brings us to the c s S. H. L. Huntley,
which we will talk more about after a sponsor break.
The H. L. Hounley is named for Horace Lawson Hunley,

(10:14):
who was born in Tennessee on June three. He got
a law degree from the University of Louisiana which is
now to Lane University in eighteen forty nine, and he
opened a law practice in New Orleans. He also worked
at the New Orleans Customs House, and he'd previously served
in the Louisiana legislature. In eighteen fifty nine or eighteen
sixty he bought a plantation, and in addition to the

(10:37):
enslaved labor that worked on the plantation, according to the
eighteen fifty census, he enslaved eight people for domestic work
at his home in New Orleans. By eighteen sixty one,
he was doing pretty well financially, but he was always
interested in finding new ways to bring in additional income,
and one of these was the development of a submarine
vessel to be used in the Confederate war effort. This

(10:59):
really seems to have in a scheme that was driven
more by money and by pride than by patriotism. Although
Hunley himself was a slave owner and he supported the
institution of slavery, he also thought it was really foolish
and shortsighted for the South to be going to war
over it. But businessman and the Confederate government had offered
substantial prizes to anyone who could sink a Union warship,

(11:20):
and Huny really hoped to get himself one of those prizes,
and he was also wanting to make his own mark
on history and establish a legacy for himself. In his
pursuit of a workable submarine, Hunley teamed up with other
financial backers and went to James McClintock, an engineer who
was living in New Orleans who had also been working
on a small underwater craft with Baxter Watson, and once

(11:43):
they were all working together, their first attempt at a
submarine was the Pioneer, which was a thirty five ft long,
roughly cylindrical vessel with tapered ends. It was powered by
two men turning a crank while a commander controlled the
depth and used fins to steer. Although the Pioneer essentially
worked and it was authorized for privateering with a letter

(12:04):
of mark, it wasn't particularly refined. It moved slowly, and
it leaked, and it never saw combat. When the Union
captured New Orleans in April of eighteen sixty two, the
team intentionally scuttled it so that it would not fall
into enemy hands. This might be where things like privateers
get romanticized, because you have to have nerves of steel

(12:24):
to be like it's essentially a big barrel. I think
I'll take it under water and pull a crank. Yeah,
this whole they talked about in the prior episode, which
I think was from Sarah and Bablina, about how nerve
racking it must have been to be in any of
these vessels. I mean, at this point, being in a
submarine is still a pretty closed in, tight quarters experience.

(12:46):
But these were just basically metal tubes that you had
to crawl into and then crouch. Yeah. Yeah, Like, here's
the submarine I built in my backyard, Go take on
the war effort in it. That would be scary. And
from there, Hunley, Watson and McClintock fled to Mobile, Alabama,
where they met Thomas W. Park and Thomas B. Lions
of the Park and Lions Machine Shop, and it was

(13:09):
there that these five men, along with William A. Alexander,
worked on another submarine, American Diver. Their efforts with the
Diver weren't nearly as successful as they had been with
the Pioneer, though McClintock spent months trying to develop an
engine that could power the sub rather than using the
power of human beings turning cranks, because moving fresh air

(13:31):
into a submersible craft was a tricky proposition. Using an
engine rather than than human exertion for propulsion would give
it a greater range and more power, but he couldn't
get an engine that was small enough to fit, so
he ultimately gave up after having spent months trying, and
then went back to the crank method that they were
using before, and he wound up with a design that
was slightly larger than the Pioneer and had two additional

(13:53):
crew to power that crank. Uh It performed well enough
in tests in the lake, but even with two more
men working the crank, once the American Diver was launched
into the sea, it wasn't powerful enough to overcome the
pull of the tide. The crew had to struggle just
to make it back to port, and once they did,
for reasons that aren't entirely clear, the vessel was immediately

(14:14):
swamped and sank, and it has never been recovered. So
not only had the team spent months working on a
vessel that didn't work in real world conditions and then
lost it, they also sunk all of their capital into
that venture. They would have been out of the submarine
game entirely had they not found a new investor that
was Edgar C. Singer of Texas, who was an expert

(14:35):
in torpedoes and Singer arrived in Mobile in the spring
of eighteen sixty three and was impressed enough with their
progress that he funded work on another submarine, which took
place over that spring and summer, and the result was
the h L Hunley, which was originally named the fish Boat. Yeah,
it's not clear to me exactly when they changed it
to the HONLY Um, but the Homely was longer than

