Day one of the 2013 Teaching American History Grant Trip

I’ve been up since 2:30 am this morning.  We hit the airport in Denver by 3:30.  The good thing about that horrible time of the night is that there was no waiting at security!

We flew first to Chicago and then transferred flights and ended up here in Charleston, South Carolina.  Thirty teachers plus our two leaders made it through baggage claim (no one lost anything!) and then onto the big brown tour bus that will be our transportation for the next 11 days.
Our first stop – the SS H.L. Hunley.  I actually knew very little about the Hunley.  What cool history it is!
The Hunley is basically the first submarine used in combat.  It was built in 1862.  It is wrought iron and cast iron plates that are riveted together and caulked.  They aren’t sure exactly what it was caulked with, they are researching the Hunley itself to discover that, (I’ll tell you more about that in a minute).

The submarine is chain driven, like a bicycle, and the power came from the men sitting side by side, using their arms to crank a long iron bar that moved the chain.  Seven men manned the crank, and the captain stood at one end, looking out a tiny porthole, steering.  They also had a compass, but how well a compass worked inside a cast iron tube-like ship is a little ify.

Here I am with Anna Bechtel, fourth grade teacher, inside a model of the Hunley. It was really hard to move the crank.

To make the submarine go under water, they opened a valve and allowed water to come in to the bow and stern sections of the craft.  To rise back to the top, they used a hand pump to pump the water out again.  While it was under water, there were two snorkel tubes that could be used to supply oxygen to the men.  They could go about 4 knots an hour while under water. (Gold star for a 5^th grader who can give me feedback about how fast that is in miles per hour!)

The Hunley actually sank three times, killing a total of 21 men.  The last time it sunk is the most exciting.  The Hunley was equipped with a ram, kind of like an iron arm sticking out the front that was designed as its weapon.  The idea as that the ship would submerge, then sneak up on another ship under water.  It would ram into the bottom of the unsuspecting ship and put a hole in its hull.  That’s not all, though.  The end of the ram had a torpedo on it that had 135 pounds of black powder in it, so not only would they ram the ship, but they then could detonate the powder and blow it up!

They were successful in ramming and blowing up a huge ship called the Housitania, but unfortunately, something went wrong after they swank the Housitania and the Hunley never came up.

Here’s what it would have looked like with the men sitting inside.

Here’s where it gets interesting…The Hunley rested under the water for 136 years before an author named Clive Cussler and a group that he started to find shipwrecks found her.  A group of people brought her up in 2011 and have been studying her and restoring and preserving her ever since. When they started working on her, they found the men who died inside her.  They were just skeletons with clothes on, but in such a tight little space, they were actually in the Hunely close to how they were sitting when they died.  They have done facial reconstructions on the men’s skulls, and have a pretty good idea of what each man looked like.  Historians and archeologists are working on the Hunley trying to find out why she sunk.

These are reconstructions of four of the men on the Hunley. Who knew that history can also be archeology and forensics as well.

This has been a really interesting way to start the trip!