Ghosts & Gunships: Lost Submarines of the Civil War (2025) Movie Script
1
(water splashing)
(soft music)
They warned us that we could encounter
skin, hair, and flesh in the recovery.
They were risk takers
crazy enough to maybe
get in this death machine.
They had all their, you know, doubts.
There was a lot of praying on everything.
The crews remains were entombed
in mud inside an iron
coffin, which was then buried.
Here is an entire spinal column.
We apply the same basic investigative
techniques as crime scene investigators.
We're doing the same thing.
We're just doing it for
extremely cold cases.
Think of it as a 3D jigsaw puzzle
where pieces fit together.
It tells us about life at the time,
how people lived, how they died.
But she very jealously has held on to that
last secret.
(diver breathing underwater)
It's almost like a form
of insanity, you know.
You go after it with such fervor.
We really want to know what
happened and how things developed.
And we're interested in all
sorts of aspects, not just the
the piece of metal or wood
or whatever that was a vessel,
sailing vessel, but the people that
went and you know why they went.
The War of the States raged,
ravaging farm and factory,
leaving the south, as well
as the north, disassembled
and struggling to
reunite as well as recover.
Casualties were catastrophic
and sporadically reported.
Battlefields are said to still be
haunted by spirits of the fallen.
Their stories, largely untold.
By war's end, two fabled
vessels surrounded in mystery,
lay quietly and
undisturbed, hundreds of feet
below the turbulent
surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
The slow sway of its floor
further concealing their secrets.
In response to the
Confederates decision to build
an ironclad, the United States
Congress authorized the
Navy to build three of them.
All of them experimental and
the Monitor was the first of those
to be completed, and it
was of a radical new design.
Very flat, flat bottomed hull,
very low freeboard, with a
turret, rotating turret with the guns.
Initially, the Monitor was
kind of this cockamamie, crazy
concept of, a vessel that most
people thought wouldn't even float.
It's primarily metal, most of it is iron.
There was a lot of skepticism
about its seaworthiness.
There was even speculation
that it would sink like a stone.
But the ironclad USS Monitor, often
referred to as a cheese box,
became a model for shipbuilding
and in some ways changed the
way battles were fought at sea.
So it actually, prevented,
you know, the South or the
Confederacy to move into the North.
And I would say, you know, they said
at that time the Monitor saved the Union.
It became the prototype
for more than 40 ironclads
built on the Monitor design
in the Union Navy,
which played a major role
in Union victory in the Civil War.
If the Monitor at first appeared
unstable, the Confederates,
a few years later launched a
veritable death trap the four foot
three inch hull of the HL Hunley
didn't even allow its crew to stand.
It was hand-cranked and designed
to ram explosives into Union
ships from below the water surface.
Here was something revolutionary that just
the first submarine in the world
to go out and sink an enemy ship
and change for all times how
war would be fought on the water.
So she's almost a historical icon.
Hunley also proved victorious
in battle, but otherwise lethal.
Both the Hunley
and the Monitor were lost at sea,
then hunted for more than a century.
Both reflected the American
Revolution of commerce and industry.
Both were the result of man's
desperate determination to be victorious,
and both exacted extraordinary
bravery and patriotism from their crews.
It's the story of the people who,
in the pursuit of defense of liberty,
have always been willing to
put aside the element of fear
and answer the call of duty.
The call of duty sounded for
naval warriors in the spring of 1861,
Rather than leave her in enemy hands,
Union forces burned and sank
USS Merrimac at the Norfolk, Virginia
Navy Yard.
But Confederates, recognizing
the usefulness of her hull,
raised the ship and went
about building an iron casemate.
She was relaunched as
the ironclad CSS Virginia.
It was a man named John Erickson
who engineered the Union's rebuttal.
But for the most part, it's this big flat
iron thing with a round gun turret on top.
And most sailors were used
to big wooden sailing vessels.
The big glorious ships that you see
with multiple masts and 40 cannons.
This was completely different. Guns.
Steam powered. Hot. Sweaty. Cold. Driven.
And it's not something
that men were just leaping at
the opportunity to serve aboard.
They were sort of written
off by some of their friends
and family for having volunteered in this
iron coffin as it was called at the time.
All previous ships had had guns in
broadside and deck guns, pivot guns,
but the turret could fire in any direction.
Two guns -
One could fire while
the other was reloaded -
moved back and forth on
carriages inside the turret,
which was covered in
eight inches of iron plating.
Crew members looked out
through small holes in the armor.
It wasn't pretty, but turns out it worked.
In March of 1862, at Hampton
Roads, Virginia, the ironclad CSS
Virginia attacked two Union ships,
USS Cumberland and USS
Congress, sinking them both.
Union frigate USS Minnesota ran aground,
but the Virginia was unable to
finish her off before Daylight's End.
Then, when the Virginia
steamed out the next morning,
it saw the Monitor
right next to the USS
Minnesota to protect it.
The Confederates
couldn't believe their eyes.
They thought it was a boiler on
a raft to be taken into for repair.
When the boiler ran out
a gun and fired on them.
And that led to four hours of combat
to the Virginia and the Monitor.
So this was that one chance where
Here they are, these
two top secret weapons,
the same bay, the same battle,
and they duked it out for four hours.
And so for four hours, basically
point blank range, firing away,
pounding each other.
Cannonball dents armor.
Just an incredible battle.
Smoke, noise.
The battle was essentially a draw.
Both ships returning with little
damage, but the Monitor had really won
the tactical victory because
its mission was to protect
the rest of the Union fleet there,
and it accomplished that mission
after the Battle of Hampton Roads,
in which the capabilities of the vessel,
you know, were proved and it
was proven to be a great technology.
That's when there was a
cachet of, hey, I served aboard
the Monitor or, you know, so
Lincoln came and visited the vessel.
He actually walked on board.
And the crew, they seem to have
a little bit of swagger about them.
They may be still don't necessarily
like serving on that vessel, but
because it's the Monitor, because
it participated in this famous battle,
they were kind of viewed as celebrities.
Two years later,
Charleston was under siege.
The city had almost not a windowpane left.
Shelling was almost nightly.
Undersea warfare was
something people had talked about.
There had been submarines
that had functioned one fashion
or another, and that had
gone on for a long, long time.
But finally, here comes a little submarine.
Eight guys cranking it, one guy kind
of poking his head out of the porthole.
The HL Hunley was a
privateer built in Mobile,
Alabama, and sent via train to Charleston.
The builders, including Horace
Hunley himself, drew the attention
of General PT Beauregard, who was
leading the defense of Charleston.
The propulsion system was hand-crank.
There were seven crank
positions inside the submarine.
The crew would sit all on one side.
On the port side.
There was a ballast
system - forward and aft.
Between the two conning towers or hatches,
You had a crew compartment,
separating the crew compartment
from the bow and the stern were bulkheads.
They had dive planes on either side to,
to pitch the submarine up and down.
And then if they wanted
to come back to the surface,
they could pump the water out of
the ballast tanks with two hand pumps.
Story is, they were going get
about $50,000 for every federal
vessel that they could sink.
Fort Sumter was under attack
and Charleston was falling.
General Beauregard sees
the submarine and manned it
with his own inexperienced crew.
- While boarding or unboarding
One of them steps down on the dive lever.
The sub rotates, takes six down, five die.
But having realized the error of his ways,
he pleads with Captain
Hunley, the chief financier,
to come take the submarine
back, crew it with volunteers.
You do it.
The sub was raised. A new crew trained.
Hunley himself was in the captain's chair,
but without his first captain,
whose job it was to light a candle,
the only source of light
inside the long iron tube.
The boat dives into the
depths of the Cooper River.
It becomes pitch black in there
he can't find the seacock
to turn off the front hatch.
Water is flowing in.
The boat becomes nose
heavy, gets stuck in the bottom
of the Cooper River in 32ft of water.
There they -
Half of them suffocate, half drowned.
The first two crews in practice -
They would go out, practice,
come in and practice, practice.
And then a crew would die
and they would haul the
Hunley back up to the surface.
Get the guys out, and it
may or may not be true,
but stories of having to cut
the bodies apart to get them out.
In fact, the bodies of
the first crew were found
133 years later in an
old mariner's cemetery.
Now a football field, two graves
had multiple body parts inside.
One grave contained
just one set of remains.
One was a was a Confederate sailor of color
and the color of his skin -
They didn't get the body parts mixed up.
They did with the other ones.
For three weeks in October of
1863, the Hunley rested
on the bottom of the river.
Beauregard, unwilling
to devote more men or money
to what had twice become a tomb.
Now enters Lieutenant George Dixon,
a young man who's seen the submarine, knows
Captain Hunley comes to
General Beauregard and says,
please let me have the submarine.
I can make it work.
That battle told us that
from that day forward,
the wooden walls, the wooden
navies of the past were the past.
If you want to stay competitive,
you would have to build ironclads.
Once the Monitor proved its, its success,
they were looked upon as, as heroes.
Officer's quarters aboard the
Monitor were surprisingly luxurious.
And there was a daily mail call.
- Dear Anna
And I thought we could continue
our chat with pen, ink and paper.
The odd little ship's routines
were chronicled by cruise letters
to their wives.
Lunch at 12 of whiskey and crackers.
Which I don't partake, but
Im sorry to say all the rest do.
Supper at 6, which is
usually bread and butter,
dried beef, cheese,
crackers, coffee and tea.
On Christmas Eve 1862,
the Monitor received orders
to head to Beaufort, South
Carolina, then possibly to Charleston.
It was never designed to be a
deep water, blue water sailing vessel.
It was designed to
fight in the coastal areas.
You know, the what we
call the littoral zone today.
Rivers and then bays and harbors.
And was designed to be towed from place
to place.
