Guns from famed Confederate raider CSS Alabama restored

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Guns from famed Confederate raider CSS Alabama restored
February 7, 2010
By Bruce Smith
montgomeryadvertiser.com

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- A crate arrived in Mobile on Friday carrying a piece of painstakingly restored Confederate history.

The cargo was a gun from the famed Confederate naval raider CSS Alabama which was conserved at the same South Carolina lab where the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley is being restored.

The three-ton gun, one of two restored at the lab, will be displayed at the Museum of Mobile.

The second remains in Charleston where there are plans to display it at a museum that will one day display the Hunley, said Paul Mardikian, the head conservator on the Hunley project.

"It's a relief for me to see them done," Mardikian said Friday. "Cannon are inherently difficult to conserve and stabilize."

The Hunley, the first submarine to sink an enemy warship, was raised off the South Carolina coast in August 2000, and brought to the lab. The next day one of the Alabama guns arrived as well.

The second gun from the Alabama arrived later, said former Alabama state Sen. Robert
Edington, who for years served as head of the CSS Alabama Association.

There were human remains -- including a jaw bone -- on the encrustation on that gun. Those remains were buried in a ceremony in Mobile several years ago and the gun arrived back in Alabama on Friday, he said.

It took about six years to conserve the guns.

Scientists initially had their hands full with the Hunley, the hand-cranked sub that contained the remains of its eight-man crew, so conservation work on the guns didn't begin immediately.

"I would think these are the last cannon I treat with conventional techniques," Mardikian said. "It takes less time to build a bridge than to treat a cannon."

The conventional method leaves the cannon in a bath of solution such as sodium hydroxide or sodium bicarbonate to remove salts left by sea water.

Clemson University researchers at the lab have been experimenting with a new subcritical fluid method. With that technology, fluids take on the characteristics of both a gas and a liquid under intense heat and pressure and have unique dissolving characteristics.

ardikian said that once the technique is perfected, conserving a similar cannon in subcritical fluids could be done in six months rather than six years.

The Alabama, built in Liverpool, England, and launched in 1862, was one of the most successful raiders in naval history.

The CSS Alabama Association said that during the 22 months it sailed, her crew boarded 447 ships taking 2,000 prisoners. The cannon have inscriptions showing they were made in Liverpool, Mardikian said.

"It's very significant" to have the gun back, Edington said. "There were eight guns altogether on the ship and we have recovered four, one of each type. This was a standard Royal Navy 32-pounder -- 32 pounds refers to the weight of the cannon ball."

The Alabama sank in about 200 feet of water off Cherbourg, France, after an engagement with the Union's USS Kearsage on June 11, 1864, just a few months after the Hunley sank.

The wreck of the Alabama was discovered in 1984 by a French navy mine sweeper. The cannon were raised in 2000, a few months before the Hunley.

The 40-foot Hunley rammed a spar with a black powder charge into the Union blockade ship Housatonic on Feb. 17, 1864 off Charleston Harbor. Though it was the first sub to sink an enemy warship, the Hunley sank as well.