Secrets of the sea
03/10/02By ROY HOFFMAN
Writer in Residence
CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Shea McLean was born down in Alabama, in Mobile, on Feb. 17, 1964 -- one century to the day after eight Confederate sailors disappeared in Charleston Harbor on the submarine H.L. Hunley. McLean, a marine archaeologist, finds that coincidence slightly eerie.
"Some re-enactors pointed out the dates to me," says McLean, 38, a tall, dark-haired man who looks, ironically, a little like Armande Assante, who played Mobile riverboat engineer George E. Dixon, the Hunley captain, in a television movie about the submarine. "They say I was meant to be on this project."
Behind McLean as he speaks is the Hunley itself -- the 40-foot-long, 39-ton concatenation of steel drums, air bellow and crankshaft that sank the USS Housatonic with a spar torpedo before the submarine itself plunged to the bottom.
For 136 years, the Hunley lay buried in silt before being hauled up on Aug. 8, 2000, its crew a grim party of skeletons. The submarine was moved to a newly outfitted research laboratory at the old Charleston Navy Yard.
McLean, who joined the Hunley dive team in July 2000, and was kept on to do conservation work after the recovery, has loved the sea since his boyhood.
Although he grew up in Midtown, near Ladd Stadium, stories from the water were never far away, thanks to his father, Wayne, a steamship agent, and his great-grandmother, Annie Jemison, who recounted to a rapt young Shea the exploits of her uncles who had died in the Battle of Mobile Bay.
After graduating from McGill-Toolen High and the University of South Alabama, McLean completed graduate work in marine archaeology at Florida State University in Tallahassee. His thesis was on Civil War wrecks in Mobile Bay.
A veteran of salvage expeditions ranging from American ironclads to Spanish galleons, McLean had been diving off the Florida coast, helping recover rocket boosters for NASA, when he got the call from Clive Cussler, the adventurer who had located the Hunley. McLean says he had worked in earlier years with Cussler's team in searching for the lost Confederate sub Pioneer II in Mobile Bay, and conducting a remote sensing survey for the Bellone, a ship intended for Pierre LeMoyne Seiur de Bienville, who founded Mobile in 1702.
Enlisted by Hunley project director Robert Neyland, McLean soon found himself four miles out in Charleston Harbor, donning a polymer diving helmet, hooking up the air hose, and descending 30 feet beneath the choppy waves.
For weeks on end, he worked in near-darkness, whether the hour was morning or night.
"We divers never saw the submarine. Underwater, there was only 7 inches of visibility," he says. Even so, "I felt the Hunley from one end to another. I knew it like a blind man did."
At the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, the Hunley lurks like a giant sea creature strapped motionless in its tank. Covered with barnacles and pieces of shell, it is turned partially on its side, its three-blade propeller like a dark fin. Part of its back is peeled away, revealing a hollow hull.
When the Hunley was pulled from the water, that hull was packed with silt and sand, encasing the remains of the sailors.
McLean is in awe of this creation -- the design of an underwater vessel, he believes, years ahead of its time. He expresses his pride in the submarine having been built in Mobile, at the Park & Lyons Machine Shop on Water Street, where George E. Dixon was employed in the fabrication of the submarine.
He also marvels at how the eight men, under Dixon's command, pushed out into Charleston Harbor that February evening, 1864.
Dixon, says McLean, is the most vivid to him of the crew. "We know the most about him," he explains. Among other attributes, he says of the Civil War captain, "Dixon was a dandy."
A famous, romantic story about Dixon deals with a $20 gold piece given to him by a girl in Mobile, Queenie Bennett, said to be Dixon's fiancee. The coin, according to lore, stopped a bullet from entering Dixon's groin at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, and was deep in Dixon's pocket when he took command of the Hunley nearly two years later.
Even though the conservation project has, indeed, turned up a gold coin in the Hunley, McLean is skeptical of the Dixon-Bennett romantic tale. "Queenie would have only been 13 at the time of Shiloh," McLean says, "when she gave the coin to Dixon -- a much older man." He finds implausible that they were engaged.
But there is no doubting the tragedy of the Hunley's sortie. On a steel beam next to the observation tank is a plaque with the names of the sailors superimposed over a cross and the words, "In Remembrance, Feb. 17, 1864."
As Paul Mardikian, the project's senior conservator, explains, the Hunley was lost underwater in such a way as to create a perfect archaeological site, a sealed world, much like the Roman city of Pompeii that was buried beneath the lava of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The Hunley, says Mardikian, "is not only a shipwreck. It's a grave site."