-As the year 1862 wound to a close
The crew aboard the now somewhat
famous Monitor, under tow by USS Rhode
Island, was in grand spirits. Even
as bad weather forced them below
They cheered uproariously as
their ship became the first ironclad
to round Cape Hatteras.
The storm worsened.
Waves crashed against the
turret, causing it to vibrate and leak.
As evening wore on, the
storm's thrashing finally snapped
one of the Howsers, causing the
flat top heavy vessel to roll wildly.
Greenville Weeks, the Surgeon
General aboard, later shared his account
-Solid iron from keels on the turret top
clinging to anything for safety.
If the Monitor should go down,
would only insure a share in her fate.
Water began overwhelming
the Worthington bilge pumps
and dousing the fires which
fueled the boat's engines.
Ocean claimed our little
vessel and her trembling
frame and failing fire proved
she would soon answer his call.
The Monitor's captain, John
Bankhead considered distress signals
a last resort, but ordered the Red
Lantern hoisted around ten at night.
The Rhode Island responded
by sending lifeboats,
but the treacherous sea overwhelmed them.
It is madness to remain here longer.
Let each man save himself.
It was only then that Surgeon
General Weeks made a
desperate leap for a lifeboat,
which now crashed about
dangerously beside the sinking Monitor.
Just as he jumped, a swell
seized the boat upwards and away,
but Weeks was dragged aboard at
Lieutenant Samuel Greene's command
Aboard the Rhode Island
The doctor himself was
treated for a dislocated shoulder,
and three smashed fingers were amputated.
For an hour or more
We watched from the
deck of the Rhode Island.
The lonely light upon the Monitors turret
100 times we thought had gone forever.
100 times
It reappeared until at last,
about 2:00 Wednesday morning,
it sank and we saw it no more.
People have said, well,
was it a poor design?
It was a great design.
It just wasn't designed to sustain
those type of, you know, sustain itself
in those type of conditions.
The real tragedy was that
what enemy fire could not
accomplish in the
conflict with the Virginia
and with other Confederate
ships and fortifications -
Mother nature did when it sank
the Monitor on the last day of 1862.
47 men were rescued that night.
16 were either washed overboard
or trapped inside the ship.
Our little vessel was lost, and
we who were in months gone
by had learned to love her,
felt a strange pang go through us
as we remembered that never
more might we tread on her deck.
Or gather in her little
cabin in the evening.
It would be 111 years
before any human detected signal
or sign of the USS Monitor again.
Not once, not twice, three times.
People from all over the
world came to Charleston
to lift the siege on a city
that was longer than the siege
on Stalingrad and
Leningrad in World War Two,
and they did so really fulfilling what
the great book says is the greatest
gift that any one of us can give.
Why would somebody volunteer
to climb into the Hunley,
you know, to get down there,
contort their bodies, to get into
this little metal tube with no lights and
no source of,
you know, no source of air to
breathe, no nothing to breathe.
Once they hatch that,
you know, batten down the hatch on
that thing, you're down to a very short
period of time that you can sustain life.
Twice the HL Hunley had plummeted
to the ocean floor, killing its crew.
Lieutenant George Dixon convinced
Beauregard the sinkings were not
the result of poor design,
but of clumsy operation.
George Dixon came back and said, no,
give us one more chance, one more chance.
I'll get a third crew together.
Who are these crazy guys
to get in this death machine?
Right?
That is fascinating.
None of them are from Charleston.
None of them are from even South Carolina.
Four of them are from you know,
Alabama, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina.
But then we have another four
crewmen who, were immigrants,
The crew of the Hunley,
It's a really interesting cross-section
of American society at the time,
half the crew on board the
Hunley you're speaking with,
you know, accents other
than southern accents.
You know,
the purpose of the submarine was,
again, to dive beneath a target ship.
And so they were intending
to dive, but they weren't
intending to dive deep or for very long.
The goal, really, was just to get
underneath the surface of the water
and go get underneath the
ship that they were attacking.
Dixon, by most accounts, a flamboyant
ladies man who had previously
served in the Confederate
infantry, would captain the sub.
He was the one who would
navigate the submarine.
He had a depth gauge, compass.
He controlled the valves for the
forward ballast tank to let water in.
He controlled
the dive planes, and he
was the only one that could -
That would be looking
out the viewing ports,
and guiding the submarine
towards its target.
So, basically they
would line up on a target,
move forward, and then dive underneath it.
It's not known exactly how
the detonation system worked,
but essentially a torpedo
type explosive was mounted
at the end of a spar which
projected from the bow.
The idea was to ram the spar into
the enemy ship below its waterline.
She's a great piece of technology.
She bumped up on the
technological limits of the day.
She's 50 years ahead of her
time and hydrodynamic design.
She's got an air system, the
world's first joystick steering.
She's got a crew compartment
that, had a 3 to 1 gear ratio.
It's got skylights.
Not known to exist at that time.
Confederate naval forces were growing
ever more desperate to break the Union's
blockade of the Charleston harbor.
Dixon and his crew made the 1240
ton USS Housatonic their target.
The sloop carried 12
cannons and a crew of 150.
Under cover of darkness, the Hunley
slipped low into the water at the Breach
Inlet, moving out around the
Housatonic, which was moored bound north.
Conning tower exposed, Dixon
maneuvered the sub to aim
for the ship's starboard aft, then
submerged to plant its lethal blow.
- And it worked to great effect.
The Housatonic sank within minutes.
Five Union sailors were killed, but
many survived in the shallow waters
by clinging to rigging.
Accounts from those
survivors vary, some reporting
the Hunley was hit by small
arms fire before they submerged.
Others report seeing the
Hunley surface after the attack,
signaling shore of their
success with a white or blue light.
We don't know exactly what happened,
but the Hunley never came back.
We want to fill that - complete that story.
We want to tell all the aspects,
and everything that we can discover
about the Hunley and what happened that
fateful night, February 17th, 1864.
The Hunley, was something
that it kind of mystified people.
It was it's something like, you know,
people wanted to find the Titanic.
People wanted to find the Hunley.
At one point, we got a very
strong magnetometer hit.
Clyde Smith went along on several search
expeditions run and financed
by author Clive Cussler.
In the early 90s.
We had four square miles,
Housatonic at the very middle
and what we just ran up and
down across these one mile squares
and we were running lanes, if
you will like, mowing the lawn.
The mag hit was significant
enough to launch divers.
Smith went down to help stake
out their find, and we had five
foot long metal rods that were
that could be screwed together.
So we would go in there and we
would pound these into the sand,
and then we'd screw another rod
and pound that in the
sand thing, and we ended up
with an elliptical shape pattern
of all these little rods sticking up.
That was the length we were
looking for 34, 35ft or something.
And it was sort of a cigar
- a cigar shaped pattern.
They uncovered a corner of
the metal object, but determined
that the sort of rivet they
exposed belonged to a sunken buoy.
They abandoned the site.
Years later, Cussler returned
and dug a little deeper.
- And they dug out some more.
And that time they
found one of the hatches.
And that's when we knew it was the Hunley.
When it was time to find
it, it got - it was found.
So know that's how that worked.
And I said, you know, we
ought to go get that submarine.
We sent a site assessment
out to take a look and see.
Do we have a rusted hull?
Is it going on the bottom?
We don't know anything
about which construction.
All the records are gone and
everything, but we could see through
the viewing ports of the entire inside
of the submarine was full of sediment,
so we knew we were going to
have preservation of the material
that we would find inside.
For example, the crew's
remains were entombed in mud
inside an iron coffin,
which was then buried.
They said an anaerobic
environment had set up inside
an oxygen-less environment very
early in the history of the vessel.
And so they warned us
that we could encounter skin,
hair, and flesh in the recovery.
Suspecting how well preserved
the contents of the sub
likely were, didn't make
the recovery any easier.
In fact, it made it all the more delicate.
It took several years for
engineers to come up with a way
to move the vessel without
liquefying what lay inside.
We have only one chance
to do this, and to do it right.
Suction pilings were
used to create a foundation
which supported slings,
cocooning the vessel in the same
starboard leaning position
in which it was found.
We knew we had one design weakness,
and that was that the four
legs of that superstructure
had to hit a moving
barge at one time or two
G's would go through it
and damage everything.
So they were holding the submarine
up there over that moving barge.
And what we did is we created
a 28 second window of smooth
water with a dredge barge.
And as that traveled under that
moving barge and that thing stabilized,
that crane operator had to
pop it and drop it on there with all four.
And I'll never forget
that loud, loud thump.
(object thumps loudly)
And then we knew we had it.
(crowd cheering)
(inspirational music and sirens)
It was unbelievable.
It was like this
incredible
you know, finally, after all
these years, well over 100 years.
And here it comes out of the water.
It's a wonderful day because
it was about four miles
in to Charleston's harbor.
And when we got near the harbor
and came down the jetties,
the Catholic Church Stella
Maris on Sullivan's Island began
ringing its bell
and then the other churches in
the city started ringing the bells.
And on the rooftops there
were hundreds of boats
going by us, the
rooftops across Charleston,
the people on roofs and
everything on the battery.
They were the aquarium.
They were all over the Yorktown.
The traffic came to a halt
on the big Cooper River
bridge and people looking over the sides.
And it's just just time
stood still for the Hunley
to complete the final journey home.
The HL Hunley
and USS Monitor both
products of the Civil War
and both technologically
years ahead of their time.
The Monitor and odd little ironclad
ship proved her worth, famously
blocking Confederate advancement
at the Battle of Hampton Roads,
but a storm claimed her
just eight months later.
It would be more than 100 years
before anyone saw the Monitor again.
The real tragedy was that
the enemy fire could not
accomplish in conflict with the Virginia.
