![]() Friends of the HunleyĪ team of naval warfare experts and biomedical scientists reconstructed a scale model of the submarine using a similar steel used in Civil War-era ships. ![]() "Finding the cause of death of the crew has finally allowed us to declare the mystery solved." An X-ray reconstruction of the interior of the HL.Hunley shows the color-coded skeletons of the eight crewmen still at their stations with no broken bones. "The disappearance of the Hunley has long stood as one of the great mysteries of American history," lead study author Rachel Lance of Duke University said in a statement. In a study in the journal PLOS One, they explain how the crew died from an intense blast of air caused by setting off the black powder torpedo. Fewer goods could be imported to Alabama, and citizens living in the state experienced increasing food shortages.Now scientists have reinvestigated the sub’s mysterious demise and found the cause of death of those unfortunate sub-mariners. By 1864, though, even the most successful blockade-running ships had been captured and burned by the United States Navy. Small gray ships with fast engines slipped in and out of the port under the cover of darkness, bringing much needed supplies into the Confederacy and shipping southern cotton to Caribbean markets. (The only channel deep enough for blockaders was also narrow and easily blocked by Union ships.) Nevertheless, early in the war, some bold Confederate civilians found sneaking goods into Mobile to be a lucrative business opportunity. Yet despite its prime location, Union ships blockaded the port, and its geography made it difficult for blockade runners to sneak through. It served as the Confederacy’s most important port city in the Gulf of Mexico after New Orleans, Louisiana, was captured by Union forces in May of 1862. After the war, he returned to Mobile, where he lived until his death in 1877.Īlthough Mobile contributed the innovative Hunley and a heroic ship captain to the Confederate war effort, the city itself faced hardship during the war. Semmes escaped the vessel and returned to the Confederacy, where he was promoted to rear-admiral in 1865. In June 1864, when Semmes made such a stop to have the ship refitted in the French port of Cherbourg, the Alabama was hemmed in by the USS Kearsarge and sunk. Although the ship could never dock at a Confederate port, Semmes and his 144-man crew kept themselves supplied with the contents of captured northern vessels and also docked at foreign ports to purchase stores and maintain the ship. The cruiser, along with other Confederate commerce raiders such as the Florida, significantly limited the scope of the United States merchant marine. Over the next two years, Semmes and the Alabama captured or destroyed more than sixty Union merchant ships, worth more than $6.5 million. ![]() Semmes first converted a New Orleans steamer into a raider, which he named Sumter, but by the summer of 1862, he began to captain a new cruiser built in Great Britain, which he named the Alabama, after his adopted state. Because the United States had a powerful fleet of merchant ships, Semmes believed that privateering could strike a blow at the northern war eff ort. Semmes practiced law until the outbreak of the Civil War, and, in 1861, began advocating for the use of commerce raiders by the Confederacy. It was also the adopted home of Raphael Semmes, a former naval officer and native of Maryland who had settled in Mobile after the end of the Mexican-American War. The city of Mobile, Alabama, was important not only as a test site for the first submarine. Despite the problems, however, the vessel was resurrected and fitted with a new crew for its first, and last, mission. During test runs, the submarine sank twice, losing a total of thirteen men, including the inventor, Horace Hunley. Following a successful test in July 1863, the Hunley was shipped by rail to Charleston, South Carolina, where it was immediately commandeered by the Confederate navy. Although the sinking took place more than five hundred miles away from Alabama, the Hunley, nicknamed the “Fish,” was constructed in Alabama and tested in Mobile Bay. Despite the Hunley’s success that winter night, the experimental submarine sank in the harbor shortly after detonating the torpedo, and its entire crew drowned.
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