After 15 years of painstaking restoration, scientists say they are on the brink of solving what sank the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley – the first sub in history to wreck an enemy warship.
Considered the Confederacy's stealth weapon during the Civil War, the hand-cranked Hunley sank the Union warship Housatonic in winter 1864 and then disappeared with all eight Confederate sailors inside. Its remains were discovered in 1995 in waters off South Carolina and five later it was raised to a conservation lab. Now with about 70per cent of the hull cleaned of heavy rust, Paul Mardikian, a senior conservator on the Hunley project, says that crucial clues have been unearthed but 'it's too early to talk about it yet.'
He added: 'It's like unwrapping a Christmas gift after 15 years. We have been wanting to do this for many years now. We have a submarine that is encrypted. It's like an Enigma machine.'
He said the clues will be studied closely as scientists finally piece together what happened to the 40-foot submarine that night decades ago.
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.