Mother nature did when it sank
the Monitor on the last day of 1862,
the Hunley, a hand-cranked
submarine with a crew of eight,
delivered a fatal blow to
the USS Housatonic before
disappearing into the Atlantic Ocean.
She was finally discovered
in 1995, mostly buried in sand.
Crews remains were entombed
in mud inside an iron coffin,
which was then buried.
It took several years to figure
out how to bring her up and gingerly
carry her back to Charleston,
where archeologists began
their amazing excavation.
The first time I saw it was,
it was pretty incredible.
So seeing this thing
and knowing what it was
and knowing how historically
significant it was pretty overwhelming.
The wreck of the USS Monitor was elusive.
Many teams searched, but it wasn't
until August of 1973 that scientists
aboard Duke University's research
vessel Eastward finally found her.
At the time, they relied
upon grainy black and white
photos taken with a submerged
camera to confirm their find.
At some point, the turret became
dislodged and was lying underneath
a ship half covered by the
ship and half outside of the ship.
Now I have it again with
the ship totally inverted.
It was a weird thing.
The, you know, the turret
as it was on the seabed.
It was exposed.
And it's just, you know, it's just
a it just looks like a cheese box.
It's just a cylinder.
And it was open on top, and, you
know, it had been dug out somewhat.
You could see the - And of
course, it's all upside down.
So you see the bottom
of the gun carriages and you see
some, some of the support structure
and you'd swim up to it and
you can peer over the edge.
And if you had to do work inside of it,
sometimes you kind of remove your
fins and get in there and brace yourself.
It's very small with all the, the beams
and things, and we usually would have
a team between like 6 to 8
people, that would be on the bottom.
And each one of them
would be in buddy pairs.
And they would have a specific task though,
a lot of times
those were either
recovering small artifacts
or recording features on
the wreck or doing, photo
and video of particular areas
so that we could know where
things came from and reconstruct.
You know, that's that's one of the biggest,
one of the most important things of
removing artifacts is understanding
where they came from on the wreck,
because they they lose a lot of meaning
unless you know exactly
where they were located.
The hard crust that tends
to form on the outside.
A lot of these big iron
objects, it's called concretion.
We call it concretion.
It's it's basically hard, like concrete,
but it's a mix of of sand and shell
and coral and marine life and calcium.
It's kind of a byproduct of some
corrosion that forms on the artifact.
How do you know it's an artifact?
How can you - how do you recognize things?
So it is, it's really tricky
to sort of develop an eye for
what you're looking at because,
you know, if you take something
like, like a lantern, right?
It has a number of
different components in it.
It might have a glass, it might
have, you know, some iron,
and then it has a brass
handle or something like that.
So the parts that are iron typically
have this concretion on them.
So they just look like these
bulgy, amorphous things
that loosely look like
the base of a lantern.
(shouting military commands)
The Navy had notified us on our way out
one morning that there
were suspected remains.
And, we went down and
dove on the site, and there clear
as day, was one set of human remains
as you realize what it is, you're like.
Wow, that is unmistakable.
And it is,
you know, it's not - it
wasn't a morbid thing.
It was just, it was really
profound to think that this is -
this is a, you know, it
just makes the whole story
seem so much more real - that
makes these things come to life.
Even though it's, you
know, the antithesis of no one
had seen these individuals for
at that time it was about 140 years.
And here we are 140 years later,
laying eyes on these guys
again for the first time.
And it was that that was the
point that we decided to cease
all, further excavation and
actually remove the turret.
Archeologists knew the turret
was a virtual time capsule,
and recovery would have to be delicate.
And because it was flipped upside down,
it was, in essence resting on its roof,
which was never designed to carry weight.
So how do you lift 200 tons of material
without having it give
way and spill the contents?
The Navy's Mobile Diving
and Salvage Unit, or MDSU
was largely responsible
for removing the overburden,
including armored plating designed
to protect the Monitor from cannon fire
once that was out of the way,
MDSU used this specially
designed spider to lift the turret
-And then the excavation
was continued on the surface
once it was out of the water.
We can see kind of a commotion and a
hectic situation based on the artifacts,
of the two sets of human remains
that were discovered in the gun turret.
One of those sailors was
wearing two different shoes.
Its dark in there. The
ship's pitching side to side.
Did he just grab the nearest
shoes that were there,
not even realizing in the dark,
put them on and hustled up
through the gun turret?
We don't know.
And when you have 10 to 15ft seas splashing
over the deck of the ship, you're
not going to open the deck hatch.
So the only way up and out of the ship
that night of the sinking
was through the gun turret.
Other artifacts found
inside the turret suggest crew
members were attempting to
bring along some of their valuables.
Perhaps it was Okay
I've got this chest with my items.
I'm bringing it up to the turret,
and by the time I pop my head out
and look at the conditions, forget it.
I'm only. I'm not taking.
These things are too heavy.
They may pull me down.
We have personal items from the sailors
who served and died aboard silverware
with inscriptions, clothing,
buttons from boots and shoes,
pocket knives, everyday contents that
these sailors would have had aboard
the night of the sinking.
When you are actually able to
discover something that has the sailors
initials engraved on it, and then
you can go back to the cruelest
and actually determine who
was the owner of that item.
That's that's taking the experience
to a whole different level.
One piece of silverware, a spoon,
was inscribed with the initials
JN for Jacob Nicklis.
It's possible that one set of
those recovered remains were his.
At 16 he enlisted.
Didn't want to go on the
Monitor, but all of his
crewmates basically, you know, did.
So he didn't want to be the guy
who didn't say he went aboard.
Jamie Nicklis is a descendant of Jacob's.
He's been able to read a series of letters
exchanged between Jacob
and his father in 1862.
His father sent him a Christmas package
and the next his father asked
him kind of what he wanted.
The following letter he told
his father not to send it yet
because, they were ordered
to take the ship out into the
ocean and come into a different bay.
And they didn't think it
was seaworthy whatsoever.
They they had all their, you know, doubts.
And, there was a lot of
praying on everything.
And, so that's the last
that we heard from him.
Forensic scientists
were able to reconstruct
the faces from the skulls of those remains.
One of the sailors was younger,
you know, 17 to 24 or 25.
One of them was a little bit
older, probably late 20s or 30s.
The older sailor had a tooth that
was slightly carved out from, from
smoking a pipe just from wear on it,
you know, our nose, our chin and stuff.
I mean, I can just see it in
this guy right here, but I'm not
I don't know who's who on this picture.
I'd love to know.
I would say this guy
right here really looks like -
- The rotating gun turret
That remarkable 120 ton piece
of 1860s engineering is here
in Newport News, Virginia,
immersed in a 90,000 gallon tank.
The turret,
along with the steam engine, the cannons
and the carriages are being conserved.
That is stabilized
enough to eventually be put on
display at the Mariners Museum.
And our primary job here is to
actually remove all of the salts
that have accumulated
inside of these artifacts.
If we don't,
if we just say, take a cannon,
rinse it off and place it on display,
all those salts that are in
there are going to react with
the relative humidity in the room.
If somebody were to walk up and
touch the gun, their salts and oils
and things on their hands, over
time those guns would fall apart.
They would break into pieces,
they would corrode on display.
Not an option.
Archeologists are
occasionally able to get a better
look at the turret when the
tank is occasionally drained.
We know that some of
the sailors actually received
concussions in the gun turret
during the Battle of Hampton Roads.
When we go back in and
excavate the sediment,
we were actually able to
locate dents from the cannonballs
from the, from the other vessels
that actually pushed the armor in.
And, potentially with the locations
where those sailors were standing
when they received their concussions.
They also found dents
where the gun carriages
slammed into the back of the turret,
and three small holes through which
they could look out at their target.
Many of the items recovered
prove the Monitor was a sign
of the industrial
revolution about to unfold.
Most people think civil war
a long time ago fairly crude,
but what we're learning is the
incredible mechanical abilities
of the, of the nation in order
to produce these machines
and, the industrial capacity of
people producing these pieces
in different areas,
shipping them to New York,
they were all incorporated
into the Monitor.
So it's it's man in its struggle,
but it's also a crazy machine.
Its this really interesting hybrid.
Remember the Worthington pumps
that struggled so mightily the
night the Monitor went down?
(machines whirring)
That's one of them.
This is, a steam engine actually
the steam piston chamber
from one of the two bilge pumps.
And as you can see, it's
really cracked and fragile.
And so what I'm doing right
now is one of the first stages
is to pacify the surface,
put a protective coating on.
And that's why you can
kind of see it's gone black.
The ultimate goal is to keep moisture
from entering the surface of the object.
So once the object is stable,
structurally, physically stable,
we then go back in and try to reassemble
it, putting back all the small pieces.
And so with objects of this size,
you have to kind of do it in sections
so that you can move it around.
Imagine it's like a 3D jigsaw
puzzle trying to figure out where
all these small fragments go.
And the ultimate goal is to then reposition
them in their fitting place.
We can tell from the
surface texture with sand cast,
which you see the parting line that
runs down the whole middle of the mold.
And so that's just one little story
about, well, how did they do it?
How did they make these things?
And not only does it talk about the work
of the foundry that made this, but it adds
the bigger picture of sort of that,
you know, America's move from,
you know, the farm to the
to the city, to the industry.
There's all these little facets that,
that we can tell and share with the public.
To me, that's why it's important
to save something like the Monitor.
Yes. It sank. Sure.
It fought in the battle.
It was only afloat for nine
months. What's the big deal?
Well, not only does it tell
about the sailors who serve.
Tells us about life at the time,
how people lived, how they died.
And it's a benchmark for the
country and where we've been.
Here was something
revolutionary that supposedly,
according to the history
books, was the first submarine
in the world to go out and
sink an enemy ship and change
for all times how war would
be fought on the water.
