The first submarine to torpedo an enemy boat was the invention
of Horace Lawson Hunley. The South lost the fight, but his invention
was the secret weapon that defended Charleston, a port city shelled
by the Union day and night. Hunley’s eponymous contraption,
a converted steam boiler that must have looked like a whale
surfacing in the harbor under moonlight, spurning attention,
held eight Jonahs in its belly, one skipper and seven brave crewmen
propelling the sub with hand cranks. They all died, I should mention,
just after their valor blew the USS Housatonic out of the water.
Worse, Horace Lawson Hunley died before his invention
modernized naval warfare. During diving trials, Hunley sank
with the Hunley because the hatch wasn’t closed tight. His invention
was salvaged by Confederate divers, who found captain and crew
still frozen in their death poses, a grisly sight. There’d been tension,
of course, between old-school navy men and Captain Hunley.
They told him, “We don’t hide in fright in an invention
that lets cowards breathe beneath the ocean. We battle on the waves,
like men!” The age-old clash between the dim lights of convention
and the bright bulbs of innovation. Like him, I’m a Hunley, a rebel,
a maker. Words are my keys-on-kites. These poems are my inventions.
(unpublished, uncollected)