The first working submarine is believed by historians to have been built in 1623 by Cornelis Drebbel, who worked for King James I, perhaps most remembered by we pipe smokers as the author of A Counterblaste Against Tobacco in 1604, the same year he instituted a 4,000 percent tax increase on tobacco. James didn't like tobacco, but he was an innovator. Drebbel's submarine is said to have been an enclosed rowboat with 12 oarsmen who made a trip down the Thames, according to legend, at a depth of 15 feet. As far as we know, no further research and development of submarines continued in the immediate future.

In the Netherlands in the mid-1600s, the "Rotterdam Boat" was built to attack the British, but she failed because the propulsion system was ineffective for actually moving the boat in a direction the pilot chose.

Submarines are dangerous modes of transport, especially those built during the early development of underwater technologies. Enterprising inventors experimented and typically perished. It wasn't until the Civil War that a submersible successfully sank an enemy ship, but it was at the cost of the entire submarine crew.

That submarine was the Confederate H.L Hunley. She sank the USS Housatonic, killing five aboard the Union ship. However, in achieving that victorious battle position, 21 men died in three separate sinkings, including her developer, Horace Lawson Hunley.

Little detail is known about the development of submarines during the Civil War, because it was a program kept secret, a program run by the Confederate Secret Service, not its Navy. Submarine warfare was considered reprehensible, or at least that's what governments said about it when used by opposing governments. The North denigrated underwater warfare as unfair and cowardly, all while working on its own submarine technology. Records regarding submarine development and deployment kept by the southern military were destroyed as the war closed, because it was thought that those who participated would be more harshly punished. Accounts are therefore sparse.

King James I, perhaps most remembered by we pipe smokers as the author of A Counterblaste Against Tobacco in 1604, the same year he instituted a 4,000 percent tax increase on tobacco

The North's navy was far more robust than that of the South, and the opponents pursued submarine technology in different ways according to their particular motivations. The North wanted submarines for clearing underwater debris in harbors so they could set up and maintain blockades. The South wanted to destroy Northern ships and open those blockades.

The Confederacy started with the David steamboats, which were not entirely submersible because they had to maintain smokestacks. In 1863, the original David attacked the USS New Ironsides, damaging but not sinking her. The craft tried other attacks over the following months, but all were ineffective. Several "David" boats were built, but we know of no damage they caused, and know of their existence primarily because several were captured by the North when Charleston fell in 1865. The Hunley is the most famous of the Civil War submersibles because she completed the one and only successful underwater attack of the war.

The Hunley is interesting to those of us in the pipe community because three pipes were found in her interior after the boat was finally raised in 2000. Smoking was an impossibility in that environment, yet pipes were carried aboard, and we can surmise that they accompanied their owners because they held more personal value than that provided by the combustion of tobacco. The two previous crews of the Hunley had perished. This was extraordinarily dangerous duty and the crew understood that their survival was unsure, even unlikely, so those pipes may have been brought for the value of their comfort even without smoking.

Horace Hunley was a lawyer who personally organized and funded the development of the Hunley after two previous failed attempts at submersible crafts, the first with the Pioneer, which was scuttled in Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans to escape capture by the North, and the American Diver, which foundered in bad weather during an attack on the Union blockade in Mobile, Alabama. Hunley was a wealthy landowner in New Orleans who owned slaves and supported the South, though he never joined the military. His motivation for pursuing the invention was to help the war efforts, but also for notoriety and profit. In trying to overcome the odds of the North's 83 warships against its own 10-ship fleet, the Confederacy maintained a bounty of $50,000 (that would be $791,300 today, adjusted for inflation) for the sinking of a single Union ship. Hunley and his investors, however, were promised half of any assets captured with the help of the invention. If the submarine worked, Horace Hunley could be made very wealthy indeed.

The Hunley, which is now on display at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in Charleston, SC, is 40 feet long, four feet wide, and four-and-a half feet high, excluding the two short conning towers. She could hold nine men: eight to turn the crank that powered the propeller, and one to control ballast and dive planes and to navigate. Her interior was lit by a single candle, which also measured the oxygen left in the craft: When the candle flame dwindled, it was time to surface. A half hour was the boat's typical duration before necessarily replenishing its oxygen.

Conceived and built by riverboat captain James McClintock, engineer Bruce Watson, and Horace Hunley, the submarine was built in the Park and Lyons Machine Shop in Mobile, like her predecessor, the Pioneer, and was privately constructed at a cost of about $15,000.

During testing on the Mobile River, the Hunley, which at the time was referred to as "the fish boat," or "the fish torpedo boat," dragged a floating mine behind and dove under her target of a coal barge towed into the river for that purpose. The mine was dragged into the barge successfully and the Hunley was shipped by train to Charleston, which was under daily bombardment by the Union fleet.

James McClintock was the commander during testing, but the Confederacy grew dissatisfied with his slow and non-aggressive approach and seized the boat for temporary command and more control, placing her in the hands of John Payne, a Navy lieutenant, who chose a crew from volunteers and began training.

On August 29, 1863, during a training run, Payne unintentionally engaged the dive planes when the boat's hatches were still open, flooding the craft. He and two others managed to escape, but the other members of the eight-man crew drowned.

