Standing on the press boat and leaning over the railing, I felt an indescribable thrill. Finally, I would lay eyes on her. My son, Dirk, friend and cowriter Craig Dirgo, and I had hoped to dive on her soon after Ralph, Wes, and Harry made the discovery, but several days of rough weather and high seas beat us out. By then it was too late. A Charleston press conference was scheduled to announce the discovery, and we could not venture to the site again for fear of giving away her location to shady Civil War artifact collectors who were already offering $5,000 for a hatch cover and $10,000 for the propeller to anyone who would dive to the wreck and remove them. The Hunley hung poised and elegant, coated in rust and ancient sea life that had attached to her iron plates before the silt covered her entirely. She was gently lowered onto a smaller barge and then towed by two tugboats on her final, belated voyage into Charleston Harbor. Flags on Fort Sumter were lowered to half-mast, as reenactors in authentic Civil War uniforms, both Union and Confederate, shot volleys to the sky, accompanied by muzzle-loading cannon, whose salutes filled the air with puffs of black powder smoke. Women lined the shore wearing antebellum dresses, nine of the garments black in honor of the submarine’s nine dead crew. Thousands of spectators lining the shores cheered as the barge, with its precious cargo, and the fleet of pleasure craft made their way past the town Battery and up the Cooper River to the old navy yard.

The men behind the project had pulled off an amazing feat. The entire operation had gone as smoothly as a ticking clock on the dashboard of a Rolls Royce. A crane lifted the sub off the barge onto a rail car that carried her into the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, where she will spend the next several years in a tank. Here, during her preservation process, her hull plates will be removed so the interior can be excavated and all artifacts and the crew’s remains can be removed and studied. Eventually, Hunley, in all her glory, will be put in a museum for permanent public display.

I was numb with disbelief and exhilaration that the event had actually happened, as numb as I was the day five years earlier when Ralph Wilbanks had awakened me at 5 A.M. and told me he wasn’t going to search for the Hunley anymore — because he and Wes and Harry had just touched its hull!

Dr. Robert Neyland, the naval archaeologist who was in charge of the investigation, graciously allowed me to go up now and touch the sub. After fifteen years and a share of my children’s inheritance spent on the long search, I felt as if an electric shock were running through me as I laid my hands on the propeller. Close up, the vessel looked longer and narrower than I had imagined, far more streamlined and aerodynamically designed to reduce water resistance than anyone had suspected. Hunley was truly a marvel of Civil War engineering and technology.

A photographer asked Ralph, Wes, Harry, and me to stand in front of the sub as it hung suspended in its sling, before it was lowered into the preservation tank. After we posed for a few minutes, the entire building suddenly erupted in cheers and applause. Totally unexpected, it was truly an emotional and cherished moment, a fulfillment of a dream. We all fought back the tears, proud that this moment existed because of us. The years of effort and expense had been worth it.

But, as with a triumphant army after a great victory, the moment soon passed. That was then. Now is now. It was time to plan the next expedition in hopes of finding another historically significant shipwreck.

Perhaps it’ll be the Pioneer II—or American Diver, as she was sometimes called. It was the predecessor to Hunley and was built by the same group of men in Mobile, Alabama. While being towed from the harbor in an attempt to sink one of the blockading Union fleet, she was hit by a squall, and she began to take on water through an improperly sealed hatch until she slipped under the waves. Fortunately, none of her crew accompanied her into the deep. Scientists and archaeologists are anxious to see the technology that was used as a foundation to modify and refine the Hunley into an undersea vessel considered state-of-the-art in 1863.

We’ve just received a permit from the state of Alabama to conduct a search and excavation. Yes, we’re positive this is another wreck that is buried deep in the sand and silt, and so is probably unrecoverable. But if we never make the attempt, we will never succeed.

Much water has passed the bows since Craig Dirgo and I wrote the first Sea Hunters. Since then NUMA has found the wrecks of Carpathia, the ship that rescued Titanic’s survivors and was torpedoed by a German U-boat six years later; the General Slocum, an excursion steamboat that burned and sank in the East River of New York, with a loss of more than one thousand people, mostly women and children; and the Mary Celeste, the famous ghost ship that was found floating off the Azores in 1876 with no one on board, the first great mystery of the seas.

The following narratives chronicle the most recent searches by NUMA crews who dragged sensing equipment through eight-foot seas, found themselves inundated by tidal waves, dove in water so dirty they couldn’t see the fingernails on the hands in front of them, and excavated tons of mud and sand under the worst conditions imaginable, all in an effort to identify a long-lost shipwreck. The people who are portrayed here, both past and present, were and are real. The historical events depicted are also factual but have been slightly dramatized to make the ships, and all who voyaged in them, more immediate to today’s reader.

There is no monetary profit to this ship-hunting madness. I do what I do purely out of a love for our country’s maritime history and to preserve it for future generations. It’s rich and worth cherishing.

Each day is future history. So don’t step lightly. The trick is to leave tracks that can be followed.

“The fool!” René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle shouted as he stood helpless on the desolate shore and watched his flagship, L’Aimable, veer out of the buoyed channel toward what he knew was certain destruction.

Earlier, over the protests of L’Aimable’s captain, René Aigron, La Salle had ordered the 300-ton French ship loaded with stores for a new colony to sail across the bar of Cavallo Pass into Matagorda Bay — a body of water that would become part of the state of Texas 157 years later.

Aigron stared menacingly, demanded La Salle draw up a document absolving him of any responsibility, and insisted the explorer sign it. La Salle, still recovering from an illness, was too weary to argue the point and reluctantly agreed to the terms. Fearing the worst, Aigron then transferred his personal possessions to a smaller ship, Joly, which had already crossed the bar and was safely anchored inside.

Now, with the sails unfurled and billowing from a following breeze, L’Aimable, to the horror of La Salle, was sailing into oblivion.

The man who would claim the new world for France was born in Rouen, France, on November 22, 1643. After an unsuccessful attempt to become a Jesuit priest, he left France seeking a new life in New France, now known as Canada, then a French colony. After a few false starts, La Salle established a thriving fur-trading business, an endeavor that allowed him to develop his budding passion for exploration.

When Louis de Buade Comte de Frontenac became the new governor of Canada, La Salle nurtured a friendship with him. In time, the Canadian governor introduced La Salle to King Louis XIV, who granted the explorer a patent, or royal license, to explore the western regions of New France. In effect, La Salle now became France’s approved explorer in the New World. La Salle, in debt, wasted little time before exploiting the honor.