So she's almost a historical icon.
The Hunley ended her celebrated
journey from the ocean floor here
at the Warren Conservation
Center in Charleston, South Carolina.
She was immediately immersed
in a 55,000 gallon treatment tank.
First, a scan was made of the entire
submarine, which gave archeologists
a two scale rendering, helping them
determine the best manner of access.
Initially, they worked
through an existing hole
in one of the ballast tanks.
Eventually, they pulled
off the hull plates,
essentially the lid on
their sunken treasure chest.
So we had no idea
when we popped the hull plates to
get inside and begin the excavation.
We had no idea, what we're going to find.
You know, you come in eight
in the morning ready to work,
you're going to start excavating.
Might not a clue.
And there's nobody on Earth that
can tell you what you might find.
Not living at least.
Delicately scraping
through layers of sediment,
archeologists gradually
revealed fascinating artifacts,
beginning with the bench their
crew sat on and dozens of buttons
and a wide assortment of buttons,
plain buttons for their clothing and,
whatever uniforms they
happen to have with them.
We had, Confederate Navy,
Union Navy
infantry, artillery, so wide
assortment of buttons.
There wasn't a uniform for the Hunley. It's
just whatever branch of military
service they had already been serving in.
They had their - their uniforms from that.
About two months into the excavation,
the first human remains were discovered.
What followed was amazing
and critical to solving the mystery.
As a crew
so well preserved in their bone structure.
Their brains are still in their heads.
We spent a lot of time and,
tried our best to be as accurate
as possible with the mapping
and recording of all of the bones,
every single bone from each crew member.
After the excavation, we
took all the long bones,
basically everything except for the hands
And the feet were scanned
with a laser scanner.
And then we made a reduced
but 1 to 1 scale accurate
3D model of each bone,
and then brought it back,
and lined them up with the points
that we collected during the excavation.
So you get a point there.
Each crew member a
different color, dark and light.
For example, the green
means left and right sides.
There is an entire spinal
column that was articulated
now, obviously, and you
can see the ribs still lined up.
Nothing is attached anymore.
But this man's torso ended up,
with his back down at the
bottom of the submarine.
The result?
A depiction of where each crew member died.
Each crewman remains were
pretty much, had they had decomposed
at their stations, there wasn't
a whole lot of co-mingling.
There wasn't any evidence at all that
these guys were fighting to get out.
The more I looked at
it, the more I realized it's
almost impossible that
these guys were conscious
and drowning based on the
disposition of their remains.
Now, were they
incapacitated by the explosion?
Knocked out
or something like that?
It's possible.
Otherwise, we have to come
up with another way for them to
die at their stations without
any attempt to get out.
It's possible they had become
stuck in the mud and ran out of air.
But remember, there are reports
from survivors aboard the Housatonic
that the submarine
surfaced and signaled shore.
What we're doing is, is compiling
all the evidence, looking at all
the clues, and see
what direction they point.
What, theory of the
sinking do they suggest?
Do the same.
We apply the same basic
investigative techniques
as detective work or
crime scene investigators.
We're doing the same thing.
We're just doing it for
extremely cold cases.
Captain George
Dixon's story is the
most chilling of cold cases.
His remains were pretty well articulated.
He was sitting in his
seat almost like this,
with his hand back, and he
was embedded in the sediment.
So we will bring him
out and in what we call
a block lift, which is
with the sediment around.
Dixon, by some accounts,
had a girlfriend by the name of
Queenie Bennett back in Mobile, Alabama.
The story went that she'd given him
a gold coin when he went off to fight
in the Confederate infantry in 1861.
- And he carried it with him
at the Battle of Shiloh
on April the 6th, 1862.
He was shot in his left side,
but the shot was deflected
by that gold coin that
was in his left pocket.
But so far the historical fable was thought
by many to be nothing
more than romantic fancy.
Marie Jacobson was the
archeologist in charge of lifting
Dixon out of the wreck, so
Maria Jacobson got in there
and slid in the mud and put her hands
under his pelvic regions to make
sure that we had him disengaged.
When she did, she felt the cold ridge
of the coin on his left side remains.
I got it.
-Really? -Say the words!
I have the gold coin right here.
Do you feel it in your fingers?
Oh, I feel it in my fingers. Oh, I do.
-Oh my God! -You're right.
-Call James. -Get James.
Oh my God.
Oh, man, I got chill bumps.
On the coin is inscribed Shiloh, 1862.
My life preserver, GED.
When we pulled the coin,
The coin is warped. It's bent.
The lead is still on Lady Liberty's
bonnet, where the shot struck.
And when we looked at
George Dixon's remains,
he has the calcium
deposits here on his bone,
where the coin was pushed into his flesh.
In his right
pocket, an 18 karat gold brooch
embedded with 38 diamonds
and a Kentucky
colonel ring bearing eight
diamonds, one of them a full carat.
This is Dixon's watch.
The gold
pocket watch was found well,
in his pant pocket and on the fob,
He has his name engraved
and his Mason chapter.
It says George
E. Dixon, Mobile chapter number 40.
It wasn't that difficult to
conserve gold because it's gold.
So it doesnt corrode like other
materials, other metals will do.
But we have the entire mechanism.
And that was a big challenge
because the mechanism
we have the porcelain
dial, we have the iron hands
we had all interior brass
and all kinds of metals.
-Components must each
be treated differently.
And textiles, in this case, Dixon's
clothing are a particular challenge.
The entire textile will be
just draped on his body.
The clothing was the
consistency of toilet paper.
Johanna painstakingly used water
and syringes to remove sediment
from the material.
He was very fancy, as you know,
so he was wearing cashmere.
My problem in conserving
him is that his jacket
and vest are both made of cashmere,
and I think they're matching cashmere,
so it's really hard for me to figure out
What is what?
These are drawings of Dixon's block
lift as it was removed from the sub.
They work as a sort of map
as Johanna tries to put the
captain's suit back together.
Now, this used to, used to be
really red when I excavated, but light
Unfortunately, affects
a lot of the materials.
The vest is beginning to take shape.
This is the bottom line
and those two
holes there was where the buttons were.
And here, this is the chest lining.
It goes like this.
We have that missing area over there.
This is the neckline.
That's where the arm goes.
Remember the unlit candle in
the second sinking of the Hunley?
It appears this crew's only source
of light was on board and intact.
And it was completely covered in sediment
and was concreted.
Some part of the candle
was fused to the hull,
which is why we have this very dark orangey
red type of material that's
removed the candle out of the holder,
and unfortunately, I can't remove the wick.
So this this one is going
to be treated in a way
that is going to be safe, both
for the wick and for the wax
and also the candle was -
wasn't really burned that much.
So it was a little bit burned.
But we will have traces of wax
in the holder if you have burned
for a long time but we dont.
So it was barely used/
-Right, so it tells the story of
they hadn't been down there.
One of the most telling
finds discovered in late 2012
was under a brittle layer of
concretion at the end of the spar.
Remains of the copper sleeve
used to attach the so-called torpedo.
You can also see the, the peel back effect
of that copper.
Again, that's not from physical trauma.
That's the force of a detonation.
Now, the shockwave of the
explosion blew back the copper
as the torpedo destroyed itself.
And so since we have this
remains on the end of the spar,
we're 100% sure that
the torpedo was detonated,
while still attached
to the end of the spar.
And that's a big clue for us.
That means the detonation initially
took place within 18ft of the submarine,
and the crew fully
expected to survive the blast.
The casing also confirms the
explosive was an Edgar Singer
design, which, according to
historical drawings, contains 135
pounds of gunpowder and was
detonated with a trigger mechanism.
The crew is known to have
conducted tests using half the charge,
and the wooden hull of the Housatonic
could have created more blowback,
so doubling the size of your charge
and placement could have possibly
had some negative effects
for the submarine's hull or crew.
We don't know.
Keep in mind, though,
there's been no damage found on
the submarine caused by the explosion.
Did they do as some of the witnesses said
backed up, disappeared into
the dark after the explosion?
Was it anchored out there?
Did they throw that grapple hook out?
And was the rope too short?
And did it pull the
Hunley under and trap it?
And did they have anoxia
and just boom, blackout?
We don't know yet, but we will know.
Even after 150 years, the
nation's commitment to bring you
home is as good today as
it was during the Civil War.
It was pretty remarkable
that they honored these guys in that
way after such a long amount of time
has elapsed.
-On March 8th, 2013, the 151st anniversary
of the Battle of Hampton Roads,
the remains of the two sailors
recovered from USS
Monitor were laid to rest.
However, having raised those remains,
we brought them here
to the National Military Cemetery,
founded during the same great
conflict for which they gave, in
President Lincoln's words, their
last full measure of devotion.
It was kind of nice,
though, to see it, concluded.
The site, where about 80%
of the Monitor wreck still lies, is
now a national Marine Sanctuary.
Another first.
The remains of 14 other
men may still be buried there.
This is something that I can assure you
The crew of the Monitor back in
1862 never would have imagined
they'd be involved with.
But in the end, that sacrifice and
that contribution may be as equally
as effective and powerful
as what they did on March 9th,
helping us to be better citizens
and caretakers of the sea.
Until 2011, the HL Hunley
sat at the same 45 degree
angle at which she landed
on the ocean floor in 1864.
Once the artifacts were
recovered, she was rotated upright.
She's undergoing preservation,
and archeologists are figuring out
how to safely put her on display.
Her crew received a burial service in
line with the crew who went before them.
You could hear the
clomp of the horses and
soldiers passing by in the coffins,
and it was like going back to the
burial that was given to Horace Hunley.
All three crew remains now lie
at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston.
Meantime, archeologists and historians
continue their work solving
the mystery of the HL Hunley.
The Hunley is like a giant jigsaw puzzle,
but she very jealously has
held on to that last secret.
