The Eerily Calm Deaths Aboard a Submarine

In the year 2000, archaeologists from Clemson University cracked open a Confederate submarine from the Civil War. The sub, called the Hunley, had recently been salvaged, and the hull looked remarkably intact. It offered no clue as to why it mysteriously sank, killing everyone on board. More mysteries emerged inside.

Mineral stalactites hung from the ceiling. The sub had also filled with silt over the years, preserving everything inside. This included artifacts from the crew, a gold coin, a watch stopped at exactly 8.23 p.m. More chilling, the archaeologists found the crew members' skeletons, bones, tobacco-stained teeth, skulls with brains still inside. The strangest detail was the position of the skeletons.

In most recovered subs, crew members are found clumped near the exits. Grimly, they spent their last moments clawing at the hatches, desperate to escape. But not with this sub. Amid the silt, every crew member was found still at his battle station, frozen for over a century. One man's skeleton was found sitting upright, ankles crossed, a hand resting on his knee. As one historian said, it looked as if all eight men simply sat back, relaxed, and died.

So what happened? When their sub sank, why didn't they scramble for the hatchets or release the lead weights that would have rocketed them to the surface? Theories abounded, but none of them added up. Not until 2016, when an engineer from North Carolina decided to build a whole new Confederate submarine and blow the hell out of it. This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, a topsy-turvy, science-y history podcast where footnotes become the real story. The Hunley submarine was born out of desperation. During the Civil War, the Union enacted its so-called Anaconda Plan, surrounding the Confederacy and squeezing it to death by cutting off every seaport.

Many cities suffered, especially Charleston, South Carolina. By 1863, it was the biggest city left in the Confederacy, with the most mouths to feed, and Union ships blockaded the harbor. Before long, the citizens of Charleston had nothing to eat except rice and corn mush. On top of that, Union ships were shelling Charleston day and night. Eventually, the Confederate military grew desperate, desperate enough to revive an idea they swore they would never try again. Submarines. Submarines back then were not the sleek, deadly barracudas of today. They didn't even go completely underwater. A bit of hull stuck out above the surface. But they rowed low enough in the water to sneak up on enemy ships. They dangled a

bomb the size of a beer keg in front of them on a long, stout pole. The bomb had a trigger, and when the trigger bumped into an enemy ship, boom. Still, most Navy folks then despised submarines. They called them infernal machines. They were cramped, cold, and smelly inside. Worse, they often killed their crew. Plus, it seemed cowardly to sneak up on someone with bombs like that. Face your enemy like a man and fight. But as the war dragged on and the North kept pummeling the South, the Confederate military decided its morals were flexible and gave submarines a shot.

The final Hunley design was a tapered tube around 40 feet long. It had a pair of foot-tall bumps on top for conning towers. Each conning tower had a small window for observation, as well as a hatch for entering and exiting. Each hatch was just 21 inches long and 12 inches wide. Imagine wriggling through that. A pilot steered the sub by peering through a window in the conning tower and manipulating levers. This was by far the best job on board. The other seven crew members sat packed onto a wooden bench. In front of them ran a long metal crank with kinks in it. It was connected to a propeller. They powered the sub by turning the crank hour after hour after hour. During a test in August 1863, the Hunley accidentally dove underwater with an unsecured hatch.

Five men aboard drowned. Within days, their corpses were so swollen that divers had to dismember them to squeeze them through the tiny hatches. Two months later, eight more men suffocated when the Hunley plowed into the ocean floor and got stuck. Seven crew members were discovered inside crowded around a set of bolts. They were trying to release some lead weights to buoy themselves to the surface, but the bolts got stuck. The eighth crew member was found near the exit, trying to force it open. After this, the Infernal Machine became known as the Peripatetic Coffin. But as Charleston starved, Confederate military leaders decided to send the sub into combat anyway. They were willing to risk still more

men to clear the blockaded harbor. For the Hunley's maiden combat mission in October 1863, its designers made a key innovation. The bomb dangling on the pole in front of the sub was originally only partly underwater. But for this mission, they fully submerged the bomb. It now dangled lower than both the sub and the target ship. As a result, the full punch of the blast would strike the ship's hull, not be wasted in the air. Finding a good target would be tricky. Thanks to Confederate spies, Union ships knew all about submarines and protected themselves by stringing up nets.

