In the Waves

Description

 
One of “The Most Fascinating Books WIRED Read in 2020”

“One part science book, one part historical narrative, one part memoir . . . harrowing and inspiring.”—The Wall Street Journal 

How a determined scientist cracked the case of the first successful—and disastrous—submarine attack
 
On the night of February 17, 1864, the tiny Confederate submarine HL Hunley made its way toward the USS Housatonic just outside Charleston harbor. Within a matter of hours, the Union ship’s stern was blown open in a spray of wood planks. The explosion sank the ship, killing many of its crew. And the submarine, the first ever to be successful in combat, disappeared without a trace.
 
For 131 years the eight-man crew of the HL Hunley lay in their watery graves, undiscovered. When finally raised, the narrow metal vessel revealed a puzzling sight. There was no indication the blast had breached the hull, and all eight men were still seated at their stations—frozen in time after more than a century. Why did it sink? Why did the men die? Archaeologists and conservationists have been studying the boat and the remains for years, and now one woman has the answers.
 
In the Waves is much more than just a military perspective or a technical account. It’s also the story of Rachel Lance’s single-minded obsession spanning three years, the story of the extreme highs and lows in her quest to find all the puzzle pieces of the Hunley. Balancing a gripping historical tale and original research with a personal story of professional and private obstacles, In the Waves is an enthralling look at a unique part of the Civil War and the lengths one scientist will go to uncover its secrets.“A page-turning tale of personal obsession to solve a great historical mystery frozen in time. Rachel Lance dives deep into an era during the Civil War when combatants took almost unimaginable risks, then uses a thrilling combination of creativity, ingenuity, and curiosity to answer questions long thought lost beneath the waves. A wonderful adventure told by that rarest of breeds–a scientist who writes beautifully and won’t relent until she knows.”
—Robert Kurson, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers and Rocket Men

“In the Waves draws the reader deep into a layered mystery, rich with explosive experimentation, Civil War history, and the engaging personal narrative of a young scientist. As persuasive as she is passionate, Rachel Lance expertly unravels the tragedy of the Hunley, complete with its scientific and historical context. Yet Lance’s book reveals more than torpedo blasts and shock waves: it is an inspiring look at what is possible when devotion and science are joined.”
—Nathalia Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“In the Waves is a thrilling expedition into one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Civil War. Harnessing the revelatory wonders of the digital age and her own undersea expertise–along with gritty determination and persuasive powers–Rachel Lance has delivered a mesmerizing tale of science, history, tragedy, and adventure!”
—Liza Mundy, author of Code Girls

“In the Waves is one part science book, one part historical narrative, one part memoir . . . harrowing and inspiring.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Lance deftly blends historical narrative and the unraveling of this scientific puzzle in a thoroughly accessible and entertaining style. . . . This engaging investigative work will intrigue readers of Civil War and naval histories and sleuths of scientific puzzles.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“Ever since the Confederate submarine HL Hunley was brought up from the ocean floor in 2000, with the skeletons of its eight crewmen still at their posts inside the intact hull, conservationists and historians have speculated about their fate. Were they drowned by water pouring in from damage by the torpedo explosion that sank their target, the USS Housatonic? Were they asphyxiated by lack of oxygen and carbon dioxide poisoning? Or did they die from some other cause? In this enthralling account based on extensive research and testing, the US Navy blast-injury specialist Rachel Lance solves the mystery in convincing fashion and offers an important contribution to Civil War literature.”
—James M. McPherson, Princeton University, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“They were the first crew of a submarine to sink an enemy ship, but did they ever have a hope of coming home? To find out, Rachel Lance brings together an unlikely mix of old-style weaponry, modern science, and people who love to make things go bang. This is her determined search to uncover the truth about an impossible mission. It is a great read!” 
—Sherry Sontag, co-author of Blind Man’s Bluff

“Rachel Lance’s In The Waves is a captivating magic trick of a book: part detective story, part scientific mystery, and part personal essay on the challenges—and triumphs of—researching stubborn history. Lance weaves these threads with astonishing aplomb, and the devastating denouement will haunt you long after you’ve turned the final page.” 
—Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park 

“[Lance] has a firm command of both the scientific and historical subject matter and writes with flair. Her richly detailed account appears to definitively solve this Civil War–era mystery.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Anyone who enjoys reading outstanding narrative nonfiction will absolutely love Rachel Lance’s In the Waves. Reading it is like watching Sherlock Holmes investigate a murder mystery—if ‘Sherlock’ were an exquisite writer, a woman, and had to solve the mystery while battling petty academic jealousies. Lance unravels the science and medical hypotheses with engaging observations, venturing from Kurt Vonnegut and the allied bombing of Dresden to Senator Strom Thurmond. And this storytelling ‘Sherlock’ also packs a genuine sense of humor.”
—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 ship in the Charleston harbor and then disappeared without a trace for 131 years. With determination and a knack for storytelling, Dr. Lance re-creates the daring mission of the HL Hunley and her demise, using precision-based bio-medical expertise to solve the mystery of how her eight-man crew died.”
—Ann Blackman, author of Wild Rose, Civil War Spy
 
