Hey Civil War buffs..this is kinda cool. - Beyond Tiki

D DawnTiki Tiki Socialite next stop Hulaville! Joined: Sep 01, 2002 Posts: 1679	D DawnTiki Posted posted on Tue, Jun 22, 2004 6:44 PM Taken from this months Smithsonian.... :tiki: Raised From The Deep By examining the remains of men who died 140 years ago aboard a Civil War submarine a Smithsonian anthropologist is determining their identities On the evening of February 17, 1864, eight Confederate sailors wriggled through the narrow hatch of the H. L. Hunley, a 40-foot-long submarine made from plates of iron. The men knew the risks of their top-secret mission. The year before, the Hunley's two training exercises had both ended in disaster, killing 13 men. But the unrelenting Union naval blockade was strangling Charleston, South Carolina, and so a desperate plan called for the sub to strike at a federal warship anchored in the harbor. A 25-year-old lieutenant named George Dixon commanded a volunteer crew of seven whose names were never recorded. They sat crowded shoulder to shoulder on a bench in the three-and-a-half-foot-wide, four-foot-high space and turned an iron crankshaft to power the vessel's propeller. Four miles from shore, the Hunley came upon its quarry, the sloop USS Housatonic. Dixon sent the Hunley forward and rammed the Union ship with a barbed, 135-pound explosive affixed to a spar protruding from the sub's bow. Minutes later, a blast tore away the Housatonic's aft section and the ship sank. Observers onshore saw the Hunley hoist the blue lantern that would signal the mission's success—the first sinking of an enemy ship by a submarine in wartime. But then the submarine also sank, killing all aboard. It would lay in the thick black silt of Charleston Harbor for 136 years, until underwater archaeologists recovered it in August 2000. The sub now rests at the Friends of the Hunley's conservation center in north Charleston, where Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, is helping to solve the historic action's abiding mysteries: Who were the Confederate sailors and why did the vessel sink? Working with archaeologists, Owsley created a three-dimensional digital map of the sailors' remains, which were embedded in fine silt that partially preserved bits of clothing and bodily tissues, from bones to brain matter. Owsley has had wide experience with such evidence. He has examined the 10,000-year-old skeletons of Paleoamericans and the remains of Europeans killed in 1992 and left in mass graves during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. And he often analyzes victims of crime for law-enforcement authorities. "I'm looking for the answers to what killed them in their bones," he says. Four of the Hunley sailors, he concluded, were frequent smokers; their teeth had been worn away by pipe stems. Another man could have been a barroom brawler, as indicated by a fractured nose and right cheekbone. Conventional wisdom held that these submariners were young and not very tall, but Owsley has shown that three men were arthritic and in their early 40s and one was 6-foot-1. After analyzing the composition of the sailors' teeth, which contain distinctive chemical signatures of the foods they ate, Owsley concluded that four of the men were Americans, who ate a predominantly corn-based diet, while the other four must have come originally from Europe, where they ate wheat, barley and rye. The Hunley project's forensic genealogist, Linda Abrams, combed through census records and other Civil War-era public documents and came up with several candidates. Owsley attempted to match DNA from the Confederate sailors' remains with that of relatives identified by Abrams; he even arranged to exhume several bodies to obtain a source of DNA. Owsley says he's certain about the names of the four American-born sailors: Dixon; Frank Collins, 26, of Virginia; Joseph Ridgaway, 30, of Maryland; and James A. Wicks, 45, of North Carolina. The European-born sailors are proving more of a challenge to identify. This past April, 140 years after the Hunley foundered, the bodies of its crew received a full military burial at Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery. As for the final moments aboard the submarine, Owsley and others are still trying to piece together what might have occurred. "The remains show no evidence of physical trauma that could come from a scramble to exit the submarine," he says. "So whatever happened, they died at their stations." —John F. Ross [ Edited by: DawnTiki on 2004-06-22 18:45 ]

Taken from this months Smithsonian.... :tiki:
Raised From The Deep

By examining the remains of men who died 140 years ago aboard a Civil War submarine a Smithsonian anthropologist is determining their identities

On the evening of February 17, 1864, eight Confederate sailors wriggled through the narrow hatch of the H. L. Hunley, a 40-foot-long submarine made from plates of iron. The men knew the risks of their top-secret mission. The year before, the Hunley's two training exercises had both ended in disaster, killing 13 men. But the unrelenting Union naval blockade was strangling Charleston, South Carolina, and so a desperate plan called for the sub to strike at a federal warship anchored in the harbor.

A 25-year-old lieutenant named George Dixon commanded a volunteer crew of seven whose names were never recorded. They sat crowded shoulder to shoulder on a bench in the three-and-a-half-foot-wide, four-foot-high space and turned an iron crankshaft to power the vessel's propeller. Four miles from shore, the Hunley came upon its quarry, the sloop USS Housatonic.

Dixon sent the Hunley forward and rammed the Union ship with a barbed, 135-pound explosive affixed to a spar protruding from the sub's bow. Minutes later, a blast tore away the Housatonic's aft section and the ship sank. Observers onshore saw the Hunley hoist the blue lantern that would signal the mission's success—the first sinking of an enemy ship by a submarine in wartime. But then the submarine also sank, killing all aboard.

It would lay in the thick black silt of Charleston Harbor for 136 years, until underwater archaeologists recovered it in August 2000. The sub now rests at the Friends of the Hunley's conservation center in north Charleston, where Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, is helping to solve the historic action's abiding mysteries: Who were the Confederate sailors and why did the vessel sink?

Working with archaeologists, Owsley created a three-dimensional digital map of the sailors' remains, which were embedded in fine silt that partially preserved bits of clothing and bodily tissues, from bones to brain matter. Owsley has had wide experience with such evidence. He has examined the 10,000-year-old skeletons of Paleoamericans and the remains of Europeans killed in 1992 and left in mass graves during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. And he often analyzes victims of crime for law-enforcement authorities. "I'm looking for the answers to what killed them in their bones," he says.

Four of the Hunley sailors, he concluded, were frequent smokers; their teeth had been worn away by pipe stems. Another man could have been a barroom brawler, as indicated by a fractured nose and right cheekbone. Conventional wisdom held that these submariners were young and not very tall, but Owsley has shown that three men were arthritic and in their early 40s and one was 6-foot-1. After analyzing the composition of the sailors' teeth, which contain distinctive chemical signatures of the foods they ate, Owsley concluded that four of the men were Americans, who ate a predominantly corn-based diet, while the other four must have come originally from Europe, where they ate wheat, barley and rye.

The Hunley project's forensic genealogist, Linda Abrams, combed through census records and other Civil War-era public documents and came up with several candidates. Owsley attempted to match DNA from the Confederate sailors' remains with that of relatives identified by Abrams; he even arranged to exhume several bodies to obtain a source of DNA. Owsley says he's certain about the names of the four American-born sailors: Dixon; Frank Collins, 26, of Virginia; Joseph Ridgaway, 30, of Maryland; and James A. Wicks, 45, of North Carolina. The European-born sailors are proving more of a challenge to identify. This past April, 140 years after the Hunley foundered, the bodies of its crew received a full military burial at Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery.

As for the final moments aboard the submarine, Owsley and others are still trying to piece together what might have occurred. "The remains show no evidence of physical trauma that could come from a scramble to exit the submarine," he says. "So whatever happened, they died at their stations."

—John F. Ross

[ Edited by: DawnTiki on 2004-06-22 18:45 ]

Post #97863 by DawnTiki on Tue, Jun 22, 2004 6:44 PM