CHAPTER 1
WHAT ABOUT THE HUNLEY
Being a scientist is like being an explorer. You have this immense curiosity, this stubbornness, this resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say.
—Sara Seager, planetary scientist
I stood on the deck of the slightly rolling ship and looked down at the sea below. A faint breeze across the Gulf of Mexico was not enough to make the day comfortable. I had rolled out of bed at 0330, or less specifically oh-dark-thirty, as the smaller numbers of the morning are sometimes called by the men and women of the United States Navy. That had left me just enough time to rouse myself to a state of consciousness sufficient for driving, get to base, and get safely on board the specialized military diving vessel before she got under way. We had been waiting for good weather to undertake this mission, and the calm waters off the starboard gunwale looked bleary through my tired eyes. I had been working toward the next moments for the last year and a half.
My job as a civilian engineer in Panama City, Florida, had been to get us to this point: to find a new underwater breathing system, prove it was safe, and get the navy to let us test dive it in the open ocean. It was a seemingly straightforward task, but one that had required plenty of sweat, creativity, and math. By the time the divers emerged from the ocean, I knew that the new system worked.
We cast celebratory fishing lines off the stern and trolled for dinner on the way home. The success of this project meant that the navy would want me to lead projects myself, to submit proposals for new technologies. They had even offered me the chance to go back to school and get a PhD in biomedical engineering so I could do it.
A few months later, I was assigned a seat at a curved desk with pale faux-wood veneer in the far corner of a narrow office on the Duke University campus. Wedged to the left of my desk was a battered black filing cabinet containing hundreds of meticulously labeled manila folders, shoved full of papers by a compulsive graduate student who had long ago studied cardiac function from my chair. The filing cabinet blocked my view of the lone, slitlike window on the wall opposite the doorway, and I had recycled the papers in the bottom drawer to make room for a small stockpile of individual-serving bags of potato chips—stolen booty from the catering tables at lectures on campus.
Unlike undergraduate students, who pay the costs of their own tuition, engineering PhD students are paid a stipend to perform their work and are often given the job title of “research assistants.” However, these students are still different from normal employees because from the first day they arrive at their new labs they are already hoping to leave as quickly as possible. Graduation with a PhD is not guaranteed by completing certain classes; rather, the degree is granted only when, and if, a student’s adviser declares the student to be finished. It’s tacitly forbidden to ask the senior students when they will graduate because they are likely asking themselves the same question every day.
As students finish and move on, they often leave behind objects like relics of their time there, and new students moving into these borrowed spaces shift around the layers of abandoned artifacts to clear themselves an area. I had claimed my secret snack drawer but moved almost nothing else since I had first been placed into that office when I arrived at Duke in August 2011.
My research adviser was Cameron R. Bass, known as Dale to everyone who had ever spoken with him. He was an associate research professor of biomedical engineering and the director of Duke’s Injury Biomechanics Laboratory. Dale believed in efficiency above all else. His white hair and facial stubble were all trimmed to the same short-cropped length, a process his wife could do for him at home without wasting time at a barber. Every day he wore the same type of black polo shirt, with black or gray cargo hiking pants that zipped off at the knee, and the same heavy black lace-up combat boots. This daily uniform saved time shopping or picking out clothes. The students in Dale’s lab researched injury biomechanics: the various mechanisms by which human beings got injured and killed. About half the students worked on car crashes, and the other half, including me, focused on explosions.
For several months I had been working through medical case reports from underwater explosions. Scientists have long had a fairly clear idea of how well human beings can tolerate blasts in air, but not as much is known about human tolerance to blasts that occur underwater. Injured people and shrapnel chunks tend to stay where they fall when explosions occur on dry land, leaving a scene that can be safely examined later, whereas the waves and currents of the ocean quickly destroy all clues. The underwater science, therefore, had received much less attention.
But cases with eyewitness testimony, with survivors to describe the details of what had happened and where, were still useful. My first goal had been to compile as many cases of human exposures to underwater explosions as I could find. Then, I would use a complex piece of navy modeling software, called Dynamic System Advanced Simulation (DYSMAS), to calculate how strong of a blast each person experienced. The DYSMAS software could accept crucial information like the size of the charge and the depth at which it detonated, then model the resulting explosion. The output from the software about the strength of the shock wave could then be combined with the medical report describing how badly each person was hurt. These cases, examined together as a group, would allow me to find the blast levels at which humans in the water get injured or killed. The hope, at least at that time, was to turn the project into my PhD dissertation.
