Hi, this is Future Ticia 2026. After this history lesson that was part of our geography lesson, which was also a science lesson, I became really interested in the Hunley. I even “forced” my husband to go to the Hunley museum. Learning all about how the Hunley was found and dug up was a great history and science lesson all those years ago. I’m going to add in more materials from our original lesson. Back to past Ticia 2011.
Sooooo……. I went to the library to find books on South Carolina and came up with 6. Three about the same thing. One which is checked out presumed missing (but was an awesome book), and another which doesn’t really lead itself to any sort of activity.
Okay, on to our project. We read about the HL Hunley. It’s the first ever submarine (Future Ticia 2026 will add, this is not actually, there is one from the Revolutionary War called the Turtle, which did not last as long), and it sank and for years it was a mystery where did it sink, why did it sink, what happened? And then come the turn of the century (isn’t it funny to say that and not mean 1900s?) they found it!
But how to lift it? How can we explore its mysteries?
Shipwreck Search {affiliate link} details all about the search for the Hunley and how we finally got it to the surface. We got details of how they first searched for it right after it went missing. Then details of the attempts through the ages, until finally it was found.
How to raise the Hunley?
Here is what you will need for each group.
Something that will sink. I used matchbox cars, because they were made of metal and would seem like it could be raised with the magnets I was going to give the kids.
Then I had a large bowl for each set of kids that was filled with water and large amounts of dirt. I also buried miscellaneous things, rocks, bolts, and other stuff.
Supplies to try and retrieve the Hunley: magnets, pipe cleaners, yarn, bamboo skewers, obviously you can give them whatever supplies you want to try and let them dig up their Hunley
Instructions: Using the materials pictured on the right, find the “Hunley” and discover how to get it out of the bowl without touching the car or the water.
How did the Hunley lesson go?
Then the race was on. The girls started by poking around in the water with the bamboo rods, until they found the car. Then they used two forks to raise the “Hunley.”
The boys probably had too many cooks in the pot. They all happily got to poking around and did find the car very quickly, but they took about a minute longer.
General consensus: The magnets were not very helpful (probably because the cars were not magnetic). The bamboo skewers worked very well for finding it, but not for lifting it up. The big forks worked very well for lifting it, but the spoons did not.
This was a huge hit with the boys who hid their “Hunley” several more times before finally being done with it. After the other kids left my boys then spent several more minutes (read half an hour) finding everything in it they could.
More information on the Hunley
Here are a couple of videos on the Hunley. I opted not to share the first video I found because it was not a student friendly version…
First, this is someone going through the museum.
Now, this is an official video with one of the experts at the Hunley museum, and talking through it.
And then one last one (I’m actually watching these as I’m updating the post, as I hadn’t had them in the post originally). This is from the museum itself as they are working on removing the debris from the Hunley.
Okay, that video is very out of date, seeing as how it’s from 10 years ago. They have now removed more or less all of the debris from inside the ship, and have since been able to remove the crew from the Hunley and given them a burial, and identified each crew member.
Hunley websites
Okay, let’s take a quick moment to check some sites around the web.
- HL Hunley museum– the museum website has all sorts of information
- Hunley naval history– a quick bit of naval history
- Hunley and the science of finding it– this is pretty cool to learn how they worked to preserve it
A funny story from our visit to the Hunley
All right funny story from when we visited the Hunley. I had been wanting to visit the Hunley since we studied it in 2011, and the first time we visited Charleston the museum was closed that day. But the second time in 2022 for our 20th anniversary trip, it was open, so I dragged Jeff there, and I was like a cat in the cream as I happily sat through all the lectures from the docents and read every single bit of information.
The docent was this man who really knew how to tell a story and he kept talking about how sometimes they learn more from the people who visit the museum than they do from experts. He told us how there was an expert in black powder guns that came to visit the museum who he asked to give an impromptu talk and corrected him on some aspects he had wrong.
But he talked about how a lot of the material we know on the Hunley is slowly correcting what we didn’t know that we had wrong. And sometimes it is corrected by visitors. And that day he’s sitting there and explaining how they’ve identified each member of the crew, and he says, “We’ve identified this member of the crew as Bob Smith (that was not the name, I don’t remember the name, but that’s the name I’m using) the tailor. We know that because he has a tailor’s indent in his teeth. Tailors will get that in their teeth from gripping the needle.”
As soon as I heard that I sat up and thought, “That’s not how they get that. They get it from biting the thread, and it slowly wears a ridge in the tooth. It’s one of the things you get warned not to do.”
After his talk, I told him how he was going to have a new story to add in, because he was incorrect on how the tailor got the indent in his teeth, and he was highly amused by my correction, and thought it was fascinating. We then had an extended conversation about how you can have very niche knowledge of history.
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