(water splashing)
(soft music)
They warned us that we could encounter
skin, hair, and flesh in the recovery.
They were risk takers
crazy enough to maybe
get in this death machine.
They had all their, you know, doubts.
There was a lot of praying on everything.
The crews remains were entombed
in mud inside an iron
coffin, which was then buried.
Here is an entire spinal column.
We apply the same basic investigative
techniques as crime scene investigators.
We're doing the same thing.
We're just doing it for
extremely cold cases.
Think of it as a 3D jigsaw puzzle
where pieces fit together.
It tells us about life at the time,
how people lived, how they died.
But she very jealously has held on to that
last secret.
(diver breathing underwater)
It's almost like a form
of insanity, you know.
You go after it with such fervor.
We really want to know what
happened and how things developed.
And we're interested in all
sorts of aspects, not just the
the piece of metal or wood
or whatever that was a vessel,
sailing vessel, but the people that
went and you know why they went.
The War of the States raged,
ravaging farm and factory,
leaving the south, as well
as the north, disassembled
and struggling to
reunite as well as recover.
Casualties were catastrophic
and sporadically reported.
Battlefields are said to still be
haunted by spirits of the fallen.
Their stories, largely untold.
By war's end, two fabled
vessels surrounded in mystery,
lay quietly and
undisturbed, hundreds of feet
below the turbulent
surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
The slow sway of its floor
further concealing their secrets.
In response to the
Confederates decision to build
an ironclad, the United States
Congress authorized the
Navy to build three of them.
All of them experimental and
the Monitor was the first of those
to be completed, and it
was of a radical new design.
Very flat, flat bottomed hull,
very low freeboard, with a
turret, rotating turret with the guns.
Initially, the Monitor was
kind of this cockamamie, crazy
concept of, a vessel that most
people thought wouldn't even float.
It's primarily metal, most of it is iron.
There was a lot of skepticism
about its seaworthiness.
There was even speculation
that it would sink like a stone.
But the ironclad USS Monitor, often
referred to as a cheese box,
became a model for shipbuilding
and in some ways changed the
way battles were fought at sea.
So it actually, prevented,
you know, the South or the
Confederacy to move into the North.
And I would say, you know, they said
at that time the Monitor saved the Union.
It became the prototype
for more than 40 ironclads
built on the Monitor design
in the Union Navy,
which played a major role
in Union victory in the Civil War.
If the Monitor at first appeared
unstable, the Confederates,
a few years later launched a
veritable death trap the four foot
three inch hull of the HL Hunley
didn't even allow its crew to stand.
It was hand-cranked and designed
to ram explosives into Union
ships from below the water surface.
Here was something revolutionary that just
the first submarine in the world
to go out and sink an enemy ship
and change for all times how
war would be fought on the water.
So she's almost a historical icon.
Hunley also proved victorious
in battle, but otherwise lethal.
Both the Hunley
and the Monitor were lost at sea,
then hunted for more than a century.
Both reflected the American
Revolution of commerce and industry.
Both were the result of man's
desperate determination to be victorious,
and both exacted extraordinary
bravery and patriotism from their crews.
It's the story of the people who,
in the pursuit of defense of liberty,
have always been willing to
put aside the element of fear
and answer the call of duty.
The call of duty sounded for
naval warriors in the spring of 1861,
Rather than leave her in enemy hands,
Union forces burned and sank
USS Merrimac at the Norfolk, Virginia
Navy Yard.
But Confederates, recognizing
the usefulness of her hull,
raised the ship and went
about building an iron casemate.
She was relaunched as
the ironclad CSS Virginia.
It was a man named John Erickson
who engineered the Union's rebuttal.
But for the most part, it's this big flat
iron thing with a round gun turret on top.
And most sailors were used
to big wooden sailing vessels.
The big glorious ships that you see
with multiple masts and 40 cannons.
This was completely different. Guns.
Steam powered. Hot. Sweaty. Cold. Driven.
And it's not something
that men were just leaping at
the opportunity to serve aboard.
They were sort of written
off by some of their friends
and family for having volunteered in this
iron coffin as it was called at the time.
All previous ships had had guns in
broadside and deck guns, pivot guns,
but the turret could fire in any direction.
Two guns -
One could fire while
the other was reloaded -
moved back and forth on
carriages inside the turret,
which was covered in
eight inches of iron plating.
Crew members looked out
through small holes in the armor.
It wasn't pretty, but turns out it worked.
In March of 1862, at Hampton
Roads, Virginia, the ironclad CSS
Virginia attacked two Union ships,
USS Cumberland and USS
Congress, sinking them both.
Union frigate USS Minnesota ran aground,
but the Virginia was unable to
finish her off before Daylight's End.
Then, when the Virginia
steamed out the next morning,
it saw the Monitor
right next to the USS
Minnesota to protect it.
The Confederates
couldn't believe their eyes.
They thought it was a boiler on
a raft to be taken into for repair.
When the boiler ran out
a gun and fired on them.
And that led to four hours of combat
to the Virginia and the Monitor.
So this was that one chance where
Here they are, these
two top secret weapons,
the same bay, the same battle,
and they duked it out for four hours.
And so for four hours, basically
point blank range, firing away,
pounding each other.
Cannonball dents armor.
Just an incredible battle.
Smoke, noise.
The battle was essentially a draw.
Both ships returning with little
damage, but the Monitor had really won
the tactical victory because
its mission was to protect
the rest of the Union fleet there,
and it accomplished that mission
after the Battle of Hampton Roads,
in which the capabilities of the vessel,
you know, were proved and it
was proven to be a great technology.
That's when there was a
cachet of, hey, I served aboard
the Monitor or, you know, so
Lincoln came and visited the vessel.
He actually walked on board.
And the crew, they seem to have
a little bit of swagger about them.
They may be still don't necessarily
like serving on that vessel, but
because it's the Monitor, because
it participated in this famous battle,
they were kind of viewed as celebrities.
Two years later,
Charleston was under siege.
The city had almost not a windowpane left.
Shelling was almost nightly.
Undersea warfare was
something people had talked about.
There had been submarines
that had functioned one fashion
or another, and that had
gone on for a long, long time.
But finally, here comes a little submarine.
Eight guys cranking it, one guy kind
of poking his head out of the porthole.
The HL Hunley was a
privateer built in Mobile,
Alabama, and sent via train to Charleston.
The builders, including Horace
Hunley himself, drew the attention
of General PT Beauregard, who was
leading the defense of Charleston.
The propulsion system was hand-crank.
There were seven crank
positions inside the submarine.
The crew would sit all on one side.
On the port side.
There was a ballast
system - forward and aft.
Between the two conning towers or hatches,
You had a crew compartment,
separating the crew compartment
from the bow and the stern were bulkheads.
They had dive planes on either side to,
to pitch the submarine up and down.
And then if they wanted
to come back to the surface,
they could pump the water out of
the ballast tanks with two hand pumps.
Story is, they were going get
about $50,000 for every federal
vessel that they could sink.
Fort Sumter was under attack
and Charleston was falling.
General Beauregard sees
the submarine and manned it
with his own inexperienced crew.
- While boarding or unboarding
One of them steps down on the dive lever.
The sub rotates, takes six down, five die.
But having realized the error of his ways,
he pleads with Captain
Hunley, the chief financier,
to come take the submarine
back, crew it with volunteers.
You do it.
The sub was raised. A new crew trained.
Hunley himself was in the captain's chair,
but without his first captain,
whose job it was to light a candle,
the only source of light
inside the long iron tube.
The boat dives into the
depths of the Cooper River.
It becomes pitch black in there
he can't find the seacock
to turn off the front hatch.
Water is flowing in.
The boat becomes nose
heavy, gets stuck in the bottom
of the Cooper River in 32ft of water.
There they -
Half of them suffocate, half drowned.
The first two crews in practice -
They would go out, practice,
come in and practice, practice.
And then a crew would die
and they would haul the
Hunley back up to the surface.
Get the guys out, and it
may or may not be true,
but stories of having to cut
the bodies apart to get them out.
In fact, the bodies of
the first crew were found
133 years later in an
old mariner's cemetery.
Now a football field, two graves
had multiple body parts inside.
One grave contained
just one set of remains.
One was a was a Confederate sailor of color
and the color of his skin -
They didn't get the body parts mixed up.
They did with the other ones.
For three weeks in October of
1863, the Hunley rested
on the bottom of the river.
Beauregard, unwilling
to devote more men or money
to what had twice become a tomb.
Now enters Lieutenant George Dixon,
a young man who's seen the submarine, knows
Captain Hunley comes to
General Beauregard and says,
please let me have the submarine.
I can make it work.
That battle told us that
from that day forward,
the wooden walls, the wooden
navies of the past were the past.
If you want to stay competitive,
you would have to build ironclads.
Once the Monitor proved its, its success,
they were looked upon as, as heroes.
Officer's quarters aboard the
Monitor were surprisingly luxurious.
And there was a daily mail call.
- Dear Anna
And I thought we could continue
our chat with pen, ink and paper.
The odd little ship's routines
were chronicled by cruise letters
to their wives.
Lunch at 12 of whiskey and crackers.
Which I don't partake, but
Im sorry to say all the rest do.
Supper at 6, which is
usually bread and butter,
dried beef, cheese,
crackers, coffee and tea.
On Christmas Eve 1862,
the Monitor received orders
to head to Beaufort, South
Carolina, then possibly to Charleston.
It was never designed to be a
deep water, blue water sailing vessel.
It was designed to
fight in the coastal areas.
You know, the what we
call the littoral zone today.
Rivers and then bays and harbors.
And was designed to be towed from place
to place.
