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SECRETS
Illustration by Daniel Dowdey
New discoveries may solve the mystery of the H.L. Hunley
BY KEITH PHILLIPS
Hands clad in blue latex gloves, Paul Mardikian gently lifts the artifact that may unlock the 149-year-old mystery of the Civil War sub marine H.L. Hunley. “This is really interesting,” he says cradling the object in his palms the way a parent holds a newborn child. “It is changing the way we are looking at the attack on the Housatonic.” Interesting? It’s a corroded piece of steel pipe, about the length of a man’s forearm, and so fragile that it could easily snap. The pipe is capped on one end by a jagged blossom of discolored copper sheathing that is held in place by a rusted iron bolt. To my untrained eye, it looks like a household plumbing project gone horribly wrong, but if this object is a vital link to the past, Mardikian would know. As the senior conservator
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SOUTH CAROLINA LIVING | February 2013 | scliving.coop
at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston, he’s been working for the past 12 years as part of a multi-disciplinary team examining every square inch of the historic sub. Under the direction of Senior Archaeologist Maria Jacobsen, scientists with the Clemson University Restoration Institute are using hightech tools and painstaking forensic techniques to restore and analyze artifacts recovered from the first submarine to sink a ship in combat. The team’s discoveries so far have made international headlines, been profiled in National Geographic documentaries and caused historians to rewrite much of the sub’s history, but the researchers are still working to answer the question: What sank the Hunley? The piece in Mardikian’s hands has the