Most of my cases were from World War II. I had been spending long days sorting through testimonies of human wreckage, seventy years after the fact, hoping to convert them into something useful. I combed through dozens of reports a day, looking for those where a sailor’s physicians reported enough information to let me model his case. The stories were usually the same: feeling of a sharp kick to the groin, with a stabbing pain in the gut. Sometimes they would immediately vomit blood, sometimes they would have sudden and uncontrollable bloody diarrhea. Both are signs of severe trauma to the intestinal tract. Sometimes they would start coughing blood, a sign of damage to the lungs. Sometimes they watched a nearby friend sink silently beneath the waves.
The doctors in World War II were weirdly obsessed with food. They seemed to think there was some relationship between injury severity and the victim’s most recent meal. The case reports are riddled with statements like “Case 47 had a sandwich three hours before the blast, but Case 48 had only coffee. . . .” I would find a case that reported distance from the charge, plug it into the navy’s software, and then stare vapidly at the blank beige wall above my desk, munching on stolen potato chips while the code ran, wondering what was in Case 47’s last sandwich. Were there pickles? I wondered what it was like to be moments from death, screaming in agony, with a large intestine split open along its length by a bomb, and then to have your doctor ask you about your sandwiches.
It was during one of these depressing reveries that I was glad for a distraction.
In graduate school, you learn to sense when your adviser is coming for you. Dale in particular had a distinct way of walking down a hallway. Point A and Point B were never close enough together, and the time spent between them was time he could have used more beneficially for research. His office was at the west end of the hallway and the lab’s grad students, myself included, worked in the shared offices scattered down the line between him and most useful destinations. We all knew the rapid staccato thunk of his ever-present combat boots coming down the hall.
Each of us would listen for the boots to pass our door. If they kept going, we kept working uninterrupted. But sometimes the boots stopped a few steps past a door, paused, and then reversed. This interruption in their rhythm meant Dale had an idea. This day, a few years after my arrival at Duke, the boots stopped for me. Dale pulled a tattered blue office chair out of the corner, sat down, and looked at me expectantly.
“What about the Hunley.” The words were delivered as a statement. There seemed to be no question mark in his tone. I had no idea what he was talking about, and the expression on my face probably told him so.
“What about the Hunley,” he repeated. Dale often spoke in the clipped, truncated pattern I was familiar with from working on the navy base and talking to military operators. Minimal adjectives. Pleasantries are an inefficient use of time. Make your point and move on. My need for the repetition must have irked him, but still I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Can your fancy software model it?” he asked.
“Sure,” I responded, still without any idea what he was asking. “I don’t see why not.” In grad school, unless you already have a damn good reason locked and loaded, the correct answer is always yes. Besides, DYSMAS was designed to assess ship damage. Whatever he was talking about, assuming it was a boat of some kind, the navy’s software could probably model it.
The boots proceeded back on their mission down the hall.
Once Dale was safely out of earshot, I pulled up a new browser window on my computer and began to investigate the Hunley and what I had signed up for.
Being a blast-trauma expert requires a certain degree of mental immunity to death. Every project is started because someone died, or because there is a good chance someone could die. Even in the early days of blast research, long before the Nazis and the Nuremberg Trials made patient and test-subject protections a global concern, doctors shared a common tendency to obscure the details of cases that would make the victims human and identifiable. Papers often contain detailed drawings of torn and perforated intestines, but almost never are there external views of stiff or distended abdomens. There are illustrations showing blast lung, but fractured skulls are limited to text descriptions. This hesitation is not because researchers do not want to think of victims as people; it is because, in order to function in our jobs, we simply cannot. The emotional toll of processing dozens of deaths per day in a normal fashion is not sustainable. Thinking of the case reports as only patchy blast lung or an isolated perforated bowel is a necessary defense mechanism. The alternative, at least for me, would have been spending every evening getting drunk in the bathtub.
But still, there were unavoidable moments. Like with the sandwiches. Victimless descriptions of gut trauma don’t eat sandwiches. I could tell immediately that the Hunley would be one of those cases. The mystery of that night, without its human element, is not actually that interesting: tiny submarine sets off large bomb; tiny submarine sinks. But when the human element is introduced, the story becomes haunting and inescapable, like mental quicksand.