(14:59):
the Pioneer or the American Diver, with a total length
of fort or twelve meters that included a five ft
long or seven point six meter main compartment, and then
running all through that compartment was the crank connected to
a propeller by a series of gears that would be
operated by a crew of seven. Space inside of the
scrap was very tight. Those men would basically, one at

(15:21):
a time, crawl or sort of sidle their way in
and then cunch over this central crank. Uh An eighth
man who was the one in the in command of
the vessel controlled the depth and the direction. I'm so
claustrophobic just hearing that description. Tracy's watching me wins and squirm,
and the artwork for this episode on that will be

(15:43):
on our website is like a diagram of what the
thing looked like. It is very it's very it's very
tight and there. Out of the water, the hunley looked
like a giant metal tube with tapered ends and fins
and a couple of domes on top. But in the
water it was pretty easy to mistake for a porpoise
or a dolphin. Bellows and snorkel tubes were used to
move fresh air into the craft, with a lit candle,

(16:04):
providing an early warning system for oxygen getting too low.
It's one of the things that previous hosts remarked on
as being little nerve racking to have to keep an
eye on a candle to know if you had enough air.
The craft's buoyancy and depth were controlled through a pair
of ballast tanks, one four and one aft, and each
of them was equipped with its own pump. The pumps
were also capable of removing water out from the crew compartment,

(16:27):
which was somewhere it should not be. The vessel's buoyancy
was a very delicate balance, and too much water collecting
in the main compartment would cause the vessel to sink.
They began testing the Hunley in the Mobile River in
July of eighteen sixty three, working the bugs out before
inviting Confederate military officials to observe. They conducted a successful

(16:49):
demonstration on July thirty one, which involved approaching a barge
in the river while towing a mine, and when it
got close to the barge, the Hunley submerged, passed under it,
and resur fist farther up the river. Meanwhile, once the
Mind came in contact with the barge, it exploded and
sank it. This demonstration was a clear success, but it

(17:09):
was not met with the unanimous approval among the Confederate Navy.
Submarine technology in general was viewed with some suspicion, and
a lot of people thought it was dishonorable or underhanded
to sneak up on an enemy and attack it in
a way that had no hope at all of defense.
Uh The whole the whole collection of torpedoes and mines

(17:30):
and things like that that exploded in the water were
all known as infernal machines at this point in history.
Um The counter argument to the idea that it was
dishonorable to be using these things to blow up a
ship when people had no way of defending themselves. Was
basically that, as underdogs with fewer naval resources than the
Union the Confederates, that you basically had to use whatever

(17:52):
tools they had at hand. Rear Admiral Franklin Buchanan, commander
of the Naval District of the Gulf, was one military
figure who not entirely trust submarines. Yet he was the
one who contacted Flag Officer John Randolph Tucker, who was
in command of the Confederate Navy and Charleston, to unreservedly
recommend the Huntley's use against the blockade there. Tucker passed

(18:14):
the recommendation on to General p. G. T. Beauregard, who
immediately requested that the Hunley be sent to Charleston. Tucker
had apparently been confident enough that Beauregard would want to
take this infernal submarine off of his hands that he
had already made arrangements to transport it to Charleston before
he actually got that permission. The Hunley went to Charleston
by train, where it arrived in August. Soon the Confederate

(18:38):
Navy took control of it, feeling the civilian team's progress
was too slow, but on August twenty nine, eighteen sixty three,
while at the dock being prepared for a training mission,
the Hunley sank and five of the eight crew aboard
were killed. Horace Hunley then demanded that the control of
the submarine be returned back to him from the Confederate military,

(18:58):
and this was granted, but it did not end well
for him either. On October fifteenth, he planned a demonstration
and in which he would dive under a Confederate vessel
and then surface again on the other side, with himself
in command of the vessel. But after the dive, the
Hunley did not come back up again. Hunley himself, along
with the rest of the crew were all killed, and

(19:20):
due to bad weather, the vessel wasn't recovered for weeks.
When it was recovered, it turned out a valve on
the ballast tank was open, which had allowed water from
the sea into the crew compartment, which had sunk the
vessel and killed everyone aboard, although they had managed to
raise the h L. Hunley from the sea floor. After
both of these incidents, General Beauregard was understandably reluctant to

(19:41):
allow the vessel to be used again, but Lieutenant George Dixon,
who had previously lived in Mobile and had worked at
the Parking Lions machine shop when the Hunley was built,
asked to be put in charge of it. Dixon was
finally given permission to target the U. S. S. Housa Tonic,
which was part of the Union blockade at Charles Sston
Fix and carried out this operation on February eighteen sixty

