Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Four and a half years ago, the archaeologists announced that they had confirmed that when the Confederate submersible H. L. Hunley sank USS Housatonic in February 1864, the torpedo they used was still attached to a sixteen-foot iron pole attached to the bow of the boat. They were also able to corroborate that the remains of that copper torpedo match a contemporary drawing of a device claimed to be the same weapon, filled with 135 lbs of black powder. It was a landmark discovery in the process of investigating the wreck itself.

Now, armed with that knowledge, researchers at Duke University believe they’ve determined what actually sank the boat and killed its crew:

Speculation about the crew’s deaths has included suffocation and drowning, but a new study claims that a shockwave created by their own weapon was to blame.

Researchers from Duke University in North Carolina set blasts near a scale model of the vessel to calculate their impact.

They also shot authentic weapons at historically accurate iron plates.

They used this data to work out the mathematics behind human respiration and the transmission of blast energy.

Ms Rachel Lance, one of the researchers on the study, says the crew died instantly from the force of the explosion travelling through the soft tissues of their bodies, especially their lungs and brains.

Ms Lance calculates the likelihood of immediately fatal lung trauma to be at least 85 per cent for each member of the Hunley crew.

She believes the crippled sub then drifted out on a falling tide and slowly took on water before sinking.

‘This is the characteristic trauma of blast victims, they call it “blast lung”, said Ms Lance.

‘You have an instant fatality that leaves no marks on the skeletal remains.

‘Unfortunately, the soft tissues that would show us what happened have decomposed in the past hundred years.’

While I don’t have the scientific background to assess the Duke researchers’ methodology, this seems right to me, and I’ve long thought that whatever died happen must surely have killed or incapacitated the crew almost instantly.

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Update, Wednesday evening: Here’s a paper from last year arguing that the crew of Hunley did NOT suffocate due to lack of oxygen. So that rules out one of the other major theories.

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Update, slightly later Wednesday evening: The U.S. Navy History and Heritage Command isn’t so sure:

Navy researchers helping with the official examination of the Hunley have studied the blast wave theory and have their doubts, Naval History and Heritage Command spokesman Paul Taylor said.

“The Navy has already examined the concussive wave theory. We found it highly unlikely to have injured the crew, let alone caused their deaths,” said Taylor, who added the team had not had time to review Lance’s research. . . .

The official scientists working to preserve the submarine in a North Charleston, South Carolina, laboratory, had no comment on Lance’s research, said Kellen Correia, executive director of the Friends of the Hunley. Correia pointed out Lance had no access to the primary evidence from the current research into the sub.

Those official researchers continue their work on several ways the men could have died, including the notion that the submarine had a leak and could not surface, or that the crew ran out of oxygen while underwater.

So maybe something, maybe not. The “fish boat” has fooled people before.

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h/t Bobby Hughes of the Ships and the Sea Museum in Savannah, Georgia.