The afternoon passed quickly as I became absorbed in Hunley search results. The blast software finished its current project, and the large desktop computer I used for the DYSMAS computational modeling sat whirring softly, awaiting its next instruction. But I sat totally engrossed, reading piece after piece of the Hunley’s story.
The little handmade submarine had been constructed during the American Civil War, and on the evening of February 17, 1864, the crew of the submersible boat decided the conditions were right to attempt her mission. The Hunley departed from near the city of Charleston, South Carolina, one of the last-standing Southern ports in the waning years of the war. She set out to try to break the Union blockade that prevented supply ships from bringing food and munitions to Charleston’s battered citizens and weary troops. Her target had been the USS Housatonic, which she destroyed with what seemed like ease to become “the first successful submarine to sink an enemy ship during time of war.” This victory was the Hunley’s claim to fame, and almost the exact phrase was repeated in every reference. It was the reason she was remembered when so many earlier attempts at submarine technology had been long forgotten.
The small sub disappeared after her mission, and the relative lack of information meant that the internet was filled with countless speculative theories from professional and armchair historians. The modern public interest was resuscitated in spectacular fashion in 1995 when bestselling author Clive Cussler and his organization, the National Underwater Marine Agency (NUMA), announced they had found the wreck of the long-lost submarine. By 2000, a plan for raising the Hunley and an agreement for her preservation had been formalized, and in exchange, Cussler and NUMA released the coordinates of her resting place. The US Navy would own her, as she was sunk in combat and therefore considered the spoils of war, but the submarine would be on permanent loan to the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The nonprofit group Friends of the Hunley would be the public face of the collaborative “Hunley Project” to enable her conservation, and they would work in partnership with the South Carolina Hunley Commission, the Naval History and Heritage Command, and the Charleston Naval Complex Redevelopment Authority. Clemson University would also be part of the collaboration, and the university’s Restoration Institute would employ the archaeologists and conservators who performed the conservation and preservation of the artifact. With the paperwork finalized, the Hunley was brought home to Charleston to see if her recovered hulk might reveal to the world why she disappeared that night so long ago.
In her custom water tank at her new home in Charleston, the archaeologists and conservationists from Clemson assembled into a team and got to work.
When the team cracked open the hull of the vessel, they discovered that the silt of the ocean floor had completely filled the interior cabin, but not until long after she sank. Based on the pattern of the layering in the sediment, they could tell that the hull had been intact when she first went down and for an extended period afterward, except for a small hole in the fore conning tower that occurred during or shortly after her sinking.
They painstakingly removed the layers of silt in blocks to allow careful mapping of the remains within. All eight men inside were found resting at their battle stations. None showed any signs of skeletal trauma. None appeared to have made any attempt to escape the vessel. There was no crowding near the exits or clambering on top of one another. There was no evidence of panicked attempts to claw out of the sunken wreckage, or even to unlock the firmly secured hatch of the rear conning tower. The pilot of the submarine had been seated directly below the first point of intrusion of the silt, the fore conning tower. The early trickles of sediment through the tower locked much of his skeleton in place before it had time to decay and crumble into the bilge. His head had tumbled from his spine before the sediment levels built to that height, but his limbs still sat poised on his small bench, ankles lightly crossed, one hand rested casually on his knee. He had slumped docilely onto his seat.
The bilge pumps were not set to pump out water, so the boat hadn’t been filling slowly while the crew was conscious. Even the heavy lead weights along the keel remained firmly attached, with no efforts to turn the bolts inside the hull that would set the weights free and rocket the submarine to the surface. Furthermore, stalactites of concretion dripped from the roof of the interior. These slim, icicle-like formations can form only in gas, not in water, which means a large gas bubble remained inside the hull for a long time after she sank. It looked as if all eight men simply sat back, relaxed, and died.
Positions of the arms and legs of the pilot.
People are born with the instinct to fight against their own death, to struggle with their last breath against even the most unavoidable and uncompromising ends. That universal instinct is why the Hunley case fascinates. It would be simple to think that the crew members saw no logical option and chose to spend their last moments nobly, in peace, but it would defy human nature. Something killed these men. Something that left no trace on the boat or the bones.
