In the Waves: My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine

Lance, a biomedical engineering researcher at Duke University, debuts with a thorough and persuasive account of her efforts to solve the mystery surrounding the February 1864 sinking of the Confederate submarine HL Hunley off the coast of South Carolina. Tasked with breaking the Union blockade of Charleston, the Hunley detonated its spar torpedo (a stationary bomb attached to the end of a long pole) against the hull of the USS Housatonic, becoming the first submarine to sink an enemy warship in combat. But the Hunley disappeared immediately after the explosion. When it was finally recovered from Charleston Harbor in 2000, it didn’t appear to have been significantly damaged in the attack and each of its eight crewmembers “was still seated peacefully at his station.” Lance offers a blow-by-blow account of “what it took to work through the puzzle” of the Hunley: recruiting colleagues with expertise in hyperbaric medicine, painstakingly reassembling the ingredients of the Hunley’s torpedo, exploring the mechanics of how the device was delivered, and testing through trial-and-error a theory that the crew perished in a shock wave. Readers without an engineering background may struggle through Lance’s number crunching, but she has a firm command of both the scientific and historical subject matter and writes with flair. Her richly detailed account appears to definitively solve this Civil War–era mystery.[em] (Apr.) [/em]