The search for Hunley ended 131 years later when best-selling author Clive Cussler and his team from the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) discovered the submarine after a 14-year search. Hunley was not seen again for over a century. Hunley rammed Housatonic below the water line, detonating the torpedo, tearing a hole in the Union ship’s hull and sending her to the bottom along with five of her crew. Carrying a torpedo packed with explosive black powder bolted to a 16-foot spar, H. On 17 February 1864, after months of practice runs and weather delays, the Confederate submarine, under cover of darkness, silently approached USS Housatonic, a 16-gun, 1,240-ton sloop-of-war, on blockade duty four miles off the entrance to Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. With many of the features that would become standard in later submarines, including diving planes and raised conning towers, the boat is a prime example of the American technological ingenuity that characterized the Civil War period. Each end was equipped with water ballast tanks that could be flooded by valves or pumped dry by hand pumps. It was powered by a hand crank operated by a crew of seven, with an eighth member to pilot the boat. Privately built in 1863 by Park and Lyons of Mobile, Alabama, with the financial backing of Horace Lawson Hunley, the submarine was constructed from rolled iron boiler plate with custom cast iron fittings. Although the boat and its crew were lost as a result of this endeavor, the success of their mission proved that this new style of naval warfare would be an inevitable course of future development. Hunley has the distinction of being the first submarine to sink an enemy warship in wartime.
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