LATEST MOVE FOR THE HUNLEY, THE LUCKY COIN SUBMARINE

After sitting in the same spot for 10 years, the H.L. Hunley is finally ready to move. Well, a few feet anyway. This summer, the team at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center will take the 19th century submarine out of the lift cradle that's held it since 2000 and set it upright for the first time since 1864. It sounds pretty simple, but it's a significant step in the project — and an ordeal that has taken nearly as long as it took to recover the sub from the ocean floor.

The rotation, as the scientists call it, will set into motion the final phase of the sub's rehabilitation — and may answer lingering questions about its disappearance in the dark days of the Civil War. People have waited a long time for those answers, but the crew at the Lasch lab has moved cautiously because, well, they don't want to drop it.

The Hunley became the first successful combat submarine on Feb. 17, 1864, when it sank the USS Housatonic, a Union blockade ship. Shortly after the attack, the Hunley disappeared. No one knows why. This project is in part meant to prepare the sub for display in a museum, and in part to fill in the blanks in history.

Paul Mardikian, the senior conservator on the project, said it will take a year to completely remove all the concretion from the 40-foot sub. "No one has ever seen the sub like that," Mardikian said. In the meantime, the crew continues to restore the hundreds of artifacts found inside the Hunley. Mardikian just finished work on binoculars that belonged to the sub's captain, George E. Dixon. They look more like theater glasses than modern binoculars. "They are Hunley-sized," Mardikian notes. "Small submarine, small binoculars."

To read the complete article, see: Scientists finally ready to right the Hunley (www.thestate.com/2011/03/21/1744818/scientists-finally-ready-to-right.html)

To read an earlier E-SYlum article, see: UPDATE ON THE HUNLEY, THE LUCKY COIN SUBMARINE (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v13n32a16.html)

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