Civil War buffs have something else to marvel over.
Considered the Confederacy’s stealth weapon, the Hunley sank the Union warship Housatonic in winter 1864, and then disappeared with all eight Confederate sailors inside.
The narrow, top-secret “torpedo fish,” built in Mobile, Alabama by Horace Hunley from cast iron and wrought iron with a hand-cranked propeller, arrived in Charleston in 1863 while the city was under siege by Union troops and ships.
In the ensuing few months, it sank twice after sea trial accidents, killing 13 crew members including Horace Hunley, who was steering.
“There are historical references that the bodies of one crew had to be cut into pieces to remove them from the submarine,” Mardikian told Reuters. “There was forensic evidence when they found the bones (between 1993 and 2004 in a Confederate graveyard beneath a football stadium in Charleston) that that was true.”
The Confederate Navy hauled the sub up twice, recovered the bodies of the crew, and planned a winter attack.
On the night of February 17, 1864, its captain and seven crew left Sullivan’s Island near Charleston, and hand-powered the sub to the Union warship four miles offshore. From a metal spar on its bow, the Hunley planted a 135-pound torpedo in the hull of the ship, which burned and sank.
Some historians say that the submarine showed a mission-accomplished lantern signal from its hatch to troops back on shore before it disappeared.
CAFFEINATED POLITICS 
So interesting this part of History and this boat.
National Geographics had a wonderful story about The Hunley as well.
A morbid need to know about the crews who perished in her. About how the hull was sealed and contained all breathable air used up by the crew and ballast control until she could stay submerged no longer.
Submerged only to approach, deliver, and back away, pulling on the lanyard to detonate the explosives this hard-to-notice Hunley was formidable and lethal as fixed guns on board the Housatonic could not be depressed enough to fire on the unseen approaching Hunley.
The story continues about the leather seals used for the shaft and ballast pumps to keep the sea out, about how the hatch only opened ‘out’ and the sea pressure sealed her shut when submerged, sunk or scuttled.
The Hunley was a brillant weapon used to deliver and impale a barbed harpoon holding an explosive charge to the starboard plank of the Union warship Housatonic at or below the waterline. Holed and burned the Housatonic rolled over and sank as a result of The Hunley’s attack. “There is but a plank between a sailor and eternity”~thomas Gibbons.
The Hunley was a desperate attempt to defeat a Union blockade imposed on the Confederates at Charleston.
I’d love to place my hand on her rusted plates, touching and admiring her as undeniably all her crews had before me.
skip.
It is incorrect to say that the Hunley may have signaled the success of its attack with a blue lantern. A lantern with a clear glass lensn not a blue one, was found in the recovered submarine. Two historical mentions of “blue light” are the basis for the oft-repeated claim that a blue lantern was used as a signal. In fact, in 1864 “blue light” referred to a pyrotechnic signal akin to our modern road flare. Period dictionaries, military manuals, chemistry texts and popular literature of the nineteenth centure corroborate the period meaning of “blue light.” Modern researchers and authors erred by misinterpreting the nineteenth century use of the term “blue light” as a blue lantern. The signal which was observed by the lookout aboard the sunken USS Housatonic was pyrotechnic blue light, which was in common use by both sides during the American Civil War.
Thanks Chris.
Excellent comment and information.