(20:04):
four after about two months of training and practice for
the crew, and we will talk about the mission and
how it went both well and poorly. After a sponsor break.
When the h L. Hunley embarked on its mission to

(20:25):
destroy the unionship He's a Tonic, it was no longer
towing a mind behind it as it had done in
that initial demonstration in the Mobile River. Instead, it was
equipped with a black powder torpedo attached to the end
of a twenty ft spar so for the sake of clarity.
Torpedoes at this point generally did not have any kind
of propulsion or guidance like they do today. They were

(20:46):
a lot more like mines than modern torpedoes. They usually
had to just be rammed into their target in some
physical way. The plan for The Hunley was to do
exactly that and then raise a blue phosphorus lamp to
signal at the mission was complete, and after seeing the signal,
men on shore would light a fire that the Hunley
could use to navigate home. The Hunley approached the Housatonic

(21:09):
at about eight pm on February eighteen sixty four. Robert F. Fleming,
one of the few black men stationed aboard, spotted something
odd in the water. He alerted Acting Master's mate Louis
a Compwait, who observed the object and so that it
was a log. Fleming did not agree with this assessment,
given the objects shape and the fact that it was

(21:30):
traveling quickly across the tide instead of with the tide.
He alerted another sailor on watch that there was a
torpedo incoming. The Housatonic was prepared for a submarine attack.
Thanks to word carried by Confederate deserters, the Union knew
that the Confederate Navy had a vessel that could approach
ships while partially or entirely submerged. The semi submersible David

(21:53):
had also attacked the U s s New Iron Sides
the previous October, so all the blockade ships in the area.
It took the precaution of anchoring in fairly shallow water
and keeping the boilers ready to move if necessary. Even so,
the response aboard the Housatonic was kind of sluggish. Fleming's
observations weren't readily heated, leading him to say he was

(22:14):
going to slip the anchor chain himself if he had to.
It was only after Compway took a second look with
binoculars that he actually sent word up the chain of
command that an incoming vessel was on the way. Eventually,
Acting Master John Crosby alerted the Captain Charles Pickering. As
the rest of the crew began trying to take evasive action.

(22:35):
Pickering began firing on the Hunley with his shotguns, since
the Hunley had already gotten too close for them to
hit it with a cannon. In spite of the efforts
aboard the Housatonic, the Hunley successfully deployed its torpedo, blowing
a huge hole in the side of the ship and
causing it to rapidly sink since it had been in
shallow water with the hope of deterring a submarine attack.

(22:57):
It came to rest with its rigging above the waterline line,
and those crew not able to make it to lifeboats
were able to cling to the rigging while waiting for
rescue by other ships in the blockade. Although the Housatonic
sank and very little aboard was salvageable afterward, most of
the crew did survive, five were killed out of a
total of about a hundred and fifty five. Fleming reported

(23:18):
that while awaiting rescue, he saw a blue light on
the water, presumably the Hunley signal of success, and there's
some debate about what he might have seen them. He
wouldn't have had knowledge of the Hunley signal plans, and
he wouldn't have had reason to make it up, but
it seems likely that the only light actually burning aboard
the Hunley was the candle that was used to monitor

(23:39):
the oxygen level. Fumily also never made it back to
port due to elapse in communication there on. Shore officials
in Charleston didn't actually realize the ship was missing for days,
and with no surviving witnesses on their side, it took
the Confederate Navy a while to confirm that the Housatonic
had been sunk as well. The Confederate Navy try to

(24:00):
keep the word of the Hunley's loss from spreading. It
would have been impossible to try to locate or raise
the ship, since it had gone down in the vicinity
of the blockade and no one aboard had survived to
give its precise location, But it was useful to the
Confederacy for the Union to believe it still had the
capability of a surprised submarine attack, and believing the Hunley

(24:20):
or at least the crew, were still out there was
also a boost to flagging Confederate morale. Once it was
clear that no one had survived, theories abounded about what
might have happened that night aboard the Huntley. Perhaps too
much water had gotten into the Huntley when the hatch
was open to raise that blue light and it had sunk.
Perhaps the explosion had damaged the vessel, or gunfire from

(24:44):
the ship had pierced the hull. Or maybe in the
thrill of the moment, that candle had burned out and
nobody had noticed. Since the captain of the vessel was
the only one who could really control its direction or
its depth, if he had been killed or injured somehow,
then his loss would have doomed the whole crews. There
was a lot of speculation, but no one had any idea.
The Hunley stayed in its place on the sea floor