-As the year 1862 wound to a close
The crew aboard the now somewhat
famous Monitor, under tow by USS Rhode
Island, was in grand spirits. Even
as bad weather forced them below
They cheered uproariously as
their ship became the first ironclad
to round Cape Hatteras.
The storm worsened.
Waves crashed against the
turret, causing it to vibrate and leak.
As evening wore on, the
storm's thrashing finally snapped
one of the Howsers, causing the
flat top heavy vessel to roll wildly.
Greenville Weeks, the Surgeon
General aboard, later shared his account
-Solid iron from keels on the turret top
clinging to anything for safety.
If the Monitor should go down,
would only insure a share in her fate.
Water began overwhelming
the Worthington bilge pumps
and dousing the fires which
fueled the boat's engines.
Ocean claimed our little
vessel and her trembling
frame and failing fire proved
she would soon answer his call.
The Monitor's captain, John
Bankhead considered distress signals
a last resort, but ordered the Red
Lantern hoisted around ten at night.
The Rhode Island responded
by sending lifeboats,
but the treacherous sea overwhelmed them.
It is madness to remain here longer.
Let each man save himself.
It was only then that Surgeon
General Weeks made a
desperate leap for a lifeboat,
which now crashed about
dangerously beside the sinking Monitor.
Just as he jumped, a swell
seized the boat upwards and away,
but Weeks was dragged aboard at
Lieutenant Samuel Greene's command
Aboard the Rhode Island
The doctor himself was
treated for a dislocated shoulder,
and three smashed fingers were amputated.
For an hour or more
We watched from the
deck of the Rhode Island.
The lonely light upon the Monitors turret
100 times we thought had gone forever.
100 times
It reappeared until at last,
about 2:00 Wednesday morning,
it sank and we saw it no more.
People have said, well,
was it a poor design?
It was a great design.
It just wasn't designed to sustain
those type of, you know, sustain itself
in those type of conditions.
The real tragedy was that
what enemy fire could not
accomplish in the
conflict with the Virginia
and with other Confederate
ships and fortifications -
Mother nature did when it sank
the Monitor on the last day of 1862.
47 men were rescued that night.
16 were either washed overboard
or trapped inside the ship.
Our little vessel was lost, and
we who were in months gone
by had learned to love her,
felt a strange pang go through us
as we remembered that never
more might we tread on her deck.
Or gather in her little
cabin in the evening.
It would be 111 years
before any human detected signal
or sign of the USS Monitor again.
Not once, not twice, three times.
People from all over the
world came to Charleston
to lift the siege on a city
that was longer than the siege
on Stalingrad and
Leningrad in World War Two,
and they did so really fulfilling what
the great book says is the greatest
gift that any one of us can give.
Why would somebody volunteer
to climb into the Hunley,
you know, to get down there,
contort their bodies, to get into
this little metal tube with no lights and
no source of,
you know, no source of air to
breathe, no nothing to breathe.
Once they hatch that,
you know, batten down the hatch on
that thing, you're down to a very short
period of time that you can sustain life.
Twice the HL Hunley had plummeted
to the ocean floor, killing its crew.
Lieutenant George Dixon convinced
Beauregard the sinkings were not
the result of poor design,
but of clumsy operation.
George Dixon came back and said, no,
give us one more chance, one more chance.
I'll get a third crew together.
Who are these crazy guys
to get in this death machine?
Right?
That is fascinating.
None of them are from Charleston.
None of them are from even South Carolina.
Four of them are from you know,
Alabama, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina.
But then we have another four
crewmen who, were immigrants,
The crew of the Hunley,
It's a really interesting cross-section
of American society at the time,
half the crew on board the
Hunley you're speaking with,
you know, accents other
than southern accents.
You know,
the purpose of the submarine was,
again, to dive beneath a target ship.
And so they were intending
to dive, but they weren't
intending to dive deep or for very long.
The goal, really, was just to get
underneath the surface of the water
and go get underneath the
ship that they were attacking.
Dixon, by most accounts, a flamboyant
ladies man who had previously
served in the Confederate
infantry, would captain the sub.
He was the one who would
navigate the submarine.
He had a depth gauge, compass.
He controlled the valves for the
forward ballast tank to let water in.
He controlled
the dive planes, and he
was the only one that could -
That would be looking
out the viewing ports,
and guiding the submarine
towards its target.
So, basically they
would line up on a target,
move forward, and then dive underneath it.
It's not known exactly how
the detonation system worked,
but essentially a torpedo
type explosive was mounted
at the end of a spar which
projected from the bow.
The idea was to ram the spar into
the enemy ship below its waterline.
She's a great piece of technology.
She bumped up on the
technological limits of the day.
She's 50 years ahead of her
time and hydrodynamic design.
She's got an air system, the
world's first joystick steering.
She's got a crew compartment
that, had a 3 to 1 gear ratio.
It's got skylights.
Not known to exist at that time.
Confederate naval forces were growing
ever more desperate to break the Union's
blockade of the Charleston harbor.
Dixon and his crew made the 1240
ton USS Housatonic their target.
The sloop carried 12
cannons and a crew of 150.
Under cover of darkness, the Hunley
slipped low into the water at the Breach
Inlet, moving out around the
Housatonic, which was moored bound north.
Conning tower exposed, Dixon
maneuvered the sub to aim
for the ship's starboard aft, then
submerged to plant its lethal blow.
- And it worked to great effect.
The Housatonic sank within minutes.
Five Union sailors were killed, but
many survived in the shallow waters
by clinging to rigging.
Accounts from those
survivors vary, some reporting
the Hunley was hit by small
arms fire before they submerged.
Others report seeing the
Hunley surface after the attack,
signaling shore of their
success with a white or blue light.
We don't know exactly what happened,
but the Hunley never came back.
We want to fill that - complete that story.
We want to tell all the aspects,
and everything that we can discover
about the Hunley and what happened that
fateful night, February 17th, 1864.
The Hunley, was something
that it kind of mystified people.
It was it's something like, you know,
people wanted to find the Titanic.
People wanted to find the Hunley.
At one point, we got a very
strong magnetometer hit.
Clyde Smith went along on several search
expeditions run and financed
by author Clive Cussler.
In the early 90s.
We had four square miles,
Housatonic at the very middle
and what we just ran up and
down across these one mile squares
and we were running lanes, if
you will like, mowing the lawn.
The mag hit was significant
enough to launch divers.
Smith went down to help stake
out their find, and we had five
foot long metal rods that were
that could be screwed together.
So we would go in there and we
would pound these into the sand,
and then we'd screw another rod
and pound that in the
sand thing, and we ended up
with an elliptical shape pattern
of all these little rods sticking up.
That was the length we were
looking for 34, 35ft or something.
And it was sort of a cigar
- a cigar shaped pattern.
They uncovered a corner of
the metal object, but determined
that the sort of rivet they
exposed belonged to a sunken buoy.
They abandoned the site.
Years later, Cussler returned
and dug a little deeper.
- And they dug out some more.
And that time they
found one of the hatches.
And that's when we knew it was the Hunley.
When it was time to find
it, it got - it was found.
So know that's how that worked.
And I said, you know, we
ought to go get that submarine.
We sent a site assessment
out to take a look and see.
Do we have a rusted hull?
Is it going on the bottom?
We don't know anything
about which construction.
All the records are gone and
everything, but we could see through
the viewing ports of the entire inside
of the submarine was full of sediment,
so we knew we were going to
have preservation of the material
that we would find inside.
For example, the crew's
remains were entombed in mud
inside an iron coffin,
which was then buried.
They said an anaerobic
environment had set up inside
an oxygen-less environment very
early in the history of the vessel.
And so they warned us
that we could encounter skin,
hair, and flesh in the recovery.
Suspecting how well preserved
the contents of the sub
likely were, didn't make
the recovery any easier.
In fact, it made it all the more delicate.
It took several years for
engineers to come up with a way
to move the vessel without
liquefying what lay inside.
We have only one chance
to do this, and to do it right.
Suction pilings were
used to create a foundation
which supported slings,
cocooning the vessel in the same
starboard leaning position
in which it was found.
We knew we had one design weakness,
and that was that the four
legs of that superstructure
had to hit a moving
barge at one time or two
G's would go through it
and damage everything.
So they were holding the submarine
up there over that moving barge.
And what we did is we created
a 28 second window of smooth
water with a dredge barge.
And as that traveled under that
moving barge and that thing stabilized,
that crane operator had to
pop it and drop it on there with all four.
And I'll never forget
that loud, loud thump.
(object thumps loudly)
And then we knew we had it.
(crowd cheering)
(inspirational music and sirens)
It was unbelievable.
It was like this
incredible
you know, finally, after all
these years, well over 100 years.
And here it comes out of the water.
It's a wonderful day because
it was about four miles
in to Charleston's harbor.
And when we got near the harbor
and came down the jetties,
the Catholic Church Stella
Maris on Sullivan's Island began
ringing its bell
and then the other churches in
the city started ringing the bells.
And on the rooftops there
were hundreds of boats
going by us, the
rooftops across Charleston,
the people on roofs and
everything on the battery.
They were the aquarium.
They were all over the Yorktown.
The traffic came to a halt
on the big Cooper River
bridge and people looking over the sides.
And it's just just time
stood still for the Hunley
to complete the final journey home.
The HL Hunley
and USS Monitor both
products of the Civil War
and both technologically
years ahead of their time.
The Monitor and odd little ironclad
ship proved her worth, famously
blocking Confederate advancement
at the Battle of Hampton Roads,
but a storm claimed her
just eight months later.
It would be more than 100 years
before anyone saw the Monitor again.
The real tragedy was that
the enemy fire could not
accomplish in conflict with the Virginia.
