The CSS H. L. Hunley became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy vessel on 17 February 1864. Today, the vessel has helped set another precedent in an unusual confluence of history, archaeology, and art. Since the sunken submarine was raised from the bottom of the ocean off the coast of South Carolina in 2000, the Hunley has yielded a treasure trove of artifacts as well as the bones of her eight Confederate crewmen who paid the ultimate price for making history. Those discoveries have come together in what experts describe as the first accurate image depicting the Hunley as well as her crew: The Final Mission. It is the latest painting by Long Island historical artist Mort Künstler, who specializes in the Civil War and has been named official artist of the Hunley preservation project in South Carolina.
There was a remarkably accurate painting made of the sub by Conrad Wise Chapman, who saw her during the war, and there have been many paintings done since then. No one, however, got all the details right, historians say, because no artist ever saw all of the items carried on the final voyage or the crew, and there are no known photographs of the men who were on board.
What particularly sets the Künstler work apart is that the crew was painted based on forensic archaeology recreations of their faces by a team led by Doug Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The team worked with the skulls recovered in the Hunley and built them up with clay to represent the missing flesh. Künstler also included every artifact removed from the silt inside the Hunley in his painting, with one exception: the gold coin good luck charm carried by the mission commander.
"Mort's goal is to make the painting as accurate as possible," said Robert Neyland, chief underwater archaeologist at the U.S. Naval Historical Center in Washington and the director for the Hunley recovery and preservation project. "I can't think of any other painting where people have actually gone back and used archaeological information to create it."
The painting showing the submarine with most of her crew on the adjacent dock is expected eventually to be displayed with the Hunley. In the meantime, to help pay for the preservation work, prints will be signed by the artist in Charleston during the weekend of 17-18 April when the painting will be officially unveiled and an elaborate funeral will be held for the interment of the crew's remains.
The Hunley's crew made history by hand cranking her propeller to carry the iron sub from Charleston Harbor to the Union sloop-of-war Housatonic. They rammed the metal spar mounted on the sub's bow into the wooden warship, attaching a 135-pound torpedo. As the Hunley backed away, an explosion sent the Federal ship to the bottom with five of her sailors. The Hunley surfaced long enough for the crew to signal their success to shore with a blue light. The Hunley then disappeared without a trace until she was discovered intact in 1995 by author Clive Cussler.
The head of the South Carolina commission overseeing the preservation of the Hunley, Glenn McConnell, President Pro Tempore of the State Senate, said during a visit to Charleston last year, "I took Mort to see the Hunley and then I took him out to the site where the Hunley departed from and then took him to the [planned] burial site. Once he saw the breadth of the project, he told me, 'This is something I have to paint.'"
"It's exciting because I haven't done a reconstruction of a boat from scratch like this before," Künstler said. "It's challenging and the lighting effects are challenging, too, with the moonlight, lantern light upon the dock, and candlelight coming from the sub."
After seeing the finished painting, McConnell said, "I think he has captured both the reality and the feeling of that night." Since the recovery in 2000, "we've pretty much completely excavated it," Neyland said. "The bodies decomposed and the bones separated, so the bottom of this sub became a continuous layer of bones. Interspersed with them are personal artifacts, fragments of clothing, buttons, shoes, tobacco pipes, bits of metal from suspenders, and things that individuals would carry in their pockets. Each individual had a canteen. There were also tools. We did recover a compass and a wooden bellows that was used to pump air in and out of the submarine through two iron snorkels."
"No one else has had the information I have," Künstler said. He worked from a model of the Hunley constructed by the conservators in Charleston, drawings of the recovered sub, x-ray photographs of parts of the sub and her equipment that are still encased in concreted sediment. Künstler also examined artifacts such as commander George Dixon's pocket watch when he visited Charleston.
The "goal was to get as many of the artifacts coming out of the boat into the painting as possible," Künstler said. "They discovered a caulking iron and a bucket recently, so I put them in the background. I have a compass and compass box in the foreground. So far I've got everything they've taken out of the boat in the painting except the gold coin, which was too small to show and also would have been in Dixon's pocket." The gold coin was given to Dixon by his girlfriend, Queenie Bennett. It stopped a bullet that might have otherwise killed him during the Battle of Shiloh. So Dixon had the words "My Life Preserver" engraved on the bent coin and carried it wherever he went.
But the most unusual part of the research has been working from photographs of the facial reconstructions of the crew. "That's what makes it sort of interesting and mysterious," Künstler said. "I have a chart with each man's name, his height and weight, and anything else known about him and everything that they found that belonged to him."
"We have done some conservation on some of the small finds like the buttons," Neyland explained. "And we're doing some studies on the best methods of long-term conservation of the hull. It will be years before all the objects are preserved and displayed, but the more than 140 buttons made out of brass, wood and bone and porcelain and rubber and things like pipes should be on display soon. We have to clean the textiles to free them from the sediment and the mud. They're very very fragile. We have to determine which is the best way to conserve them . . . because they can't support their own weight."
View Mort Künstler's Hunley image in the April issue of Naval History.