“When we brought the Hunley up in 2000, we were shattered with exhaustion and had put everything we had into prying the Hunley from the mud of Charleston harbor, but the recovery team assumed that the scientists and researchers who came after us would bring the same passion to the science and the story of Hunley as we had. We were not wrong. Dr. Lance brings a razor-sharp mind and an equally sharp wit to the greatest remaining mystery of the Civil War—how and why did Hunley sink? [Lance’s] rigorous and highly accessible science, leavened with more than a few lovingly described characters and wry observations of graduate student life makes In the Waves a compelling explanation and a rollicking good read!”
—David L. Conlin, PhD, Hunley recovery team field director, chief archaeologist, National Park Service

“Lively . . . An entertaining account of research that solved a historical mystery.” 
—Kirkus Reviews

“This solid, engaging mystery recounts Lance’s quest to solve the mystery of the crew of the Confederate submersible Hunley . . . in a lively, entertaining, novelistic style that carries the reader along with all the verve of an Agatha Christie whodunit.”
—Booklist

“Important, timely, and deeply entertaining . . . In the Waves is many things, all of them entertaining to read: a scientific documentary woven with thriller-novel intrigue, a serious history accented with gentle snark, and a rapidly paced recounting of the dogged pursuit of scientific truth and a PhD. But In the Waves is also an accessible and important exploration of the injury deeply affecting the current generation of America’s service members.”
—Garden & GunIn addition to writing, Rachel Lance is a biomedical engineer who specializes in patterns of injury and trauma, and she is especially fascinated by blast and ballistic events. She works as an assistant consulting professor at Duke University, where she conducts research at the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. Before returning to graduate school to earn her PhD, Rachel spent several years as an engineer for the United States Navy, working to build and test specialized underwater equipment for use by navy personnel. Her doctoral work presented the first equations to predict the risk of injury and fatality from underwater explosions and has already received numerous international citations. A native of suburban Detroit, Rachel lives in Durham, North Carolina. In the Waves is her first book.

Chapter 1

 

What About the Hunley

 

Being a scientist is like being an explorer. You have this immense curiosity, this stubbornness, this resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say.

 

-Sara Seager, planetary scientist

 

I stood on the deck of the slightly rolling ship and looked down at the sea below. A faint breeze across the Gulf of Mexico was not enough to make the day comfortable. I had rolled out of bed at 0330, or less specifically oh-dark-thirty, as the smaller numbers of the morning are sometimes called by the men and women of the United States Navy. That had left me just enough time to rouse myself to a state of consciousness sufficient for driving, get to base, and get safely on board the specialized military diving vessel before she got under way. We had been waiting for good weather to undertake this mission, and the calm waters off the starboard gunwale looked bleary through my tired eyes. I had been working toward the next moments for the last year and a half.

 

My job as a civilian engineer in Panama City, Florida, had been to get us to this point: to find a new underwater breathing system, prove it was safe, and get the navy to let us test dive it in the open ocean. It was a seemingly straightforward task, but one that had required plenty of sweat, creativity, and math. By the time the divers emerged from the ocean, I knew that the new system worked.

 

We cast celebratory fishing lines off the stern and trolled for dinner on the way home. The success of this project meant that the navy would want me to lead projects myself, to submit proposals for new technologies. They had even offered me the chance to go back to school and get a PhD in biomedical engineering so I could do it.

 

A few months later, I was assigned a seat at a curved desk with pale faux-wood veneer in the far corner of a narrow office on the Duke University campus. Wedged to the left of my desk was a battered black filing cabinet containing hundreds of meticulously labeled manila folders, shoved full of papers by a compulsive graduate student who had long ago studied cardiac function from my chair. The filing cabinet blocked my view of the lone, slitlike window on the wall opposite the doorway, and I had recycled the papers in the bottom drawer to make room for a small stockpile of individual-serving bags of potato chips-stolen booty from the catering tables at lectures on campus.

 

Unlike undergraduate students, who pay the costs of their own tuition, engineering PhD students are paid a stipend to perform their work and are often given the job title of “research assistants.” However, these students are still different from normal employees because from the first day they arrive at their new labs they are already hoping to leave as quickly as possible. Graduation with a PhD is not guaranteed by completing certain classes; rather, the degree is granted only when, and if, a student’s adviser declares the student to be finished. It’s tacitly forbidden to ask the senior students when they will graduate because they are likely asking themselves the same question every day.

