A submarine sinks a warship for the first time
On this day · 17 February 1864
Off Charleston, the hand-cranked Confederate Hunley rammed a spar torpedo into the USS Housatonic — then vanished with all eight aboard.
On the night of February 17, 1864, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley crept up on the USS Housatonic, a Union sloop-of-war blockading Charleston Harbor, and made naval history as the first submarine to sink an enemy warship.
The Hunley was a cramped iron tube driven by a hand crank turned by seven men, with an eighth, Lt. George Dixon, steering. Its weapon was a spar torpedo — a charge of black powder fixed to a pole jutting from the bow. The crew rammed it into the Housatonic below the waterline; the explosion tore open the hull and the sloop went down in minutes, taking five sailors with it.
The Hunley never made it home. It sank that same night with all eight crew aboard and stayed lost for over a century.
The submarine was located in 1995 and raised in 2000, and now sits in a conservation lab in North Charleston, South Carolina.
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