But a few ships in Charleston Harbor remained unprotected, including the USS Housatonic. The night of the mission, the Housatonic posted nine sailors on lookout duty along its 205-foot length. Around 8.15 p.m., sailor Robert Fleming noticed something odd lurking in the water. He alerted a lieutenant. The lieutenant yawned.

He said, it's just a log. Don't sweat it. But Fleming wasn't sure. Wouldn't a log be drifting with the tide? Meanwhile, this shape was floating perpendicular to the tide and straight toward the Housatonic. The two men argued. The lieutenant now suggested it was a porpoise. By the time Fleming convinced him there really was something wrong, it was too late.

A gong sounded on board the Housatonic, and everyone scrambled to their battle stations. There was no time to turn the ship's lumbering guns on the submarine, so a few men grabbed muskets and began firing. It was no use. A moment later, the Hunley slipped in and detonated the bomb. The explosion was less dramatic than you might hope. There was no huge bang, no geyser of water. Again, lowering the bomb underwater ensured that most of the blast force struck the boat. One survivor said the noise was like a log plopping onto the water, nothing more. But that mild volume was deceptive. The bomb blasted a huge, jagged hole in the Housatonic's hull, so huge that it sank in five minutes, too quickly to even deploy lifeboats. Five

Union sailors drowned. This marked the first time in history that a submarine sank an enemy ship, an incredible feat. People in Charleston cheered, then waited eagerly for the Hunley heroes to return. And wait they would. It never returned to port. No one knew why. Treasure hunters spent decades scouring Charleston Harbor for any sign of the Hunley. Finally, in 1995, a team led by novelist Clive Cussler located it, to much fanfare. It lay three miles from land, under 30 feet of water. It was raised in August 2000, crusted over with marine life. Then Clemson archaeologists opened it up and noticed the eerie postures of the men encased in silt, casually sitting at their battle stations, no evidence

of panic. So what happened to the Hunley? Four theories emerged. First, that the bomb damaged the sub's own hull and sank it. Second, that the sub collided with something else and sank. Third, that a lucky musket shot had pierced the hull and it took on water. Fourth, that the crew suffocated due to dwindling oxygen inside. Endless arguments about these theories ensued, until Rachel Lance got involved. Lance was a tall, motorcycle-riding Ph.D.

student in engineering at Duke University. She had never heard of the Hunley. until her thesis advisor suggested she look into the mystery in 2014. This was an apt suggestion. Perhaps no one on Earth was more qualified to unravel the mystery than Lance. She's an expert in how underwater explosions affect submarines. Lance thought it sounded like a fun side project, a lark for a few weeks. She later said, I have never in my life so drastically underestimated a problem.

Lance examined the four theories for why the sub sank, but had serious doubts about each. Instead, based on her experience, she suspected the crew died of so-called primary blast injuries. Blast victims can suffer multiple types of harm. Shrapnel wounds are called secondary injuries. Bombs can also toss people into the air, although that's far rarer than Hollywood movies suggest.

Primary blast injuries involve tissue damage due to shock waves or near shock waves. Shock waves are pulses of high pressure. They move through water without causing much damage. And given that the human body is well over half water, most tissues survive shock waves unscathed. It's pockets of gas that cause trouble. When shock waves move from dense water to sparse pockets of gas, they tear the surrounding tissue. The intestines can suffer damage this way due to pockets of gas inside them. The brain can suffer damage as well.

But the biggest problem is the lungs, where there's loads of gas. Shockwaves absolutely shred the lungs. Even a relatively modest shockwave, one that can't push your body back an inch, can turn your lungs into a bloody, frothy pulp. Shockwave injuries were first documented during World War II. After a city was bombed, soldiers would enter homes and find dead people sitting in their chairs. They looked eerily normal, as if listening to music or having tea. The only sign of death was the bloody froth on their noses and mouths.

After some research, Lance grew convinced that something similar had happened to the Hunley crew. She emailed the Clemson University team and eagerly outlined her theory. Clemson responded with a simple message, back off. They weren't that blunt, but academics are territorial, and they made it clear that she was not welcome on the project. But Lance persisted. She toured a museum on the Hunley to gather more data. For fun, the museum gave visitors a fake gold token, similar to the coin discovered inside the sub. At the exit, visitors were asked to drop the token into one of four tubes, each labeled with a different theory for how the Hunley sank.