The Hunley is interesting to those of us in the pipe community because three pipes were found in her interior when the boat was finally raised in 2000

The Hunley was located and salvaged after a few days, and the Army put Horace Hunley in command because of his experience with the building of the submarine, despite his having no piloting experience. During a practice run on October 15, the boat dove under the CSS Indian Chief and did not resurface, losing all hands.

Again the craft was salvaged, and was renamed the Hunley in honor of Horace and placed under the command of First Lt. George Dixon, who enlisted another crew, choosing the best men from a large contingent of volunteers who seemed undismayed by the boat's record.

By February, 1864, they were ready to engage the enemy. They had discarded the strategy of dragging a floating mine behind the boat because of the danger of it drifting into the Hunley, and replaced its delivery mode with a 16-foot wooden spar on the forward end of the boat, at the end of which it was attached, designed so that it could be rammed into an enemy vessel below the water line with a barb and ignited by an attached line as the submarine backed away.

Dixon chose the closest ship, the USS Housatonic, a sloop of war, which was about a mile and a half away. He'd been ordered to keep the Hunley on the surface of the water, though she was mostly submerged, but even so it was nighttime, and when the Housatonic finally saw the approaching vessel, she could not bring large armaments to bear and fired rifles, the bullets ricocheting harmlessly off the iron hull.

The Hunley submerged and made contact, and the 135 pounds of gunpowder in her mine exploded, sinking the Housatonic in minutes. The Hunley did not resurface and was not seen again for 136 years.

She was certainly searched for. P.T. Barnum offered a $100,000 bounty to anyone who could find her, hoping to display her for the public, but the reward went unclaimed. It wasn't until 1995 that the wreck was discovered almost 100 yards away from the site of the sinking of the Housatonic.

She may have been first discovered in 1970, by E. Lee Spence, president of the Sea Search Society, who reported the find, but was not granted ownership by the courts. He included the location in his book, Treasures of the Confederate Coast. Official discovery was in 1995, by author Clive Cussler and the group he founded, the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), after searching for 15 years. She was under sediment and found by a magnetometer in 30 feet of water, and the craft was intact.

Raising the Hunley was an engineering challenge. Weight distribution during the raising would be essential lest the 20-ton submarine break apart. The site had to be excavated to clear the silt, and a large overhead truss was constructed, from which 30 slings depended, and divers dug tunnels under the craft to position those slings, with a load-monitoring device attached to each sling. Each individual sling, once positioned, was inflated with foam to conform to the shape of the hull.

The Hunley submerged and made contact, and the 135 pounds of gunpowder in her mine exploded, sinking the Housatonic in minutes.

At last the craft was brought to the surface on August 8, 2000, placed onto a transport barge and taken to the Warren Lasch Conservation Center for stabilization, where a lab had been specially constructed for the purpose.

It took years before the interior could be thoroughly examined, but an interesting find was that all of the crew were still at their stations, indicating that no attempt at escape had been made. It was determined that the resulting shock wave of the explosion had ruptured the crew's lungs. Underwater explosions and their shock waves had not been studied at the time of engagement, and the Hunley had an exterior only a half inch thick. The crew never knew what killed them, and death was almost instantaneous.

Artifacts were found. The most famous is a $20 gold piece owned by George Dixon, the commander. That coin had deflected a bullet and saved his life during the Battle of Shiloh, and he'd had it inscribed with the words, "My Life Preserver." A diamond ring and gold brooch were also found at Dixon's station, probably carried in his vest pocket. Lt. Dixon was found to have tobacco stained teeth, but without wear, so historians have determined that his most likely preferred form of consumption was chewing tobacco or smoking cigars.

Buttons, a canteen, shoes, an oil can, a hammer, a candle, and a gold pocket watch were also recovered. But most important for our interests, smoking pipes were among the debris.

The owner of one was most likely C. Lumpkin, and his remains were particularly noted because he had a notch worn in his teeth for clenching a pipe, though others of the crew also had pipe notches. The pipe was found near his body. A photo is available in a slide show of artifacts here (Slide #15).

Lumpkin was among the older men on board, somewhere between 37 and 44 and about 5'10" tall, according to researchers. He had indications of healed broken bones, including his nose, cheek and foot, and a hard life was indicated. Besides his pipe, he was found with a sewing kit and a pocket knife. He is the most likely seaman to have been responsible for arming the explosive device.

Another crew member is known only as Miller. He was a relatively recent immigrant from Europe, as indicated by carbon isotope analysis, and was 40-45 years old. He too had healed fractures indicating a hard life. The clay pipe found in the craft is thought to have belonged to him, and his teeth indicated heavy tobacco use.

Joseph Ridgaway was found with his pipe, his slouch hat, and a pencil, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command's publication, H.L. Hunley: Recovery Operations,. Three of the eight crewmen chose to carry pipes aboard a craft in which they knew they could not smoke.

Three men carried pipes with them on a mission with a low likelihood of survival, and those of us who know the comfort of a pipe find little mystery in that fact. Those men would have wanted their most precious possessions with them, those items that carried the most importance and provided emotional benefit. Courageous adventurers through history have often kept a pipe close to them in times of extraordinary peril, and our own country's history confirms the affection that pipe smokers worldwide hold for the smoking instruments that enhance their lives and offer comfort in times of danger.

References:

American Civil War Story

Military Factory

The Encyclopedia of Alabama

Hunley.org: The Search And Recovery

Hunley.org: C. Lumpkin

H.L. Hunley: Recovery Operations, Robert S. Neyland and Heather G. Brown