6/30/2023 0 Comments Hunley submarine second sinking![]() Confederate Admiral Franklin Buchanan (a conservative skeptic of the project), General Maury, and various other officers and observers were duly impressed with what now was considered an engineering marvel, unlike its predecessors, both Union and Confederate, none of which could be brought to completion or ever became a useful offensive weapon. The crew conducted public trials in Mobile Bay in late July, 1863, proving the iron cigar-shaped “infernal machine” could move at four knots, dive, blow up a target anchored in the bay with a towed torpedo, resurface, and sail home. The captain sat at one end steering and directing the boat’s rudder.Ī set of illustrations of the interior layout and operation of the Hunley It required seven crewmen sitting on a plank and pumping a zig-zag crank that turned a differential, screw propeller. Hunley was forty feet long and four feet high at midship. The third submarine built by the consortium and eventually named the H. A second boat was therein constructed, but failed in its sea trials in Mobile Bay. Maury-secured a factory, equipment, and clever and competent new engineering team members. ![]() Overcoming inter-service rivalries, government opposition, and starting a manufacturing concern from scratch in a competitive and sometimes hostile environment, the partners-with the full approval of the new commander in the city, Dabney Maury, Virginia-born nephew of the famous “pathfinder of the seas,” Matthew F. Hunley moved the submarine building operation to Mobile, Alabama, the only major Confederate port still open in the Gulf.Ī full-scale replica of the Pioneer, the prototype submarine built by Hunley, McClintock and Watson before their design of the CSS Hunley In late April of 1862, their prototype submarine, dubbed Pioneer, was scuttled by the three partners to avoid capture when Union Admiral David Farragut, along with an Army contingent, seized New Orleans. McClintock brought “engineering experience and the sheer joy of tinkering.” They had to keep the machine a closely held secret. Hunley brought “vision, business acumen, and potential investors” to the project. They agreed to design and build a submarine to prey on Yankee shipping. However, McClintock and Watson shared a passion for profit and privateering. The South’s largest city by far with well over 100,000 people (including 10,000 free blacks and 13,000 slaves), New Orleans sensed their vulnerability from the Union Gulf Squadrons about a hundred miles away and a few hours’ trip up the Mississippi River.Ĭharleston Harbor as it would have appeared in 1863Īfter taking a small blockade runner from New Orleans to Cuba and back, Hunley’s free-enterprise entrepreneurship led to a partnership with two other men who owned a machine shop and had a government contract to make bullets. In the following months and years, the Union blockaders of the 3,500-mile coastline of the Confederacy increased daily in numbers and efficiency. Hunley was a thirty-seven-year-old attorney and plantation owner, toiling as the assistant customs collector in the Custom House on Canal Street in New Orleans when Louisiana seceded from the Union. Hunley depicted as the sentinel, and also showing Sullivan’s Island and a dispatch boat in the background ![]() In this particular experiment, Horace Lawson Hunley stewarded the building of a new weapon to challenge Yankee naval supremacy through to its end.Īn 1863 illustration of the CSS Hunley in Charleston Harbor, with H.L. ![]() As in many cases of technological breakthroughs, several men pooled their ideas and resources, and through the exigencies of Providence, produced the working product. ![]() In the Second World War, American and German submarines totaled more than 4,000 ships sunk and more than twenty million tons of shipping. The Hunley crew carried with them the esprit that came to characterize undersea warriors of all ocean-going nations thereafter. Hunley became the first submarine in world history to sink an enemy vessel in combat. “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters.” -Psalm 107:23īumper sticker I observed in Charleston, South Carolina a number of years ago read: “There are only two kinds of ships: submarines and targets.” How appropriate to see that sign in Charleston, for it was there that the H.L. Landmark Events - History Highlight - The Final Sinking of the CSS Hunley, 1864 ![]()
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