 

As students finish and move on, they often leave behind objects like relics of their time there, and new students moving into these borrowed spaces shift around the layers of abandoned artifacts to clear themselves an area. I had claimed my secret snack drawer but moved almost nothing else since I had first been placed into that office when I arrived at Duke in August 2011.

 

My research adviser was Cameron R. Bass, known as Dale to everyone who had ever spoken with him. He was an associate research professor of biomedical engineering and the director of Duke’s Injury Biomechanics Laboratory. Dale believed in efficiency above all else. His white hair and facial stubble were all trimmed to the same short-cropped length, a process his wife could do for him at home without wasting time at a barber. Every day he wore the same type of black polo shirt, with black or gray cargo hiking pants that zipped off at the knee, and the same heavy black lace-up combat boots. This daily uniform saved time shopping or picking out clothes. The students in Dale’s lab researched injury biomechanics: the various mechanisms by which human beings got injured and killed. About half the students worked on car crashes, and the other half, including me, focused on explosions.

 

For several months I had been working through medical case reports from underwater explosions. Scientists have long had a fairly clear idea of how well human beings can tolerate blasts in air, but not as much is known about human tolerance to blasts that occur underwater. Injured people and shrapnel chunks tend to stay where they fall when explosions occur on dry land, leaving a scene that can be safely examined later, whereas the waves and currents of the ocean quickly destroy all clues. The underwater science, therefore, had received much less attention.

 

But cases with eyewitness testimony, with survivors to describe the details of what had happened and where, were still useful. My first goal had been to compile as many cases of human exposures to underwater explosions as I could find. Then, I would use a complex piece of navy modeling software, called Dynamic System Advanced Simulation (DYSMAS), to calculate how strong of a blast each person experienced. The DYSMAS software could accept crucial information like the size of the charge and the depth at which it detonated, then model the resulting explosion. The output from the software about the strength of the shock wave could then be combined with the medical report describing how badly each person was hurt. These cases, examined together as a group, would allow me to find the blast levels at which humans in the water get injured or killed. The hope, at least at that time, was to turn the project into my PhD dissertation.

 

Most of my cases were from World War II. I had been spending long days sorting through testimonies of human wreckage, seventy years after the fact, hoping to convert them into something useful. I combed through dozens of reports a day, looking for those where a sailor’s physicians reported enough information to let me model his case. The stories were usually the same: feeling of a sharp kick to the groin, with a stabbing pain in the gut. Sometimes they would immediately vomit blood, sometimes they would have sudden and uncontrollable bloody diarrhea. Both are signs of severe trauma to the intestinal tract. Sometimes they would start coughing blood, a sign of damage to the lungs. Sometimes they watched a nearby friend sink silently beneath the waves.

 

The doctors in World War II were weirdly obsessed with food. They seemed to think there was some relationship between injury severity and the victim’s most recent meal. The case reports are riddled with statements like “Case 47 had a sandwich three hours before the blast, but Case 48 had only coffee. . . .” I would find a case that reported distance from the charge, plug it into the navy’s software, and then stare vapidly at the blank beige wall above my desk, munching on stolen potato chips while the code ran, wondering what was in Case 47’s last sandwich. Were there pickles? I wondered what it was like to be moments from death, screaming in agony, with a large intestine split open along its length by a bomb, and then to have your doctor ask you about your sandwiches.

 

It was during one of these depressing reveries that I was glad for a distraction.

 

In graduate school, you learn to sense when your adviser is coming for you. Dale in particular had a distinct way of walking down a hallway. Point A and Point B were never close enough together, and the time spent between them is time he could have used more beneficially for research. His office was at the west end of the hallway and the lab’s grad students, myself included, worked in the shared offices scattered down the line between him and most useful destinations. We all knew the rapid staccato thunk of his ever-present combat boots coming down the hall.

 

Each of us would listen for the boots to pass our door. If they kept going, we kept working uninterrupted. But sometimes the boots stopped a few steps past a door, paused, and then reversed. This interruption in their rhythm meant Dale had an idea. This day, a few years after my arrival at Duke, the boots stopped for me. Dale pulled a tattered blue office chair out of the corner, sat down, and looked at me expectantly.

 

“What about the Hunley.” The words were delivered as a statement. There seemed to be no question mark in his tone. I had no idea what he was talking about, and the expression on my face probably told him so.

 

“What about the Hunley,” he repeated. Dale often spoke in the clipped, truncated pattern I was familiar with from working on the navy base and talking to military operators. Minimal adjectives. Pleasantries are an inefficient use of time. Make your point and move on. My need for the repetition must have irked him, but still I had no idea what he was talking about.

 

“Can your fancy software model it?” he asked.