If people near a bomb die, I always suspect the bomb first. The explosive used at the time would have been black powder, which is made by the careful and often deadly practice of grinding the ingredients together into a material with the consistency of coarse sand. It is the earliest known explosive, and the gritty, volatile substance was the monogamous darling of militaries everywhere until it was discovered around the turn of the century that trinitrotoluene (more commonly known as TNT) could build a stronger, safer bomb. During the Civil War, black powder was used for everything: for firing musket balls, for firing cannons, and for building torpedoes.
As I searched for information on the Hunley’s explosive charge, one image in particular kept appearing: a yellowed, faded scan of a cylinder, with painstakingly hand-drawn lines and circles describing the details of its shape. “Singer’s torpedo,” proclaimed the large, old-fashioned calligraphy at the top of the image, with the more crucial information in a slightly smaller font below: “used for blowing up the Housatonic.” These words implied that this was a drawing of the bomb used by the Hunley. The image had been scanned and distributed widely online since its original release from the National Archives in Washington, DC, which meant it was available for me immediately in Durham, North Carolina. And better yet, the script on the page contained the bomb’s specifications.
According to this drawing, the Hunley’s charge contained 135 pounds of black powder. One hundred and thirty-five pounds is a lot of powder. It’s a lot of any kind of explosive. The charge would have been about the size of a beer keg.
Eventually I found the second detail that I had been looking for. The spar, attached to the bottom corner of the Hunley’s bow, had recently been conserved. What had initially seemed to be voluminous concretion, the accumulated crud of thirteen decades underwater, had turned out to contain the peeled-back shards of the torpedo casing itself. I sat staring at photos of the beautiful, shiny copper ribbons. The strips of metal from the torpedo casing had been opened and peeled backward over the end of the spar like the carnage of a prank cigar in a cartoon. The bomb had to have been firmly attached to the end of the spar for those strips to have been peeled back so cleanly, and the spar was 16 feet long. Sixteen feet was therefore the distance between the boat and the bomb.
I leaned back in my rickety chair to think and opened yet another potato-chip bag from my secret drawer of inappropriate starches. This project was possible. At least, it seemed that way. The DYSMAS software could do the math, or so I thought at the time. I had a distance, and I had a charge size. I was sure I could get the measurements of the submarine somehow. Modeling the blast would take a lot of extra work—more than the few months Dale had estimated—and I didn’t know if it would be worth the extra hours in the lab.
The very idea of a new side project was exhausting. Still, the publicly favored theory of the Hunley’s crew’s demise was intriguing: Most assumed the crew suffocated. The idea was that they were either knocked unconscious by a bucking motion of the submarine or that they simply fell asleep during a break, unaware of their dwindling oxygen supply. This particular question seemed to have a lot of scientific parallels with my previous work for the navy, which often involved calculating the amount of oxygen needed by military divers as they performed physically laborious tasks underwater.
As I propped my feet up on the desk to think, I caught a glimpse of the window around the corner of the tall black filing cabinet. At some point, the sun had set, and I realized I was destroying my potato-chip cache because I was starving. I closed my laptop, leaving open the browser windows so I could continue to stare at the pictures and articles later from home, over a burrito. This project would be complex. Historical projects always are, and there was nothing modern I could use as a starting point. Chances were this work would never affect anyone ever again, a concept that is usually the kiss of death for a scientific investigation. Graduate students need to make their mark on science, to contribute, in order to be considered employable. I made my way out of the building, past the doors of open offices filled with other students still working well into the night. But as I swung my leg over my black Suzuki motorcycle parked on the sidewalk outside the lab, I decided I could spare a few weeks to calculate the crew’s oxygen supply and determine whether suffocation was a realistic theory.
I have never in my life so drastically underestimated a problem.
The next day I had the browser windows still open on my laptop, ready and waiting for Dale’s inevitable appearance in my office. As predicted, the warning rhythm of his boots only slightly preceded his materialization in the old blue chair.
“Well?” he asked. I angled the laptop screen toward him.
“This is the charge. One hundred thirty-five pounds of black powder.” I flipped to a second window. “This is the end of the spar. The charge was made of copper. It was still attached. The spar was sixteen feet long.”
A third browser window. “These are the remains.” The image showed a neat, color-coded row of skeletons inside the narrow hull of the submarine. Each color represented the remains of one individual, and each individual’s remains were crumpled in place at his battle station inside the boat.
