Raised Confederate Sub Reveals Gold Mine of History
From Mud-Caked Bones, $20 Legend Emerges
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 10, 2001; Page A01
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Maria Jacobsen's fingers were probing the black mud beside the long-dead skipper's left pelvic bone that night in the lab when she touched a small, flat object.
Through her rubber gloves, she could feel its round shape and the ridges along its edge. And in the milliseconds it took for that data to rocket from the tips of her fingers to her archaeologist brain, a message, of sorts, was delivered from the past.
It was the submarine captain's gold piece. Right where he had kept it in his pocket. Bent from the Battle of Shiloh, just as the legend said. And when she pulled it from the muck inside the hull a few weeks ago, it spoke as clearly as if he had gathered his sodden bones to recount the tale himself.
The project to raise the H.L. Hunley, the claustrophobic contraption that during the Civil War became the first successful combat submarine, already had been charmed.
But the discovery of George E. Dixon's coin, complete with his initials and the inscription "My Life Preserver," crowned a feat of maritime archaeology that experts said is like no other in recent memory.
"It's an epochal event," said William S. Dudley, director of the Naval Historical Center, at the Washington Navy Yard, which has lent scientists to the project.
Paul F. Johnston, curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, said, "No one has ever recovered a ship of that size and material, then tried to stabilize it for future generations."
On the night of Feb. 17, 1864, the crude Confederate vessel -- which was made from a boiler, had no extra air supply and was powered by a hand crank -- rammed a torpedo into a Union warship anchored off Charleston.
The Yankee ship went down, but so did the Hunley, mysteriously, with its crew and captain. It lay on its starboard side just outside Charleston's harbor until it was brought up last summer, like a gnarled, iron whale.
The first phase of the interior excavation, which began in February, is just ending in the laboratory here, specially built for its study.
But a search for crew descendants continues, and a second phase, involving possible DNA identification and facial reconstruction, is slated for the fall.
Members of the state, federal and private coalition that recovered the boat, had predicted that, if intact, its interior could be as rich as an ancient grave.
And with the 40-foot-long iron hull filled over the years with tightly packed preservative mud, it was.
Partial remains of all the crewmen -- their bones now in water-filled plastic trays in a special morgue -- were found at their stations near the hand crank. "We've got eight skulls so far, and I think we've got 16 shoes," one project scientist said.
A mysterious dog tag was discovered around the neck of one of the crew. Strange because it bore the name of a Yankee soldier who had been killed in a battle near Charleston six months before.
And along with pencils, pocketknives, a still-knotted scarf and a Navy button that looks as if it was made last week, the boat's contents provide the kind of archaeological detail that can be rare in a harsh undersea environment.
"It's a bit like finding the Wright Brothers' first airplane with the Wright brothers sitting there," said Jacobsen, the Danish scientist who is the project's senior archaeologist and excavation manager. "It's incredible."
The scientists hope to learn, among other things, why the Hunley sank and to confirm the identities of all those on board. The discovery also opens a remarkable window on a moment in the year 1864 in American history.
Indeed, the effort to examine the 14-ton vessel raised from waters off Charleston, the psychic heart of the Confederacy, has drawn expertise from well outside the seceded states.
The project director, Robert S. Neyland, heads the Naval Historical Center's underwater archaeology branch in Washington. Lead anthropologist is Douglas W. Owsley, of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.
Chief conservator Paul Mardikian is a native of Paris. Project historian Mark K. Ragan lives in Edgewater. And Warren Lasch, the hard-driven executive who oversees the business end of things, is from outside Cleveland.
All were drawn to an often overlooked incident during the Civil War; a desperate act by the dying Confederacy; and a pioneering vessel that was both a marvel of 1860s technology and "an iron tomb."
A Grisly History
Operating out of Charleston, the Hunley had already sunk twice, killing part of one crew and all of another, when it set out on what was to be its final mission in the winter of 1864.
Even its namesake, Louisiana planter Horace L. Hunley, who had helped fund its construction, had perished at the helm in the grisly second sinking, according to Ragan's history of the boat.
Each time, the sub was found and raised. The bodies were removed through the vessel's two narrow hatches, and the befouled interior was scoured clean.
Despite the submarine's track record, the Confederacy, with its weak Navy, remained eager for some way to break the Union coastal blockade that was strangling the rebellion.
And the Hunley, built in Mobile, Ala., seemed perfect.
It was remarkably like a modern submarine, with a sleek, cigar-shape hull, diving fins to help it submerge and surface, and two stubby conning towers.
