Confederate Submarine Crew Killed By Their Own Weapon

Republication from DUKE UNIVERSITY

Drawings of the H. L. Hunley from 1900 (Wikimedia commons)

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By Karl Leif Bates @DukeResearch

DURHAM, N.C. — The H.L. Hunley, the first combat submarine to sink an enemy ship, also instantly killed its own eight-man crew with the powerful explosive torpedo it carried, according to new research from a Duke University Ph.D. in biomedical engineering.

The Hunley’s first and last combat mission occurred during the Civil War on Feb. 17, 1864, when it sank a 1,200-ton Union warship, the USS Housatonic, outside Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The Hunley delivered a blast from 135 pounds of black powder below the waterline at the stern of the Housatonic, sinking the Union ship in less than five minutes. Housatonic lost five seamen, but came to rest upright in 30 feet of water, which allowed the remaining crew to be rescued after climbing the rigging and deploying lifeboats.

Fortification Plan of El Morro, citadel of San Juan, Puerto Rico

Plan of El Morro in 1742, being the citadel of San Juan, Spanish Puerto Rico (Instituto de Historia y Cultura Militar, Madrid). As it can be seen on the map, El Morro was a small peninsula in a strategic location protecting the harbour of San Juan.

Contributions to Slingshot, Journal on ancient and medieval warfare

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[Slingshot 308, September-October 2016]

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Some time now I’m contributing to Slingshot, the research Journal of the Society of Ancients (published since 1964), specialized in ancient and medieval warfare, tactics and wargaming.

Many thanks for this to Paul Innes and Nick Harbud.

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Periklis Deligiannis

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Never surrender: Native tribes of Colonial Spanish America never subdued by the Spaniards

“El joven Lautaro”, an already classic painting by P.Subercaseaux depicts the Mapuche warlord Lautaro (who confronted the Conquistadores in the mid-16^th century) along with his army and people. Note the horses and the European weapons and helmets on the right, captured from the Spaniards (credit: Wikimedia commons).

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By Periklis Deligiannis

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The Spanish Conquistadores and mostly the European microbes and diseases that they brought to the New World (smallpox, measles, ‘influenza’ and others) – which often were decimating the native tribes even before the physical appearance of the Spaniards themselves – managed between 1492 and 1600 to conquer huge areas of the North, Central and South America starting with the Caribbean world. Due to the spread of the European diseases, the thrashing superiority of the arms, armour and tactics of the Spaniards, their superior socio-political and financial system and other factors, just 11,000 Conquistadores more or less were proved to be enough for the subjugation of many millions of Amerindians in those years.

Genetic research uncovering the origins of the British people from prehistoric and historical populations

[This is a republication from the “People of the British Isles” project of the University of Oxford. You can read this paper in conjunction with my paper AFTER ARTHUR: a synoptic study on the fate of the native Briton population after the Anglo-Saxon invasion and prevalence ]

 

Figure  1

A genetic map of the People of the British Isles (Figure 1 from the Nature paper)

For each individual, the coloured symbol representing the genetic cluster to which an individual is assigned is

plotted at the mean position of their grandparents’ birthplaces. Cluster names are in the side-bar.

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