![]() Her richly detailed account appears to definitively solve this Civil War–era mystery. Gary Kinder, author of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea In the Waves a perfect title for Rachel Lance’s captivating tale documenting her obsession with solving the Civil War mystery about a tiny Confederate submarine that successfully blasted apart a Union. Readers without an engineering background may struggle through Lance’s number crunching, but she has a firm command of both the scientific and historical subject matter and writes with flair. And this storytelling 'Sherlock' also packs a genuine sense of humor. When it was finally recovered from Charleston Harbor in 2000, it didn’t appear to have been significantly damaged in the attack and each of its eight crewmembers “was still seated peacefully at his station.” Lance offers a blow-by-blow account of “what it took to work through the puzzle” of the Hunley: recruiting colleagues with expertise in hyperbaric medicine, painstakingly reassembling the ingredients of the Hunley’s torpedo, exploring the mechanics of how the device was delivered, and testing through trial-and-error a theory that the crew perished in a shock wave. But the Hunley disappeared immediately after the explosion. Tasked with breaking the Union blockade of Charleston, the Hunley detonated its spar torpedo (a stationary bomb attached to the end of a long pole) against the hull of the USS Housatonic, becoming the first submarine to sink an enemy warship in combat. Lance, a biomedical engineering researcher at Duke University, debuts with a thorough and persuasive account of her efforts to solve the mystery surrounding the February 1864 sinking of the Confederate submarine HL Hunley off the coast of South Carolina.
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