CAPE HATTERAS, North Carolina (8 August 2004) -- Naval historians and archaeologists will put to sea this month in search of a nautical needle in a haystack. With luck and the latest technology, they hope to find the remains of the U.S. Navy's first submarine. The target of the search by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Office of Naval Research is one of the most innovative, least celebrated vessels of the Civil War: the USS Alligator. Originally powered by oars and later by a hand crank, the Alligator sank in a storm in 1863 off Cape Hatteras, N.C., lost as hundreds of ships have been over the centuries in the treacherous Graveyard of the Atlantic. Discovery of the Alligator, a greenish, 47-foot-long iron vessel that resembled its namesake, could shed new light on Civil War naval technology, an era of rapid maritime innovation that has risen to prominence with the recent recovery of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley and the turret of the Union ironclad USS Monitor.
| | The Alligator was built for the Navy in 1861 in Philadelphia by French diver and inventor Brutus de Villeroi. On its first mission, in 1862, it proved useless against its intended target, a bridge on Virginia's Appomattox River. The river was too shallow. After spending the next year in the Navy yard in Washington being refitted, the Alligator sank off the N.C. coast as it was being towed south to aid in the attack on Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. Never tested in battle, the USS Alligator might have remained a footnote to history had it not been for a chance discovery two years ago in an N.C. bookstore. Certain that her husband would be interested in the magazine she had stumbled across, Nancy Cohen showed an article on "the North's only submarine" to her husband. Rear Adm. Jay Cohen, a submariner himself and chief of the Office of Naval Research, was definitely interested. And he was piqued by assertions the Alligator might never be found. Over the years, the Office of Naval Research, with the aid of its once-secret nuclear-powered mini-sub NR-1, has found lots of things lost in the ocean -- the wreckage of the space shuttle Challenger, the RMS Titanic, and 2,000-year-old Roman shipwrecks. "We are interested in finding things on the bottom of the ocean," Cohen said. "If we can find the Alligator, we can find anything." |
