74 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020
refused to show any damage itself, even after repeated blasts,
even as it transmitted the pressures inside.
By the end of the day, the data saved on the laptop was
worth more to me than anything I owned. I immediately
backed it up in triplicate.
The next step was to translate all the squiggly pressure trac-
es into a meaningful description of what happened on that
cold night in February 1864. My end goal was not simply to sit
in a series of muddy ponds and set off charges. It was to de-
termine whether the crew had been killed by their own bomb
while cocooned inside the steel walls of their vessel.
Scientists do not like to throw around the word “proof.” We
couch our words carefully. So because I am a scientist, here is
the fi ne-print scientifi c disclaimer: There are other possible
ways to explain how this pressure got inside the vessel and
maimed the crew. But the theory I was beginning to develop
was the most likely candidate, given the data that I had.
My analysis showed that the amount of pressure ricocheting
around inside the metal tube, combined with the quick rise time
of the wave, would have put each member of the Hunley’s crew
at a 95 percent risk of immediate, severe pulmonary trauma.
The kind that would leave them gasping for air,
possibly coughing up blood.
Researchers had studied the remains of the
Hunley crewmen and found that some had ap-
parently undamaged skulls and intact brains.
The soft tissues were severely damaged and
shrunk by long-term exposure to salt water, but
medical personnel who carefully examined the
tissues found that some of the brains bore dif-
fuse stains consistent with blood.THE SAILORS IN THE HUNLEY would not have
had time to realize the twinned truths of their
victory and demise.
Inside the submarine that night, they all had
items in their pockets that spoke of their be-
lief that they would go on living. The smokers
brought their pipes. George Dixon, in his 20s with
a head full of blond hair, brought his pocket watch. The watch
broke at the time of the attack, locking the hands forever at 8:23
p.m. Dixon’s head dropped against the side of the hull. His an-
kles were lightly crossed, and one hand fell to his thigh, his body
propped up by the hull wall and his small captain’s bench.
The deck of the Housatonic had sprayed into a million
shards of wood and metal hurtling into the air. Most of the
crew had already run for the bow and safety, but as the ship
gave a mighty heave to port, the few remaining joined in the
mad dash forward. A cloud with the noxious stench of rotten
eggs from the black powder drifted off across the smooth sur-
face of the calming ocean. Five Union sailors had been killed.
The submarine drifted on the outgoing tide. With no one
alive to operate the bilge pumps, eventually, it started to sink.
Water rushed in, bringing the little boat to the sand but leav-
ing an air space, inside of which, over the decades, stalactites
would grow. The HL Hunley and its crew settled to a quiet
grave 30 feet beneath the dark blue waves.magic. With each test, they showed an internal increase in
pressure precisely with the arrival of the blast wave. This
initial increase was followed by exactly what I expected: a
jagged, erratic waveform of pressure, the initial wave bounc-
ing around inside the small enclosed hull. The pressures
were getting in, just not through the bow.
My research partner, Luke, a medical student and former
Army explosive ordnance disposal operator, carried the fi rst
charge from his truck to the shore and attached a black powder
charge to the bow of the model boat. The 283-gram charges,
like the model itself, had been built to a carefully measured 1/6
size scale. As he pulled the Tiny into the center of the pond,
long, black foam-insulated wires trailed out behind it.
I triple-checked the gauges’ signals on my screen and held
up a hand to Brad, the benevolent ATF agent who had volun-
teered to help with our tests. He bellowed the countdown and
pushed the button on the blast box to trigger. First, I saw the
plume of the geyser of water. Then I felt the pier vibrate. Last
of all, I heard the blast.
Brad yelled from shore that he could feel that charge
through the ground. What he meant was: This one was strong.
Stronger than any of our previous tests with the boat. I was too
consumed by staring at the whirring laptop to respond in any
meaningful way. I waited for the screen to display the pressure
waves from the charge.
There it was, the data from the pressure gauge tracking
across the monitor of my computer. The squiggly neon green
line—plotting pressure versus time—showed the jagged, erratic
scream of bouncing waves trapped inside the hull of the boat. It
had had sharp peaks, peaks with rapid rises—peaks that weren’t
technically shock waves but still rose to maximum in under the
two-millisecond rise speed that would hurt human beings.
We set off as many charges as we could before the sun began
to set on the pond. Blast after blast, we captured and saved
the waveforms. I was thrilled to see that the readings looked
consistent. And like the actual Hunley, the scale-model Tiny
Adapted from In the Waves by Rachel Lance, to be published in April by
Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Rachel M. Lance.
SCIENTISTS
DO NOT LIKE TO THROW
AROUND THE WORD
“PROOF.”