Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate Submarine (American Civil War)
by Brian Hicks, Schuyler Kropf
Book Summary Information
Author: Brian Hicks, Schuyler KropfEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-04-01
ISBN: 0345447727
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Presidio Press
Book Reviews of Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate Submarine (American Civil War)
Book Review: At least Get the Facts Straight
Summary: 1 Stars
When you read this review please consider it in light of the fact that I am the discoverer of the Hunley. I found it in 1970 and have considerable evidence to prove it.
Although I agree that this book contains some interesting information on the Hunley, I would never recommend it to anyone.
I lost any respect that I might otherwise have had for Hicks and Kropf after they ignored the precision of my mapped location of the Hunley and credited Clive Cussler and NUMA with the discovery of the Hunley.
Their book credits Cussler even though Cussler is not an archaeologist, never dove on the wreck a single time and was not even the director of the 1994/1995 expedition that dug up and filmed the wreck. That expedition was officially an expedition under the auspices of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology & Anthropology (SCIAA) and not a NUMA expedition. That expedition was directed by SCIAA underwater archaeologist Mark Newell, who Hicks and Kropf clearly libeled in their book. More importantly, Dr. Newell is an honest man. Although he could take the position that since he was the director, he was the discover, he has publicly acknowledged that he used my maps to plan the expedition and has credited me with the actual discovery.
Could it possibly be that Hicks and Kropf thought they could later coauthor a book with Cussler as a reward for the glowing praise they bestowed on Cussler, who they even called "his authorship" in his book? I believe that's a distinct possibility. I do know that Hicks subsequently wrote a book on another of Cussler's alleged shipwreck discoveries.
I say alleged discoveries, because there is no way that I would take any of Cussler's claims on face value after he has made so many unsupported or demonstrably false claims. Those claims include Cussler's later disproved claim that NUMA had found the wreck of the HMS Actaeon, which had been sunk at the entrance to Charleston harbor in 1776. Another time Cussler claimed NUMA had found the wreck of a famous Civil War ironclad in the Mississippi River, but the find was later identified by archaeologist Alan Saltus as only a pile of discarded steel pipe. In 1981 Cussler claimed to have discovered the wrecks of the blockade runners Norseman and Stonewall Jackson, even though my company, Shipwrecks Inc., had been credited with their discovery over 12 years earlier in not only the Charleston papers, but in the New York Times. Cussler once claimed that NUMA had discovered the wreck of the USS Keokuk & that his diver had strode its decks and that it was intact and could be raised. That was pure malarkey. No part of that claim was true. He had not even found the wreck (although NUMA did come back and presumably located it the following year) some distance from where he first claimed. Moreover, the Keokuk had been blasted apart and heavily scrapped in the years following the Civil War and was in no way intact.
Cussler uses his alleged shipwreck discoveries as a way to garner free publicity for himself and his novels. Cussler's first unsuccessful search for the Hunley was tied directly to his efforts to promote the release of the movie "Raise the Titanic," which was based on one of his novels. Although I feel Cussler has robbed me of credit I rightfully deserve, I agree that he is a good writer and I am still a fan of his novels. On the other hand, I consider Brian Hicks to be just a hack. As for Kropf, my opinion of him is extremely low because he was the main reporter following the Hunley for many years and he has never seemed to get the story right.
Dr. E. Lee Spence
u/w archaeologist
843 532-8222
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