“Nobody tried to escape. They died where they sat.” A slow, broad grin spread across Dale’s face, and he let out a small chuckle. I smiled too.
The submarine had a thin metal hull. Blasts can transmit through certain surfaces, around corners, and echo down hallways. One of Dale’s previous experiments had even shown blasts transmitting to the inside of the protective “bomb suits” worn by military Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) personnel. Nobody had suspected blast trauma for the Hunley’s crew because, thanks to decades of action movies with exaggerated special effects, most people assume a blast would propel bodies in all kinds of crazy trajectories, causing broken bones and piles of smashed skeletons.
My first inclination was to call the Friends of the Hunley and loudly and proudly declare, “I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED.” But Dale talked me into a more reasonable approach. We didn’t know this organization, he pointed out. They had a high-profile historical artifact, and they had spent every working day for the past fifteen years poring over it with dental tools. For us to declare we knew the answer—and they did not—would have made us come across as arrogant fanboys, even with Duke’s academic credibility attached. Worse, they could have taken our theory and proved it without us. They had more money and more manpower.
I decided to tone down my email, instead describing my enthusiasm for history and carefully listing what I could offer to their project. To get started, I needed their drawings and dimensions of the submarine so that I could calculate the gas supply, and I wanted to make it clear that I was willing to share my knowledge of explosions and injury biomechanics in return.
“I am a blast researcher with an injury biomechanics lab at Duke University,” I wrote to the Friends of the Hunley, “and I would really like to look at some of the details of the sinking of the Hunley from an injury biomechanics perspective. Would it be possible to get copies of these drawings, with dimensions?”
Silence. Hitting the Refresh button repeatedly on my inbox did not help. However, the Lances are not a people known for being easily dissuaded. A few days later on February 17, 2014, exactly 150 years after the sinking of the submarine, I woke up to find that the unsolved mystery of the Hunley was the lead story on CNN’s website. Determined to get a response from Clemson and the Friends, I wrote again.
“I am extremely interested in historical research and think I can contribute a valuable perspective with my expertise in both air and underwater blast exposure. Please let me know, I am very eager to learn more about the structure of the ship itself. I am willing to make the trip to Charleston if it would help.” I was hesitant to say even that much. I thought that openly stating my field of study would serve as a giant red arrow, a highway sign declaring that I recognized this as a blast injury. When I forwarded the email to Dale, he agreed with my suspicions, laughingly pointing out during our next meeting that if the archaeologists searched for his name and saw his publications on air blast they might be able to figure out our theory. It was over, I thought. I have tipped them off. But I was hopeful that maybe they would still let me help with the project.
A few days later, a response arrived in my inbox. After some helpful forwarding of my contact information by personnel within the Hunley organizations, Michael Scafuri, one of the lead Clemson archaeologists on the project, wrote to me. My initial, giddy excitement on seeing the email quickly faded when I realized his email was a rejection—a polite rejection, but a rejection nonetheless.
“As you can imagine, we are focused on supporting our existing research partners in these [other] studies, and wish to see them through to completion.” In other words, thanks for caring, but we’ve already got this handled. Maybe someday we can collaborate, but not today. “We would also be more than willing to give you a tour of our facility and the submarine should you be in the Charleston area,” he wrote. On some level, I understood; they probably had plenty of people wanting to collaborate with them. I shrugged off the email and decided to study the boat anyway. The famous artifact was publicly owned, after all.
Dale was, as I expected, fully on board. He had already written in his characteristically brief fashion, “Wonder if there are existing pubs on Hunley with measurements. Bet there are.” In other words: charge on. I began accumulating files and references on the Hunley so that I could slowly chip away at the problem.
One evening, many months later, I looked out my office window at the artificial lights struggling to illuminate the green patch of campus grass and contemplated going home. There was no point, I thought to myself. What would I do once I got there? The honest answer was that I would keep working, so I might as well keep working on campus. I persevered, processing data until my hunger finally drove me out the office door close to midnight.
On the ride home, the chill of the fall air pierced the open gap between my helmet and heavy armored jacket, freezing the skin of my neck. The dimly lit roads of Durham were empty. I was cold and alone.
By the time I traveled the short distance home, I had made a decision: I needed to change my routine. The repetitive cycle of working late and sleeping all weekend was not the life I wanted. I needed a reason to leave the office at the end of the day.