The coin let them vote on what they considered the most probable theory. Primary blast injury was not an option, so Lance refused to vote. She pocketed her coin and later stuck it to her computer monitor for inspiration. She was determined to prove her theory correct. Beyond some photographs of the wreck, the Clemson team refused to share data about the Hunley. But even from those pictures, Rachel Lance could debunk some theories about how it sank. Aside from a hole in the conning tower, the hull was intact.

There was no sign of blast damage, nor of a crash. There wasn't anything to crash into where it was found, anyway. That left two theories. The hole in the conning tower might be from a lucky musket shot. Or perhaps the men suffocated. She addressed the suffocation theory first. Using archival blueprints, she built a computer model of the sub and determined its volume. Then she determined how much oxygen the crew would have consumed while chugging out to the Housatonic and back.

She found that they had at least an hour of air, possibly two, for a journey that was far shorter. Okay, but what if all the air had rushed out somehow as the sub sank? Well, that could not have happened. Recall that the sub had mineral stalactites on the ceiling. Those minerals form only in air, not water, so there must have been a pocket of air inside for a while.

The crew had oxygen. That left the lucky shot theory, that a bullet punched a hole in the sub and sank her. And recall that there was a hole in the conning tower, about the size of a softball. To examine this theory, Lance had some fun. She obtained a replica Civil War rifle, as well as steel similar to the Hunley's hull. Then she started blasting the steel and examining the holes forensically. Her results were damning. The bullet holes in the steel were far tinier than the one in the conning tower. The bullet hole edges were also ragged, not smooth like the conning tower hole. Furthermore, A softball-sized hole would have sunk the Hunley in five minutes flat.

But based on where the sub was found, it drifted for at least 14 minutes after detonating its bomb. The lucky shot theory simply did not hold water. But Lance was not content just to kill off the other theories. She wanted hard evidence for her own theory about primary blast injuries. So she had some more fun. She commissioned a metalworking artist to build a one-sixth scale model of the Hunley. It stretched 6 feet 8 inches. She dubbed it the CSS Tiny. Then she found a farmer with a pond and convinced him to let her experiment. In short, she made replica bombs from gunpowder, blew them up near the tiny, and studied the resulting shockwaves. The experiments took months.

For more details, check out Lance's delightful book on her research, called In the Waves. But she found something fascinating. After the bomb detonated, its blast waves spanked the Hunley's metal hull and caused a shockwave inside. That would have been trouble enough for the crew. But because the Hunley was a confined space, the shockwave also started resonating inside, and it grew stronger and stronger as it bounced around. As Lance said, it built on itself like a stream in an echo chamber. Lance later calculated that the resonating blast wave had a 20-50% chance of killing each man on board instantly. Even if they survived, each man faced a roughly 95% chance of severe lung trauma, so severe they

likely could not move afterward. They would have simply sat there, upright and stunned, just like they'd been found 135 years later. Despite being frozen out of the project by colleagues at Clemson, Lance had Sherlock Holmesed her way to the answer. The Hunleys' attack on the Housatonic had no effect on the blockade of Charleston. One year and one day later, the city surrendered. Yet, militarily, it remains a historic feat. No other submarine would sink an enemy ship until a half-century later, during World War I. Thankfully, submarine blast injuries are rare nowadays.

Thicker hulls and even double hulls have eliminated much of the problem. At worst, sailors experience a sharp bang or have to duck as some light bulbs shatter. But blast injuries have not disappeared from warfare, not on land. They often result from IEDs, improvised explosive devices. To be sure, Kevlar vests do a marvelous job of protecting the lungs from blast waves. They save many soldiers who would have died otherwise. But there is an unexpected downside to this.

Recall that the brain can suffer damage from shockwaves too, and Kevlar cannot protect the whole head. That's why traumatic brain injury is so common among modern soldiers. They escape shredded lungs, but at the cost of brain damage. The crew of the Hunley submarine, hand-cranking along underwater, might seem impossibly remote from our modern, high-tech military. But in their deaths due to blast trauma, we can see a sad echo of warfare today. This is the Disappearing Spoon Podcast.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a five-star review, or tell friends and family. Reviews, subscriptions, and word of mouth really do help. Also, please support the show at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. It costs as little as seven cents per day for ad-free shows. You can also get bonus episodes and signed books. You can find more incredible stories in my books. Check out samkeen.com. You can also inquire about booking me as a speaker at your school or event.

This episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Sam Keen. Thanks for listening.

The Eerily Calm Deaths Aboard a Submarine

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