[TXnMA]

Thoughtful answer! I completely agree.

Maneuvering past that crank must have been quite an obstacle course. I've always assumed the center bench position was FILO...

For completeness: in the first sinking (partial crew, alongside [?Ft. Johnson?] dock, both hatches open, swamped by wake of passing vessel) bodies were clustered around both hatches. IIRC, one crewman [?Haskell?] escaped via the front conning tower, but the hatch trapped his leg and dragged him down quite a ways, before he finally freed himself...

Assuming those hatch covers are about 1.5 sq ft in area, that means that every foot of submersion adds about 100 lbs of force required to open one of them...

[PUGACHEV]

The cut away model at the Hunley display is full size, and IIRC the seat for the crank is a six inch shelf at about the 10 o'clock position on the round hull. The crank pins are offset about 120 degrees from each other. Because the the pin has to be within arm's length from each man at the furthest point in its rotation, the is no room for one man to move past another. It must have been difficult to get in or out under the best of circumstances, and impossible in an emergency.

As you walk into the display area, there is a cabinet with eight or ten heads on two shelves,forensic reproduction made from skulls of the crew. Below each severed head is a little bio. It's interesting how most of the crew were ordinary people, and some of them recent immigrants, and not native born southerners.