 

“Sure,” I responded, still without any idea what he was asking. “I don’t see why not.” In grad school, unless you already have a damn good reason locked and loaded, the correct answer is always yes. Besides, DYSMAS was designed to assess ship damage. Whatever he was talking about, assuming it was a boat of some kind, the navy’s software could probably model it.

 

The boots proceeded back on their mission down the hall.

 

Once Dale was safely out of earshot, I pulled up a new browser window on my computer and began to investigate the Hunley and what I had signed up for.

 

Being a blast-trauma expert requires a certain degree of mental immunity to death. Every project is started because someone died, or because there is a good chance someone could die. Even in the early days of blast research, long before the Nazis and the Nuremberg Trials made patient and test-subject protections a global concern, doctors shared a common tendency to obscure the details of cases that would make the victims human and identifiable. Papers often contain detailed drawings of torn and perforated intestines, but almost never are there external views of stiff or distended abdomens. There are illustrations showing blast lung, but fractured skulls are limited to text descriptions. This hesitation is not because researchers do not want to think of victims as people; it is because, in order to function in our jobs, we simply cannot. The emotional toll of processing dozens of deaths per day in a normal fashion is not sustainable. Thinking of the case reports as only patchy blast lung or an isolated perforated bowel is a necessary defense mechanism. The alternative, at least for me, would have been spending every evening getting drunk in the bathtub.

 

But still, there were unavoidable moments. Like with the sandwiches. Victimless descriptions of gut trauma don’t eat sandwiches. I could tell immediately that the Hunley would be one of those cases. The mystery of that night, without its human element, is not actually that interesting: tiny submarine sets off large bomb; tiny submarine sinks. But when the human element is introduced, the story becomes haunting and inescapable, like mental quicksand.

 

The afternoon passed quickly as I became absorbed in Hunley search results. The blast software finished its current project, and the large desktop computer I used for the DYSMAS computational modeling sat whirring softly, awaiting its next instruction. But I sat totally engrossed, reading piece after piece of the Hunley’s story.

 

The little handmade submarine had been constructed during the American Civil War, and on the evening of February 17, 1864, the crew of the submersible boat decided the conditions were right to attempt her mission. The Hunley departed from near the city of Charleston, South Carolina, one of the last-standing Southern ports in the waning years of the war. She set out to try to break the Union blockade that prevented supply ships from bringing food and munitions to Charleston’s battered citizens and weary troops. Her target had been the USS Housatonic, which she destroyed with what seemed like ease to become “the first successful submarine to sink an enemy ship during time of war.” This victory was the Hunley’s claim to fame, and almost the exact phrase was repeated in every reference. It was the reason she was remembered when so many earlier attempts at submarine technology had been long forgotten.

 

The small sub disappeared after her mission, and the relative lack of information meant that the internet was filled with countless speculative theories from professional and armchair historians. The modern public interest was resuscitated in spectacular fashion in 1995 when bestselling author Clive Cussler and his organization, the National Underwater Marine Agency (NUMA), announced they had found the wreck of the long-lost submarine. By 2000, a plan for raising the Hunley and an agreement for her preservation had been formalized, and in exchange, Cussler and NUMA released the coordinates of her resting place. The US Navy would own her, as she was sunk in combat and therefore considered the spoils of war, but the submarine would be on permanent loan to the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The nonprofit group Friends of the Hunley would be the public face of the collaborative “Hunley Project” to enable her conservation, and they would work in partnership with the South Carolina Hunley Commission, the Naval History and Heritage Command, and the Charleston Naval Complex Redevelopment Authority. Clemson University would also be part of the collaboration, and the university’s Restoration Institute would employ the archaeologists and conservators who performed the conservation and preservation of the artifact. With the paperwork finalized, the Hunley was brought home to Charleston to see if her recovered hulk might reveal to the world why she disappeared that night so long ago.

 

In her custom water tank at her new home in Charleston, the archaeologists and conservationists from Clemson assembled into a team and got to work.

 

When the team cracked open the hull of the vessel, they discovered that the silt of the ocean floor had completely filled the interior cabin, but not until long after she sank. Based on the pattern of the layering in the sediment, they could tell that the hull had been intact when she first went down and for an extended period afterward, except for a small hole in the fore conning tower that occurred during or shortly after her sinking.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.8000 × 5.3000 × 8.0000 in
Imprint	Dutton
ISBN-13	09781524744175
ISBN-10	1524744174
Author	Rachel Lance
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO026000, HIS027150
Subjects	historical books, Waves, American history books, military history, biographies of famous people, dad gifts, history gifts, military history books, gifts for history buffs, gettysburg, biographies and memoirs, civil war books, war books, civil war books for adults, american civil war, civil war history, HIS027150, the civil war, naval history, reconstruction, gifts for dad, war, BIO026000, american history, biography, military, civil war, history, submarine, Navy, battles, history books, biographies, memoirs, autobiographies, us history