Page 18 - AlertDiver_Spring2013

DIVE SLATE //
16 | SPRING 2013
The battle lasted a mere 13 minutes. One hundred
and fifty years ago and 20 miles off the coast of
Galveston, Texas, two ships exchanged punishing
broadsides from 100 yards apart. At 7 p.m. on
Jan. 11, 1863, 11 days after the Confederates recaptured the
port of Galveston, the CSS Alabama under the command of
Capt. Raphael Semmes outmaneuvered and outgunned Capt.
Homer Blake’s armor-plated USS Hatteras and sent it bow
first to the bottom, where it rests today in 57 feet of water.
The Union survivors, including Capt. Blake, were imprisoned
in Port Royal, Jamaica. When the USS Brooklyn arrived at the
scene the following morning, the Hatteras was resting upright
on the bottom with both masts sticking out of the water and
its Navy flag swaying in the light breeze.
A former merchant ship, the Hatteras was outfitted with guns
and iron plating at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. It is the only
U.S. warship sunk in battle in the Gulf of Mexico during the
Civil War. The historical significance of the Hatteras wreck is
enormous because of the speed at which it sank, its depth and its
cargo of guns, ammunition, personal effects and even the ship’s
cash box. The wreck remains largely intact and untouched.
In 1976 Rice University professor Paul Cloutier
rediscovered the wreck while field-testing a recently designed
magnetometer. Like a submerged time capsule, the wreck lay
mostly buried in the sand-and-silt bottom. Portions of the two
paddle wheels, the stern post, parts of the steam engine and
the walking beam drive mechanism were all that protruded
from the seafloor. Two years later Cloutier took the U.S. Navy
to court to obtain admiralty rights; he was unsuccessful, and
the Hatteras remains the property of the U.S. Navy. For the
next three decades few divers — mostly state, federal and
contract archeologists — dived on the Hatteras.
Visibility in the area is highly variable, ranging from zero
to 40 feet. After Hurricane Ike (2008) and other turbulent
weather passed directly over the wreck, divers conducting
surveys for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in 2010
reported that a significant amount of cover had been swept
away, exposing more of the wreck. The news prompted James
Delgado, a renowned marine archeologist and director of
maritime heritage for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s (NOAA’s) Office of National Marine
Sanctuaries, to organize a privately funded mission involving
31 people and three vessels to assess and map the Hatteras.
Delgado secured mission funding from the Edward E.
and Marie L. Matthews Foundation and ExploreOcean and
support from the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.
The two-day mission took place in September 2012 and
employed a new kind of cutting-edge sonar technology:
BlueView. James Glaeser of Northwest Hydro procured
the high definition 3-D tool, the BV5000, that employed
this technology to map the 220-foot-long steam-powered
sidewheeler. The Flower Garden Banks National Marine
Sanctuary (FGBNMS) provided the RV Manta as a platform
for the mapping operation.
Glaeser directed the scanning operation in coordination with
Emma Hickerson, research coordinator for FGBNMS, who
orchestrated her dive team to reposition the tripod-mounted
scanner 24 times. Prior to initiating the scanning operation,
divers established the wreck’s centerlines using measuring tapes
stretched from bow to stern as well as across the wreck from
sidewheel to sidewheel. Thirty-five dives later, over a two-day
period with visibility that ranged from 5 to 15 feet, the scans
were completed. (Fortunately, visibility is not an issue with
sonar.) Glaeser created maps using mosaics of the scanned
images. The technology employed also allowed creation of
virtual 3-D “fly-throughs” of the wreck site. This was the first-
ever application of this state-of-the-art sonar technology on an
archaeological expedition to a marine shipwreck.
Mission: USS Hatteras
A new way to view our maritime past
Clockwise from left: BlueView
image of the USS Hatteras;
technicians aboard the R/V Manta;
the USS Hatteras and the
CSS Alabama in 1863;
archaeologists survey the
wreck site near the
starboard sidewheel.
James Glaeser/james@northwesthydro.com
courtesy ExploreOcean