Mother nature did when it sank
the Monitor on the last day of 1862,
the Hunley, a hand-cranked
submarine with a crew of eight,
delivered a fatal blow to
the USS Housatonic before
disappearing into the Atlantic Ocean.
She was finally discovered
in 1995, mostly buried in sand.
Crews remains were entombed
in mud inside an iron coffin,
which was then buried.
It took several years to figure
out how to bring her up and gingerly
carry her back to Charleston,
where archeologists began
their amazing excavation.
The first time I saw it was,
it was pretty incredible.
So seeing this thing
and knowing what it was
and knowing how historically
significant it was pretty overwhelming.
The wreck of the USS Monitor was elusive.
Many teams searched, but it wasn't
until August of 1973 that scientists
aboard Duke University's research
vessel Eastward finally found her.
At the time, they relied
upon grainy black and white
photos taken with a submerged
camera to confirm their find.
At some point, the turret became
dislodged and was lying underneath
a ship half covered by the
ship and half outside of the ship.
Now I have it again with
the ship totally inverted.
It was a weird thing.
The, you know, the turret
as it was on the seabed.
It was exposed.
And it's just, you know, it's just
a it just looks like a cheese box.
It's just a cylinder.
And it was open on top, and, you
know, it had been dug out somewhat.
You could see the - And of
course, it's all upside down.
So you see the bottom
of the gun carriages and you see
some, some of the support structure
and you'd swim up to it and
you can peer over the edge.
And if you had to do work inside of it,
sometimes you kind of remove your
fins and get in there and brace yourself.
It's very small with all the, the beams
and things, and we usually would have
a team between like 6 to 8
people, that would be on the bottom.
And each one of them
would be in buddy pairs.
And they would have a specific task though,
a lot of times
those were either
recovering small artifacts
or recording features on
the wreck or doing, photo
and video of particular areas
so that we could know where
things came from and reconstruct.
You know, that's that's one of the biggest,
one of the most important things of
removing artifacts is understanding
where they came from on the wreck,
because they they lose a lot of meaning
unless you know exactly
where they were located.
The hard crust that tends
to form on the outside.
A lot of these big iron
objects, it's called concretion.
We call it concretion.
It's it's basically hard, like concrete,
but it's a mix of of sand and shell
and coral and marine life and calcium.
It's kind of a byproduct of some
corrosion that forms on the artifact.
How do you know it's an artifact?
How can you - how do you recognize things?
So it is, it's really tricky
to sort of develop an eye for
what you're looking at because,
you know, if you take something
like, like a lantern, right?
It has a number of
different components in it.
It might have a glass, it might
have, you know, some iron,
and then it has a brass
handle or something like that.
So the parts that are iron typically
have this concretion on them.
So they just look like these
bulgy, amorphous things
that loosely look like
the base of a lantern.
(shouting military commands)
The Navy had notified us on our way out
one morning that there
were suspected remains.
And, we went down and
dove on the site, and there clear
as day, was one set of human remains
as you realize what it is, you're like.
Wow, that is unmistakable.
And it is,
you know, it's not - it
wasn't a morbid thing.
It was just, it was really
profound to think that this is -
this is a, you know, it
just makes the whole story
seem so much more real - that
makes these things come to life.
Even though it's, you
know, the antithesis of no one
had seen these individuals for
at that time it was about 140 years.
And here we are 140 years later,
laying eyes on these guys
again for the first time.
And it was that that was the
point that we decided to cease
all, further excavation and
actually remove the turret.
Archeologists knew the turret
was a virtual time capsule,
and recovery would have to be delicate.
And because it was flipped upside down,
it was, in essence resting on its roof,
which was never designed to carry weight.
So how do you lift 200 tons of material
without having it give
way and spill the contents?
The Navy's Mobile Diving
and Salvage Unit, or MDSU
was largely responsible
for removing the overburden,
including armored plating designed
to protect the Monitor from cannon fire
once that was out of the way,
MDSU used this specially
designed spider to lift the turret
-And then the excavation
was continued on the surface
once it was out of the water.
We can see kind of a commotion and a
hectic situation based on the artifacts,
of the two sets of human remains
that were discovered in the gun turret.
One of those sailors was
wearing two different shoes.
Its dark in there. The
ship's pitching side to side.
Did he just grab the nearest
shoes that were there,
not even realizing in the dark,
put them on and hustled up
through the gun turret?
We don't know.
And when you have 10 to 15ft seas splashing
over the deck of the ship, you're
not going to open the deck hatch.
So the only way up and out of the ship
that night of the sinking
was through the gun turret.
Other artifacts found
inside the turret suggest crew
members were attempting to
bring along some of their valuables.
Perhaps it was Okay
I've got this chest with my items.
I'm bringing it up to the turret,
and by the time I pop my head out
and look at the conditions, forget it.
I'm only. I'm not taking.
These things are too heavy.
They may pull me down.
We have personal items from the sailors
who served and died aboard silverware
with inscriptions, clothing,
buttons from boots and shoes,
pocket knives, everyday contents that
these sailors would have had aboard
the night of the sinking.
When you are actually able to
discover something that has the sailors
initials engraved on it, and then
you can go back to the cruelest
and actually determine who
was the owner of that item.
That's that's taking the experience
to a whole different level.
One piece of silverware, a spoon,
was inscribed with the initials
JN for Jacob Nicklis.
It's possible that one set of
those recovered remains were his.
At 16 he enlisted.
Didn't want to go on the
Monitor, but all of his
crewmates basically, you know, did.
So he didn't want to be the guy
who didn't say he went aboard.
Jamie Nicklis is a descendant of Jacob's.
He's been able to read a series of letters
exchanged between Jacob
and his father in 1862.
His father sent him a Christmas package
and the next his father asked
him kind of what he wanted.
The following letter he told
his father not to send it yet
because, they were ordered
to take the ship out into the
ocean and come into a different bay.
And they didn't think it
was seaworthy whatsoever.
They they had all their, you know, doubts.
And, there was a lot of
praying on everything.
And, so that's the last
that we heard from him.
Forensic scientists
were able to reconstruct
the faces from the skulls of those remains.
One of the sailors was younger,
you know, 17 to 24 or 25.
One of them was a little bit
older, probably late 20s or 30s.
The older sailor had a tooth that
was slightly carved out from, from
smoking a pipe just from wear on it,
you know, our nose, our chin and stuff.
I mean, I can just see it in
this guy right here, but I'm not
I don't know who's who on this picture.
I'd love to know.
I would say this guy
right here really looks like -
- The rotating gun turret
That remarkable 120 ton piece
of 1860s engineering is here
in Newport News, Virginia,
immersed in a 90,000 gallon tank.
The turret,
along with the steam engine, the cannons
and the carriages are being conserved.
That is stabilized
enough to eventually be put on
display at the Mariners Museum.
And our primary job here is to
actually remove all of the salts
that have accumulated
inside of these artifacts.
If we don't,
if we just say, take a cannon,
rinse it off and place it on display,
all those salts that are in
there are going to react with
the relative humidity in the room.
If somebody were to walk up and
touch the gun, their salts and oils
and things on their hands, over
time those guns would fall apart.
They would break into pieces,
they would corrode on display.
Not an option.
Archeologists are
occasionally able to get a better
look at the turret when the
tank is occasionally drained.
We know that some of
the sailors actually received
concussions in the gun turret
during the Battle of Hampton Roads.
When we go back in and
excavate the sediment,
we were actually able to
locate dents from the cannonballs
from the, from the other vessels
that actually pushed the armor in.
And, potentially with the locations
where those sailors were standing
when they received their concussions.
They also found dents
where the gun carriages
slammed into the back of the turret,
and three small holes through which
they could look out at their target.
Many of the items recovered
prove the Monitor was a sign
of the industrial
revolution about to unfold.
Most people think civil war
a long time ago fairly crude,
but what we're learning is the
incredible mechanical abilities
of the, of the nation in order
to produce these machines
and, the industrial capacity of
people producing these pieces
in different areas,
shipping them to New York,
they were all incorporated
into the Monitor.
So it's it's man in its struggle,
but it's also a crazy machine.
Its this really interesting hybrid.
Remember the Worthington pumps
that struggled so mightily the
night the Monitor went down?
(machines whirring)
That's one of them.
This is, a steam engine actually
the steam piston chamber
from one of the two bilge pumps.
And as you can see, it's
really cracked and fragile.
And so what I'm doing right
now is one of the first stages
is to pacify the surface,
put a protective coating on.
And that's why you can
kind of see it's gone black.
The ultimate goal is to keep moisture
from entering the surface of the object.
So once the object is stable,
structurally, physically stable,
we then go back in and try to reassemble
it, putting back all the small pieces.
And so with objects of this size,
you have to kind of do it in sections
so that you can move it around.
Imagine it's like a 3D jigsaw
puzzle trying to figure out where
all these small fragments go.
And the ultimate goal is to then reposition
them in their fitting place.
We can tell from the
surface texture with sand cast,
which you see the parting line that
runs down the whole middle of the mold.
And so that's just one little story
about, well, how did they do it?
How did they make these things?
And not only does it talk about the work
of the foundry that made this, but it adds
the bigger picture of sort of that,
you know, America's move from,
you know, the farm to the
to the city, to the industry.
There's all these little facets that,
that we can tell and share with the public.
To me, that's why it's important
to save something like the Monitor.
Yes. It sank. Sure.
It fought in the battle.
It was only afloat for nine
months. What's the big deal?
Well, not only does it tell
about the sailors who serve.
Tells us about life at the time,
how people lived, how they died.
And it's a benchmark for the
country and where we've been.
Here was something
revolutionary that supposedly,
according to the history
books, was the first submarine
in the world to go out and
sink an enemy ship and change
for all times how war would
be fought on the water.
So she's almost a historical icon.