Several months’ worth of uncomfortable dates later, a tall, handsome man in a maroon V-neck sweater sat with his hand awkwardly cupped over the white dry-erase panel that had been crafted into an otherwise wooden bar.
“What did you create?” I asked, taking my seat beside him after returning from the bathroom. He removed his hand with a dramatic flourish.
“It’s us!” he declared with excitement. “And I gave us cowboy hats to make it more festive.” The stick-figure male and female cartoons he had drawn sported colorful cowboy hats, and the smiling male figure had a word bubble proudly declaring that tall people should date other tall people.
This was Nick, and I liked him. He did in fact stand even higher than my six-foot self, but, more important, he had already made me laugh several times since I first recognized him earlier that night from his online picture. With very little persuading he talked me into a second date.
I quickly realized that Nick would be around for a while. My parents, frequently bored with retirement, asked if they could drive down to North Carolina from their home in Michigan to meet him, but I had a better idea. I still hadn’t found a funding sponsor to finish my project examining blasts to unprotected swimmers in the water, and I had been thinking about that damn submarine again a lot lately. I couldn’t forget the offer from Michael Scafuri of a tour if I ever happened to be in Charleston, even though I was not sure if the offer was genuine. With that obvious ulterior motive, I suggested that my parents drive to Charleston instead and that Nick and I would meet them there.
I thought going to see the Hunley would be like going to any other museum, with some emphasis on serving casual tourists. However, I questioned whether my GPS was leading me astray as the quaint downtown buildings of Charleston gave way to the high chain-link fences of a shipyard. The submarine is housed in what looks like a repurposed warehouse tucked toward the back. As I pulled into the empty parking lot, I breathed a sigh of relief. High on the warehouse were gigantic banners that said HUNLEY and SOLVE THE MYSTERY in a large, proud font, clear signs that I had arrived at the correct place. Rounding another corner revealed simple letters with the official title of the facility: Warren Lasch Conservation Center. The blank white facade of this building was all that guarded the fabled submarine.
Dale had decided to meet me in Charleston to talk to the archaeologists. As we knocked on the small door at the end of the long, sloping approach ramp, I was reminded of Dorothy trying to gain access to see the Wizard. Once inside, we were led down a window-paneled hallway to a conference room that, while clean and pleasant, disappointingly contained zero submarines. Michael Scafuri and a second archaeologist, Brent Fortenberry, walked over to the far side of the conference room table, while Dale and I selected chairs near the door.
My nervousness stemmed from more than the fact that I had left Nick alone with my parents. I had become increasingly interested in this project. I had studied modern soldiers with traumatic brain injuries, World War II soldiers with underwater blast injuries, and World War I soldiers with shell shock. We had learned something about our human bodies from the patterns of their traumas, and I wanted to learn from this trauma too.
Dale and I had decided to keep our theory to ourselves until the Clemson archaeologists agreed to collaborate. Their publications contained very little detailed information about the submarine or her measurements, I had observed, and I assumed this paucity was intentional. Even the drawing of the torpedo was always ambiguously cited simply as “from the National Archives,” with no further information to pinpoint it within the archives’ prodigious catacombs of file folders. Now that I was in a room with them, I asked.
“Yeah,” Scafuri responded, confirming my suspicions. “Things are finally getting so that we can publish more openly. For a while we weren’t releasing anything.” Dale shot me a glance. In the academic world, the number of publications is the primary yardstick by which most researchers are measured; academics don’t decline to publish without a good reason. Such a response meant that they might be withholding the information to limit the ability of other researchers to study the sub. I decided to change tactics and talk about something I could contribute to their work.
“I’ve been reading a lot about the theory of suffocation,” I mentioned. “Have you guys studied this more? Is this one of the things you’ll be publishing on soon?” In science there is often a long delay between a researcher’s moment of epiphany and when a publication on the breakthrough is released. It was possible they had already done the math on the gas supply inside the hull, in which case I was less useful to them.
“No, not really,” Scafuri replied, causing a release of tension in my brain so massive it may well have been externally audible. He explained that they had originally been collaborating with Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to look at gas supply, but those researchers had unfortunately left the project.