On the night of Feb. 17, 1864, when the men squeezed into the 3-foot-high Hunley, it was their shoes, above all else, that would endure with their imprint.
At the Conservation Center, Ebba Samuelson, a specialist in leather restoration, examines the dead men's shoes patiently, using a dentascope and tweezers to extricate grains of silt, sand and bone.
To date, says Samuelson, she has picked over seven shoes. Samuelson, who is from Sweden, is working on the Hunley project as part of a graduate program at the University of Finland.
As with every aspect of the Hunley project, Samuelson's work with each shoe requires a great deal of preparation.
First, she looks at X-rays and CAT-scans of the leather brogans.
In one image she shares with a visitor, the bones of a sailor's foot are starkly visible.
"You can tell a lot about a man from his shoe," she says, peering down into a shoe, seeing where the shape of a long-lost foot has left a impression on the leather.
As she works and talks, Samuelson reaches into the shoe with her tweezers and gently, meticulously, lifts out what looks like a white pebble. She puts it into a small jar and seals it.
"It's part of an ankle bone," she says.
Among others who examine the Hunley remains are Doug Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution, and Dr. J.C. Upshaw Downs, medical examiner for the state of Alabama.
When Samuelson takes a break, she returns to her desk in a corner of the Conservation Center laboratory. Pinned on the wall there is a postcard with a picture of an 1886 Van Gogh painting -- of weathered, old shoes.
Although the CSS Alabama was a Confederate raider, built in England, and the CSS Hunley a submarine, built in Mobile, they share a historical footnote. Both were commanded by men with Mobile ties.
The Alabama's Adm. Raphael Semmes practiced law in Mobile -- his retirement home is on lower Government Street -- and died in Point Clear.
At the Museum of the City of Mobile there is a current exhibition on the CSS Alabama. Part of that exhibition is the replica of a cannon from the warship.
That replica was made by Mardikian, who, before he became Hunley senior conservator, helped to excavate the CSS Alabama. The Confederate warship sank off the coast of France after a sea battle with the USS Kearsarge in June 1864.
"The cannons follow me," jokes Mardikian, who has received another cannon from the CSS Alabama, sent to the Warren Lasch Center for his care.
With McLean assisting him--and with their visitor looking on -- Mardikian oversees the lifting of the two-ton cannon from a tub of water. While the cannon is held aloft in a sling, Mardikian takes a long, thin rod and works it carefully down into the barrel packed with hard mud, rust and sea shells.
He slips the rod out, leans over and peers into the mouth. He wonders, he explains, whether a cannon ball still sits inside.
He inserts the rod again.
Mardikian, a jovial man with a comic turn, says that, were the rod to strike a ball, and somehow explode it, he would be the last casualty of the Civil War.
A smell arises -- the odor of oxidizing iron, Mardikian explains. "We call it," he says with his French-accented English, "'Eau de cannon ball.'"
But this cannon is not loaded, he discovers, and so he takes a water hose and pushes it in. The sediment that flows out is captured in a sieve, for later investigation.
"Octopus," says Mardikian, "like to find coins and human remains and hide them inside."
At dusk, along the battery in downtown Charleston, one can walk along and see magnificent old houses, listen to the sound of carriages, look out at Charleston Harbor and imagine the Hunley sliding into the water that winter's night nearly a century-and-a-half ago. Beneath the forward hatch, leading the expedition, Dixon was to shine a blue lantern to shore when the mission was complete.
Dixon's light never flashed.
Last year, in darkness, Shea McLean waited with the other workers on the salvage ship Karlissa B. for the Hunley to be raised by a crane.
McLean tells the story of that night. After weeks of work -- setting straps around the sunken submarine, packing foam bags next to the straps, securing the straps to a truss -- the moment had come.
His hand was swollen -- "I'd gotten tangled up with a man o' war on an earlier dive," he says -- but his spirits were good.
He knew the hazards. During the 1960s near Vicksburg, Miss., for example, a Civil War ironclad had been excavated, the Cairo, but had snapped into pieces when it was lifted.
The Hunley broke the water.
The truss kept it in place; the straps held.
It remained intact.
The Hunley had gone to the bottom of the sea with men panicking and praying and weeping, no doubt.
On the night it reappeared, McLean shone a light -- a blue light -- to signal success, and everyone cheered.