(25:06):
long beyond the end of the Civil War in eighteen
sixty five. More than a hundred and thirty years later,
on May third, an expedition by the National Underwater and
Marine Agency, which you'll see abbreviated to NUMA spearheaded by
author Clive Cussler, discovered it in the Charleston Harbor. It
was raised from the seafloor on August eighth, two thousand,

(25:28):
but when it was open, things became even more mysterious.
The entire crew were still at their stations, apparently having
made no effort at all to escape, and showing no
evidence of serious injury among what remained of their corpses.
Dixon's pocket watch was stopped at eight three, leading to

(25:50):
questions of whether it had been running slowly and had
stopped at the moment of impact, or if it had
just run down and the time was a coincidence in
terms of it being close to the time of day
that they attack the housa Tonic Dixon's lucky twenty dollar coin,
which he had held onto you after it partially deflected
a musket ball that struck him in the leg, and
the Battle of Shiloh was recovered from the wreck as well.

(26:13):
Apart from the condition of the crew, the vessel itself
was also intact, with nothing to indicate that it had
been taking on water or incapacitated in some way. There
were two large holes in its sides and missing glass
panes from one of the viewports, but this was eventually
determined to have happened long after the Hunley came to
rest on the ocean floor. And this all brings us

(26:34):
to the new research that made headlines in August. While
doing work on a PhD dissertation about injury and trauma
patterns from underwater explosions, Rachel Lance looked at data from
several famous historical battles that involved underwater explosions, and one
of these was the h L. Hunley. This eventually led
to a paper published in Plus one on augusten entitled

(26:59):
quote air last injuries killed the crew of the submarine
h L. Hunley. Since the Huntley was on the seafloor
for more than a hundred years, coming to this conclusion
required construction of a one six scale model of the ship,
which they nicknamed the CSS Tiny. The CSS tiny was
exposed to a variety of underwater blasts in a pond

(27:20):
in St. Louis, North Carolina, with the data from all
those explosions collected and analyzed. You can read this entire
paper online and we will link to it in the
show notes. But to sum it up, quote, the blast
produced likely caused flection of the ship hall to transmit
the blast wave. The secondary wave transmitted inside the crew
compartment was of sufficient magnitude that the calculated chances of

(27:43):
survival were less than six for each crew member. The
submarine drifted to its resting place after the crew died
of air blast trauma within the hull. The blast wave
wasn't enough to physically throw the crew around or damage
their skeletons, but it was enough to cause massive lethal
pulmonary trauma, which either killed the crew instantly or incapacitated

(28:06):
them beyond the ability to try and escape. This paper,
of course, does have some limitations. No matter how accurate,
a scale model is still a scale model, and the
analyzes required proportionately scaled down blasts to be done in
that lake. There's also some debate about exactly how large
the payload of the Hunley's black powdered torpedo was, and

(28:28):
also to confirm these findings, a modern autopsy would have
needed to have been performed on the bodies of the
crew when they initially died more than a hundred years ago.
Obviously that's not gonna happen. So when time travel gets invented,
we are going to sess this out. We have so
many terrible uses of time travel that come up on
our show and I'm like, could you maybe have like

(28:51):
prevented this from her? Oh? No, We're just going to
figure out what happened. But given all the other factors
about how the event transpired and all the other unanswered
questions and how the crew was found, it does make
a lot of sense as an explanation. Today, d H. L.
Hunley has been through a massive conservation that has removed
more than one thousand, two hundred pounds, or about five

(29:15):
of concretion from the vessel, and it's at the War
and Lash Conservation Center in North Charleston, South Carolina, where
conservation work is still ongoing. Tours are available, but only
on the weekends to allow for conservation work. During the week.
The Hunley's crew were also given a funeral and buried
on April seventeen, two thousand four, in the same cemetery

(29:37):
as the men killed in its prior sinkings had been
laid to rest. The next successful attack by a submarine
during wartime would be on September five, when the German
U twenty one hit the British Pathfinder with a torpedo,
sinking it and killing two hundred and fifty six. So
that as the h L Hunley. We've gotten several requests

(29:57):
for the h L Hunley over the years, and it
was only more recently than I realized that that it
had been in that one eight minute segment earlier. Yeah,
So thanks again to Rachel Lampce for sending us a
note about this yeah, where we will link to the
paper which does have other authors in addition to her
as well. We will link to that from the show
notes for folks who want to read it. It It is

(30:18):
very interesting. Thank you so much for joining us today
for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind
of email address or maybe a Facebook you are l
during the course of the episode that might be obsolete.
It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our
email address again. You can now reach us at history

(30:40):
podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're all
over social media at missed in History and you can
subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast the
I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,

(31:01):
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H m hm