“We’re looking forward to studying the theory of suffocation more, though,” Scafuri continued, “because we’re about to get to the conservation of the crank. Once we have the crank conserved, we can start to measure things like the coefficient of friction as they turned it against the brackets, and then use that to see how much oxygen the crew would have used.” I stared blankly at the two archaeologists across the table and tried to transform my pure nerd excitement into a more professional-looking countenance. I fidgeted with the pale-green graph-paper lab notebook I had brought to take notes before saying quietly, “I can do that for you. That math used to be my entire job.”
The fact that the archaeologists were focusing on the friction of the crank indirectly provided me an important piece of information: They didn’t have a physiologist on their team. A physiologist would have told them that the coefficient of friction did not matter. This problem had already been studied, and studied to death.
Ergometers are devices used to measure the work a person is performing during exercise. They most often take the form of stationary bicycles with adjustable resistance levels, but sometimes scientists use ergometers that measure the work done by cranking hand pedals. With one pedal in each hand, test subjects rotate the crank at different speeds and resistances, almost exactly like the crank of the Hunley. Often these tests include measurement of how much oxygen is being consumed by the test subject. Science had already tested this problem many times and had already measured the oxygen consumption of every size and shape of human being, working at every possible combination of pedal speed and resistance.
Human beings are restricted by their hearts and lungs, not by the precise details of the activity they are doing. The amount of oxygen they consume will follow the same predictable rules and will actually be dependent on the level of effort, not on the specific nature of the work. If someone is working moderately hard, they will consume about the same amount of oxygen whether they achieve that moderate work rate through swimming, jogging, or biking. Whether they are turning an easy crank rapidly or turning a difficult crank slowly does not matter.
I attempted to explain this to the archaeologists sitting before me.
For years I had been using the information from scientists who preceded me when I built rebreathing systems for the navy. I could use the same information about oxygen consumption to do the math for the Hunley.
When most people picture scuba equipment, they think of the simple open-circuit devices invented by Jacques Cousteau. In these devices, pressurized gas from a metal tank passes through the stages of a mechanical regulator, each stage lowering the pressure until it can be easily inhaled by the diver. When the diver is ready to exhale, the gas leaves as bubbles, floating quickly and wastefully up to the surface. In any given breath, only 5 percent of the inhaled gas is consumed, and the rest is discarded. In the specialized piece of dive equipment known as a rebreather, all of the exhaled gas is trapped by a second hose. The diver’s lungs push the gas back into this closed circuit instead of out into the ocean. A granular material chemically reacts with the carbon dioxide produced by the diver, removing it from their exhaled breath as it passes by. Sensors measure the oxygen levels and inject more to ensure that when the diver inhales again they get exactly the cleaned and replenished gas mixture they need. The remaining 95 percent of the exhaled gas is saved—no bubbles, no waste.
Building and testing these devices requires careful measurement of the volumes inside to understand how much gas is available to the diver. I used to spend a lot of time taking apart rebreathers, filling their individual parts with water, and then pouring that water into a beaker to measure the volume. The volume of the water told me the volume inside the part. All the parts together added up to the volume of gas inside the rebreather. The volume inside the rebreather affected how quickly the oxygen levels would drop, and how quickly the carbon dioxide would build up.
The Hunley, to me, was one big rebreather problem. The crewmen opened the hatches to the night sky, letting in air to ventilate the submarine. They would start out breathing air, consuming oxygen and producing carbon dioxide as they cranked. If I could get the exact volume of the inside of the boat, I would know the exact amount of fresh air available to the crew.
I looked up at Scafuri and Fortenberry. They seemed unimpressed by my explanation.
“We’re already working with some navy people,” Scafuri explained. “We’re collaborating with some blast experts out of the base in Carderock.”
“Oh, who is it?” I asked, genuinely curious. The scientific blast world is fairly small and it was entirely possible I already knew their collaborators. I thought this might be my window of opportunity. Maybe the Carderock scientists in Maryland would help encourage the Clemson group to include Dale and me.
“I think we need to check with them before discussing that with you.”
If someone is not willing to share even the names of their collaborators with you, the refusal is typically not a preamble to them incorporating you smoothly and happily into their group. As we stood to leave, rejected, Scafuri offered us a chance at a glimpse of what had brought us there.
“Do you want to see her before you go?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” replied Dale with booming emphasis, and we walked together toward the large open room where she lounged in her custom chemical pool.