The Hunley ended her celebrated
journey from the ocean floor here
at the Warren Conservation
Center in Charleston, South Carolina.
She was immediately immersed
in a 55,000 gallon treatment tank.
First, a scan was made of the entire
submarine, which gave archeologists
a two scale rendering, helping them
determine the best manner of access.
Initially, they worked
through an existing hole
in one of the ballast tanks.
Eventually, they pulled
off the hull plates,
essentially the lid on
their sunken treasure chest.
So we had no idea
when we popped the hull plates to
get inside and begin the excavation.
We had no idea, what we're going to find.
You know, you come in eight
in the morning ready to work,
you're going to start excavating.
Might not a clue.
And there's nobody on Earth that
can tell you what you might find.
Not living at least.
Delicately scraping
through layers of sediment,
archeologists gradually
revealed fascinating artifacts,
beginning with the bench their
crew sat on and dozens of buttons
and a wide assortment of buttons,
plain buttons for their clothing and,
whatever uniforms they
happen to have with them.
We had, Confederate Navy,
Union Navy
infantry, artillery, so wide
assortment of buttons.
There wasn't a uniform for the Hunley. It's
just whatever branch of military
service they had already been serving in.
They had their - their uniforms from that.
About two months into the excavation,
the first human remains were discovered.
What followed was amazing
and critical to solving the mystery.
As a crew
so well preserved in their bone structure.
Their brains are still in their heads.
We spent a lot of time and,
tried our best to be as accurate
as possible with the mapping
and recording of all of the bones,
every single bone from each crew member.
After the excavation, we
took all the long bones,
basically everything except for the hands
And the feet were scanned
with a laser scanner.
And then we made a reduced
but 1 to 1 scale accurate
3D model of each bone,
and then brought it back,
and lined them up with the points
that we collected during the excavation.
So you get a point there.
Each crew member a
different color, dark and light.
For example, the green
means left and right sides.
There is an entire spinal
column that was articulated
now, obviously, and you
can see the ribs still lined up.
Nothing is attached anymore.
But this man's torso ended up,
with his back down at the
bottom of the submarine.
The result?
A depiction of where each crew member died.
Each crewman remains were
pretty much, had they had decomposed
at their stations, there wasn't
a whole lot of co-mingling.
There wasn't any evidence at all that
these guys were fighting to get out.
The more I looked at
it, the more I realized it's
almost impossible that
these guys were conscious
and drowning based on the
disposition of their remains.
Now, were they
incapacitated by the explosion?
Knocked out
or something like that?
It's possible.
Otherwise, we have to come
up with another way for them to
die at their stations without
any attempt to get out.
It's possible they had become
stuck in the mud and ran out of air.
But remember, there are reports
from survivors aboard the Housatonic
that the submarine
surfaced and signaled shore.
What we're doing is, is compiling
all the evidence, looking at all
the clues, and see
what direction they point.
What, theory of the
sinking do they suggest?
Do the same.
We apply the same basic
investigative techniques
as detective work or
crime scene investigators.
We're doing the same thing.
We're just doing it for
extremely cold cases.
Captain George
Dixon's story is the
most chilling of cold cases.
His remains were pretty well articulated.
He was sitting in his
seat almost like this,
with his hand back, and he
was embedded in the sediment.
So we will bring him
out and in what we call
a block lift, which is
with the sediment around.
Dixon, by some accounts,
had a girlfriend by the name of
Queenie Bennett back in Mobile, Alabama.
The story went that she'd given him
a gold coin when he went off to fight
in the Confederate infantry in 1861.
- And he carried it with him
at the Battle of Shiloh
on April the 6th, 1862.
He was shot in his left side,
but the shot was deflected
by that gold coin that
was in his left pocket.
But so far the historical fable was thought
by many to be nothing
more than romantic fancy.
Marie Jacobson was the
archeologist in charge of lifting
Dixon out of the wreck, so
Maria Jacobson got in there
and slid in the mud and put her hands
under his pelvic regions to make
sure that we had him disengaged.
When she did, she felt the cold ridge
of the coin on his left side remains.
I got it.
-Really? -Say the words!
I have the gold coin right here.
Do you feel it in your fingers?
Oh, I feel it in my fingers. Oh, I do.
-Oh my God! -You're right.
-Call James. -Get James.
Oh my God.
Oh, man, I got chill bumps.
On the coin is inscribed Shiloh, 1862.
My life preserver, GED.
When we pulled the coin,
The coin is warped. It's bent.
The lead is still on Lady Liberty's
bonnet, where the shot struck.
And when we looked at
George Dixon's remains,
he has the calcium
deposits here on his bone,
where the coin was pushed into his flesh.
In his right
pocket, an 18 karat gold brooch
embedded with 38 diamonds
and a Kentucky
colonel ring bearing eight
diamonds, one of them a full carat.
This is Dixon's watch.
The gold
pocket watch was found well,
in his pant pocket and on the fob,
He has his name engraved
and his Mason chapter.
It says George
E. Dixon, Mobile chapter number 40.
It wasn't that difficult to
conserve gold because it's gold.
So it doesnt corrode like other
materials, other metals will do.
But we have the entire mechanism.
And that was a big challenge
because the mechanism
we have the porcelain
dial, we have the iron hands
we had all interior brass
and all kinds of metals.
-Components must each
be treated differently.
And textiles, in this case, Dixon's
clothing are a particular challenge.
The entire textile will be
just draped on his body.
The clothing was the
consistency of toilet paper.
Johanna painstakingly used water
and syringes to remove sediment
from the material.
He was very fancy, as you know,
so he was wearing cashmere.
My problem in conserving
him is that his jacket
and vest are both made of cashmere,
and I think they're matching cashmere,
so it's really hard for me to figure out
What is what?
These are drawings of Dixon's block
lift as it was removed from the sub.
They work as a sort of map
as Johanna tries to put the
captain's suit back together.
Now, this used to, used to be
really red when I excavated, but light
Unfortunately, affects
a lot of the materials.
The vest is beginning to take shape.
This is the bottom line
and those two
holes there was where the buttons were.
And here, this is the chest lining.
It goes like this.
We have that missing area over there.
This is the neckline.
That's where the arm goes.
Remember the unlit candle in
the second sinking of the Hunley?
It appears this crew's only source
of light was on board and intact.
And it was completely covered in sediment
and was concreted.
Some part of the candle
was fused to the hull,
which is why we have this very dark orangey
red type of material that's
removed the candle out of the holder,
and unfortunately, I can't remove the wick.
So this this one is going
to be treated in a way
that is going to be safe, both
for the wick and for the wax
and also the candle was -
wasn't really burned that much.
So it was a little bit burned.
But we will have traces of wax
in the holder if you have burned
for a long time but we dont.
So it was barely used/
-Right, so it tells the story of
they hadn't been down there.
One of the most telling
finds discovered in late 2012
was under a brittle layer of
concretion at the end of the spar.
Remains of the copper sleeve
used to attach the so-called torpedo.
You can also see the, the peel back effect
of that copper.
Again, that's not from physical trauma.
That's the force of a detonation.
Now, the shockwave of the
explosion blew back the copper
as the torpedo destroyed itself.
And so since we have this
remains on the end of the spar,
we're 100% sure that
the torpedo was detonated,
while still attached
to the end of the spar.
And that's a big clue for us.
That means the detonation initially
took place within 18ft of the submarine,
and the crew fully
expected to survive the blast.
The casing also confirms the
explosive was an Edgar Singer
design, which, according to
historical drawings, contains 135
pounds of gunpowder and was
detonated with a trigger mechanism.
The crew is known to have
conducted tests using half the charge,
and the wooden hull of the Housatonic
could have created more blowback,
so doubling the size of your charge
and placement could have possibly
had some negative effects
for the submarine's hull or crew.
We don't know.
Keep in mind, though,
there's been no damage found on
the submarine caused by the explosion.
Did they do as some of the witnesses said
backed up, disappeared into
the dark after the explosion?
Was it anchored out there?
Did they throw that grapple hook out?
And was the rope too short?
And did it pull the
Hunley under and trap it?
And did they have anoxia
and just boom, blackout?
We don't know yet, but we will know.
Even after 150 years, the
nation's commitment to bring you
home is as good today as
it was during the Civil War.
It was pretty remarkable
that they honored these guys in that
way after such a long amount of time
has elapsed.
-On March 8th, 2013, the 151st anniversary
of the Battle of Hampton Roads,
the remains of the two sailors
recovered from USS
Monitor were laid to rest.
However, having raised those remains,
we brought them here
to the National Military Cemetery,
founded during the same great
conflict for which they gave, in
President Lincoln's words, their
last full measure of devotion.
It was kind of nice,
though, to see it, concluded.
The site, where about 80%
of the Monitor wreck still lies, is
now a national Marine Sanctuary.
Another first.
The remains of 14 other
men may still be buried there.
This is something that I can assure you
The crew of the Monitor back in
1862 never would have imagined
they'd be involved with.
But in the end, that sacrifice and
that contribution may be as equally
as effective and powerful
as what they did on March 9th,
helping us to be better citizens
and caretakers of the sea.
Until 2011, the HL Hunley
sat at the same 45 degree
angle at which she landed
on the ocean floor in 1864.
Once the artifacts were
recovered, she was rotated upright.
She's undergoing preservation,
and archeologists are figuring out
how to safely put her on display.
Her crew received a burial service in
line with the crew who went before them.
You could hear the
clomp of the horses and
soldiers passing by in the coffins,
and it was like going back to the
burial that was given to Horace Hunley.
All three crew remains now lie
at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston.
Meantime, archeologists and historians
continue their work solving
the mystery of the HL Hunley.
The Hunley is like a giant jigsaw puzzle,
but she very jealously has
held on to that last secret.