The Hunley was the third submarine financed by her namesake, Horace Lawson Hunley, and designed by shipbuilder James McClintock. Their first effort, the Pioneer, was scuttled in New Orleans ahead of advancing Union forces. Their second, the American Diver, was lost in Mobile Bay. The Hunley herself was built in Mobile, Alabama, and launched in July 1863. Contrary to an enduring legend that she was fashioned from a cast-off steam boiler, the submarine was purpose-built -- sleek and modern-looking, about forty feet long, with a hull roughly four feet three inches in diameter. She carried a crew of eight: seven men to crank the hand-driven propeller and one to steer. At top speed, she could manage four knots. Ballast tanks at each end could be flooded or pumped dry by hand. Iron weights bolted to the underside of the hull could be dropped in an emergency by unscrewing bolts from inside. After a successful demonstration attack on a coal flatboat in Mobile Bay under the supervision of Confederate Admiral Franklin Buchanan, the submarine was shipped by rail to Charleston, South Carolina, on August 12, 1863.

The Hunley killed her own crews before she ever engaged the enemy. On August 29, 1863, Lieutenant John A. Payne accidentally stepped on the diving plane lever while the submarine was running on the surface with a hatch open. Five men drowned; Payne and two others escaped. The Confederate Army took direct control under General P. G. T. Beauregard, with Lieutenant Dixon placed in command. On October 15, 1863, during a mock attack exercise, the Hunley failed to surface. All eight crewmen died, including Horace Hunley himself, who had joined the crew for the drill. The submarine was salvaged both times and returned to service. Thirteen men dead before the vessel had faced an enemy -- and still, a third crew volunteered. These were men from Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Germany, Denmark, and the British Isles, identified decades later through forensic analysis of their teeth and bones, DNA testing, and painstaking archival research across multiple countries.

The Hunley's weapon was a spar torpedo -- a copper cylinder packed with black powder, mounted on an iron pipe angled downward from her bow. General Beauregard had ordered that after the second sinking, the submarine was never again to attack while submerged. On the night of February 17, 1864, Dixon and his crew cranked their way through the dark harbor toward the USS Housatonic, a 1,240-ton Union sloop-of-war on blockade duty. The torpedo struck the Housatonic's hull and detonated. The warship sank in three minutes, becoming the first vessel in history to be sunk by a combat submarine. A lookout on the Housatonic reported seeing a "blue light" on the water after the attack -- a pyrotechnic signal, not a lantern. The commander of Battery Marshall on Sullivan's Island reported receiving the Hunley's prearranged signals indicating she was returning to base. She never arrived.

The Hunley lay lost for over 130 years. Underwater archaeologist E. Lee Spence reportedly located the wreck in 1970, and the site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. In 1995, a NUMA dive team led by Ralph Wilbanks verified the wreck's location. On August 8, 2000, a crane hoisted the submarine from the Atlantic seabed for the first time in 136 years, watched by a cheering crowd. Inside, scientists found the crew seated at their stations, undisturbed. No signs of skeletal trauma. The keel blocks -- emergency ballast releases -- had never been dropped. The bilge pump had never been engaged. A team of blast trauma specialists from Duke University concluded that the explosion of the Hunley's own torpedo, detonated at close range, sent a lethal shockwave through the submarine's thin iron hull, killing the entire crew instantly. They died at the moment of their victory, never knowing they had changed naval warfare forever.

On April 17, 2004, the crew of the Hunley was buried at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, 140 years after their final mission. Tens of thousands attended the funeral procession, including six thousand reenactors and four thousand civilians in period clothing. Color guards from all five branches of the U.S. armed forces marched in modern uniforms alongside the Confederate honor guard. The Hunley herself rests in a specially designed conservation tank at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center on the former Charleston Navy Yard in North Charleston. Among the artifacts recovered: Dixon's misshapen gold coin, his compass, and the personal effects of men whose identities had been mysteries for a century and a half -- a Danish sailor named Johan Frederik Carlsen who deserted a merchant ship in Charleston Harbor in 1861, a Virginian named Frank Collins, and the others who climbed into an iron coffin and cranked themselves into history.