Ghosts & Gunships: Lost Submarines of the Civil w*r (2025)

[bunniefuu]

(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 w*r 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 w*r'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 g*ns.

Initially, the Monitor was

kind of this c*ck, 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 w*r.

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 expl*sives 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

w*r 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 g*n 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. g*ns.

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 g*ns in

broadside and deck g*ns, pivot g*ns,

but the turret could fire in any direction.

Two g*ns -

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 g*n 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 w*r 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, k*lling 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 expl*sive 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 k*lled, 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 w*r

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 g*n 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 g*n 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 g*n 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 g*n 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 g*n 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 g*n, their salts and oils

and things on their hands, over

time those g*ns 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 g*n 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 g*n 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 w*r

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 w*r 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, a*tillery, 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 expl*si*n?

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

expl*si*n 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

expl*sive 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 expl*si*n.

Did they do as some of the witnesses said

backed up, disappeared into

the dark after the expl*si*n?

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 w*r.

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.