H.L. Hunley mystery in a new light by Zuzana Zelenakova

At first, a bit of a history insight into the matter we are going to talk about is needed. H.L.Hunley was a submarine of Confederate States of America and it was the first submarine to sink an enemy warship. But after the successful attack in 1864 during the Civil War which took place in Charleston harbor it disappeared, apparently sank, together with its 8 crewmen. The wreck was recovered in 2000. It has always been a mystery why the submarine failed to return safely. At the Warren Lasch Conservation Center the team of international scientists has been working under the Naval Historical Center at conserving the sub and trying to solve the mystery of its disappearance. And it seems recently they have come across an important discovery. They reported the vessel´s crew had not set the pump to remove water from the crew compartment, which might mean it was not flooded. "It now really starts to point to a lack of oxygen making [the crew] unconscious," the chairman of the South Carolina Hunley Commission said. "They may have been cranking and moving and it was a miscalculation as to how much oxygen they had." But even the latest conclusions are not clear enough. "Can we definitely say they weren't pumping like mad to get water out of the tanks? No we cannot," said archeologist Maria Jacobsen. "I'm not really at a point where I think we should really be talking about what these guys were doing at the very end because we simply don't know all the valve settings." Only one thing is for sure – that the valve that could remove the water from the crew compartment was closed. The eight Hunley crewmen still remain the only ones to know the truth. Now they rest in Charleston´s Magnolia Cemetery where they were interred in 2004 with full military honors.


related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081018/ap_on_re_us/confederate_submarine;_ylt=Am07.7964Baq1KO2eiQuI72s0NUE

by Zuzana Zelenakova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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