Quote:

---

While the United States Navy was constructing its first submarine, USS Alligator, during the American Civil War in late 1861, the Confederates were doing so as well. Horace L. Hunley, James McClintock, and Baxter Watson built Pioneer in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was the first of three submarines financially backed by Hunley (Pioneer, Pioneer II, and Hunley).

The Pioneer was thirty feet long and four feet in diameter.The crew consisted of a pilot and one man to rotate the propeller manually. It was equipped with an explosive that would be attached to the hull of an enemy vessel and blown up using a clockwork mechanism. Pioneer was tested in February 1862 in the Mississippi River, and later was towed to Lake Pontchartrain for additional trials where it successfully managed to sink a schooner, but the Union advance towards New Orleans the following month prompted the men to abandon development and scuttle Pioneer in the New Basin Canal on 25 April 1862. The team followed with the Pioneer II or American Diver, built after they relocated to Mobile, Alabama.

The scuttled Pioneer was raised and examined by Union troops. The Times-Picayune of New Orleans of 15 February 1868 reported Pioneer had been sold for scrap.

The Bayou St. John submarine, now in the collection of the Louisiana State Museum, was for decades misidentified as Pioneer. The Bayou St. John submarine and Pioneer may have undergone trials at about the same time and confusion between the two may date back to contemporary accounts; it is not clear which of the two was constructed first.


A life-size model of Pioneer can be viewed and explored at Maritime Museum Louisiana, in Madisonville, Louisiana.

---

p_bubel said:

---

Going down a rabbit hole I caught a sentence I thought "interesting."

Quote:

---

The New Basin Canal

The New Basin Canal was constructed by the New Orleans Canal and Banking Company, incorporated in 1831 with capital of 4 million US dollars. The intent was to build a shipping canal from Lake Pontchartrain through the swamp land to the booming uptown or "American" section of the city, to compete with the existing Carondelet Canal in the downtown Creole part of the city.


Work commenced the following year. Yellow fever ravaged workers in the swamp in back of town, and the loss of slaves was judged too expensive; so most of the work was done by Irish immigrant laborers.

The Irish workers died in great numbers, but the Company had no trouble finding more men to take their place, as shiploads of poor Irishmen arrived in New Orleans.

Many were willing to risk their lives in hazardous, back-breaking work for a chance to earn $1 a day. By 1838, after an expense of $1 million, the 60-foot (18 m) wide 3.17-mile (5.10 km) long canal was complete enough to be opened to small vessels drawing 6 feet (1.8 m), with $0.375 per ton charged for passage. Over the next decade the canal was enlarged to 12 feet (3.7 m) deep, 100 feet (30 m) wide, and with shell roads alongside.


No official count was kept of the deaths of the immigrant workers; estimates ranging from 500 to 20,000 and more have been published, with 8,000 being a commonly cited total. Many were buried without a grave marker in the levee and roadway-fill beside the canal. Contemporary immigration records and other primary documents do not support a level of Irish population in the city sufficient to support the upper-end of the estimated death

---

---