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What happened to the H.L. Hunley after it sank the USS Housatonic?
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submarine
The former USS Nautilus, launched in 1954, being towed to Groton, Connecticut, to become a museum, May 1985.
After successfully sinking the USS Housatonic with a spar torpedo on February 17, 1864, the H.L. Hunley was lost along with its eight crewmen.1
The vessel remained on the ocean floor until it was discovered in 1995 and raised in 2000. Upon examination at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, researchers found the crew at their posts with no signs of an attempted evacuation. While the cause of the sinking was long debated, a 2017 study by Duke University suggested that the shock wave from the submarine's own torpedo blast likely caused fatal "blast lung" injuries to the crew, incapacitating or killing them instantly.1