As we climbed the metal stairs to the industrial-looking viewing walkway above the Hunley’s pool, our small group fell silent. Broad, clear protective panels formed a wall along the length of the grate of the viewing platform, guarding the edge of the pool from overzealous tourists. Only the top edge of the Hunley was visible in the water below, but her conning towers and cutwaters rose distinctly and unmistakably above the upper curve of her rounded hull. Patches of concretion still blemished the smooth texture of the metal submarine, and her long, cylindrical body looked so much larger than I had imagined. She was always described in the written accounts as small, a David to the Housatonic’s Goliath, and in my head I had made her a toy. As I looked down, it felt right to view her for the first time in the water. The gently moving surface of the liquid reflected patches of the overhead lights and made it harder to see her details, but underwater was where she belonged.
As Dale and I walked out of the building and back down the long, sloping ramp I looked over and saw a smile expand across his face while he walked. I started to speak, but he silenced me with hushed words.
“They don’t know,” he said quietly. “But we’ll talk in Durham.” A few steps later, he added, “They don’t have a physiologist on the team.” He had reached the same conclusion I had, and I began to grin too because I knew what he really meant: that we were going to do this project anyway. “See you back in Durham,” he said, then got into his small red Volkswagen. The conservation center was otherwise closed, and mine was one of the last vehicles in the expansive parking lot. I sat in my car for a moment, looking out at the concrete and chain-link fences of the shipyard, trying to appreciate what Dale had just indirectly given me permission to do. This boat’s story was a key piece of American history, and she was not the private possession of one closed group. I looked back up at the sign urging me to help “solve the mystery,” and I knew exactly what I could contribute.
The next day I returned to the conservation center as a regular tourist, having recruited my parents and Nick to aid me in my mission. Our group of four stood on the viewing platform, looking down at the submarine with our faces and hands pressed against the protective panels. We wandered through the museum, reading and photographing all the displays that I thought might be useful.
Forensic experts had performed facial reconstructions using the skulls of the crew, and the pale, waxen models of their heads transfixed me. Four of the eight men smoked pipes, and the stains and damage to their teeth had survived the ravages of the ocean. Their habit had been so strong that they had carried their pipes with them on board the tiny submarine, and I wondered if they actually smoked while enclosed in such a confined space. I stared at the deep, sad-looking eyes of Crewman Lumpkin, first name unknown, who held his pipe firmly between his teeth, and willed him to tell me about his final moments. His eyes stayed fixed stubbornly, silently forward, the features of his face better known than his identity.
Several buttons stamped US NAVY were found near crewman James Wicks, a sign that someone had carried a Union pea coat on board. The famously thick, warm coat would have been an asset. While pressed against the conductive metal hull the crew would have had no protection from the frigid February temperatures of the water aside from the clothes they carried into the vessel. As I traced my finger across the display of buttons, I looked at their tarnish and thought about the cold that would drive a proud Confederate soldier to wrap himself in a Union coat for his most important mission.
On entry to the museum, each person is given a golden-colored plastic token. HUNLEY MYSTERY ONE VOTE it reads along the edge, with FRIENDS OF THE HUNLEY stamped in the center. Friends of the Hunley was the organization dedicated to fund-raising for the conservation of the federally owned boat, and as I would soon learn, they considered themselves its guardians. The tokens are meant as replicas of the gold coin found with the remains of Lt. George Dixon, the pilot of the submarine on her fatal mission. Visitors carry their coins through the museum with them as they view the exhibits, stare at the submarine, and read all the known facts of the evening of February 17, 1864. Near the exit of the museum, the true purpose of the coins becomes evident. Four clear plastic cylinders adorn a wall with the words “Solving the Mystery” in large, bold print. Each cylinder represents one theory: (1) that the torpedo damaged the hull and sank the boat, (2) that the crew was somehow trapped inside, (3) that the submarine collided with another object and sank, or (4) that the crew suffocated inside the closed hull. The coins of visitors indicated the popular vote on this day was that somehow the torpedo had breached the hull and caused the Hunley to sink.
My dad stood and looked at the display. Always sarcastic, he couldn’t help but joke. “Hey, they don’t have your theory up here,” he jabbed at me. “Guess that means they disagree. Which one ya gonna vote for?”
Smiling back at him, I gripped my gold coin between my thumb and forefinger and held it up near his face.
“I’m keeping this,” I said, “for when they have to put up a fifth cylinder on that wall.” I slipped the coin into my purse. As we left the museum, Nick and my parents handed me their coins too.