But under water, the crew had only the air in the sealed hull to breathe. Light was provided by candles. And the sub's barbed torpedo, at the end of a pole attached to the prow, had to be jabbed like a harpoon into the hull of an enemy ship.
The sub would then release the torpedo, back up and detonate the explosive with a rope.
The odds of success, to say nothing of survival, were long.
But the boat had believers, among them a young Confederate infantry officer named George E. Dixon, the former steamboat engineer who was its last skipper.
Ragan found that Dixon had been in an Alabama regiment, was injured in battle and later requested command of the submarine.
Ragan also unearthed a romantic legend about him that seemed too fanciful to be true.
The story was that Dixon had been given a $20 gold piece by his Alabama sweetheart, Queenie Bennett, when he left Mobile for the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.
During the battle, the story went, a bullet struck the coin, bounced off and spared the young lieutenant, who kept the bent gold piece for good luck.
It was just a corny old yarn, Ragan thought, too gooey to be true. "It was just too crazy," he said.
As far as the records show, however, Dixon did recruit another crew of volunteers. The Hunley did set out on the night of Feb. 17, 1864, and "torpedoed" the 12-gun Union sloop Housatonic, which quickly sank, killing a handful of the Yankee crew. And the Hunley failed to return.
'Every Day . . . a Revelation'
After periodic searches that began right after the attack, the Hunley remained lost until 1995, when a team financed by adventure novelist Clive Cussler found it using sophisticated electronic gear.
To recover the submarine, a Hunley Commission, chaired by South Carolina state Sen. Glenn F. McConnell, was formed, as was a nonprofit fundraising branch, Friends of the Hunley, chaired by Lasch.
Money came from the federal government, which by law owns the boat; from South Carolina, which by agreement has permanent custody; and from private and corporate donors.
About $17 million was raised, Lasch said. An unused warehouse at the old Navy base here was transformed into a gleaming $2 million laboratory -- named for Lasch -- with a huge water-filled storage tank for the boat and a special refrigerator for remains. The hull was opened in February and interior excavation began.
After that, said archaeologist Jacobsen, "every day was a revelation."
Among the most intriguing discoveries were the dog tag and, especially, the coin, which experts likened to a message across time directly linking Dixon to the boat, while verifying much of the story.
The dog tag was found in late April by Shea McLean, a project archaeologist. McLean said he had been spray-cleaning a skull in an excavation area when he noticed a circle. At first, he thought it was the hole in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes.
But as he sprayed further, he realized it was a round object. "The more I sprayed it, the rounder it got, until I could see writing on it," he said. He made out the word "volunteers" and realized it was a dog tag of some kind. A terrific find.
But when it mysteriously turned out to bear the name not of a Hunley crewman but of a Union soldier, "things got real serious real fast," McLean said.
The Yankee was Ezra Chamberlin, of the 7th Connecticut Infantry Regiment, who had been reported killed the previous July in a failed assault on a Confederate fort outside Charleston.
But why was his dog tag on the Hunley? Had he deserted to the rebels? Had he been captured and forced to help crew the boat? Was he a spy? "All these questions" arose, McLean said.
Some quick research showed what had probably happened: A member of the Hunley crew, C.F. Carlson, had served in a Confederate artillery unit that had been at the battle where Chamberlin was killed.
Though the skeleton with the dog tag has not yet been identified as Carlson's, it is possible, historians say, that Carlson, as many did, went over the battlefield when the fighting ended and took the dog tag as a trophy or souvenir.
"We'll probably never know for sure," McLean said.
But the excavation's most astonishing discovery -- one that carried an amazing certainty -- came one night about a month later.
Much of the boat had been cleaned out. The project's initial phase was winding down. And excavation crews were working in two shifts to remove the remains of Dixon, the last member of the Hunley crew to be found.
Jacobsen, working the May 23 night shift in a muddy blue jumpsuit, was preparing a "block lift" of the segment of muck that encased Dixon's pelvis. A metal lifting tray would be slid under the mud block, and Jacobsen was checking with her hands to make sure the metal wouldn't damage any bones.
"I was running my hand down the side of his left [pelvic bone] . . . to make sure that the plate didn't scrape against it," she said. "And as I ran my fingertips along the bone, I touched" something.
"You know how sensitive the tips of your fingers are," she said. "And I can tell you, I know it sounds incredible, I could feel with the tips of my fingers what it was. I knew right away."
It felt round. It felt bent. It was right at his left hip, where a pants or jacket pocket would be.
She turned to a colleague and said: "I've got the coin."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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