The hull of the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship has been cleaned and revealed for the first time in 150 years.
After a year of painstaking work, scientists using small chisels and hand tools have removed encrusted sand, sediment and rust from the outside of the hand-cranked Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley.
Now, the outside appears much as it did when the Hunley and its eight-man crew rammed a spar with a powder charge into the USS Housatonic and sank the Union blockade ship off South Carolina in 1864.
Scientists said on Thursday that cleaning the hull did not solve the mystery of why the Hunley itself sank with its crew before returning from its mission.
Cleaning the hull showed some dents on both sides of the submarine.
However, scientists say it is not clear when the dents occurred.
The Hunley sank twice before it went on its 1864 mission, though it also could have been dented at the time of the Housatonic attack or later when the sub sat for decades on the ocean floor off Charleston.
“If there was a smoking gun, we would have seen it a long time ago,” said Johanna Rivera-Diaz, a conservator with the Hunley project.
The most significant find from cleaning the hull is an indication that a wooden boom at the front of the submarine that supported the spar with the powder charge was damaged in the attack. It appeared as if the boom had been pushed back into the vessel. That would be consistent with the boom striking a ship, said Michael Scafuri, an archaeologist with the project.
The conservation team has laboriously removed about 550kg of sediment and other gunk from the outside hull of the Hunley, which was built in an attempt to break the Union blockade that was strangling Charleston.
The next step in conserving the submarine, which was discovered in 1995 and brought to a conservation lab in North Charleston 15 years ago, is to remove encrusted sediment from the inside. That process will take another year, said Kellen Correia, president and executive director of Friends of the Hunley.
The work will take time because conservators will work in the cramped 1.3m diameter interior of the sub.
Scafuri said that cleaning the inside of the submarine is vital to understanding how it worked and perhaps why it sank.
“We have to learn how it functioned and how it was intended to function and then we can take the next step and see if anything went wrong,” he said. “We’re basically looking at the cabin. This is where the guys were and where they were operating.”
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
COMMUNITY CONFLICT: Concerns about disease spread from corpses has run up against friends and families’ desire to bury their dead as infection spreads in the area Angry residents of a town at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) attacked and burned a tent that was part of a health center where people are being treated for the virus, the staff there said Saturday. It was the second such attack in the region in a week. No one was hurt in the attack, according to reports but as patients ran out to escape the fire, 18 people with suspected Ebola infections fled the facility and are unaccounted for, a hospital director said. Angry residents arrived at the clinic in the
INSURGENT ACTION: A local independence movement in Balochistan, alleged by Pakistan’s government to be backed by India, claimed responsibility for the strike A suicide bomber detonated an vehicle-borne IED near a railway as a passenger train passed through the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta yesterday, killing at least 23 people and wounding over 70, officials said. The explosion caused two of the train cars to overturn and catch fire, according to footage shared online. The attack happened in an area where security forces are usually stationed, badly damaging several nearby buildings and smashing more than a dozen vehicles parked along the road, according to witnesses and images circulating on social media. Doctors at local hospitals said they had received the wounded, with 20 in critical
RSS