Saw this today in which it appears that a quartet of Confederate submersibles, scuttled in Louisiana mud to prevent those darned Yankees from grabbing them up, have been located– right where they were left 150~ years ago.
Marty Loschen, director of the Spring Street Museum in downtown Shreveport, thinks he’s found remnants of the hand-propelled craft in the banks of a branch of Cross Bayou about a half-mile west of where the Confederate Navy had a shipyard. At Cross Bayou’s mouth on Red River, it was home to the leaky ironclad CSS Missouri and a fast packet, the Webb, whose presence overshadowed the humbler underwater vessels.
Several months ago, before recent rains raised water levels on Cross Bayou and its feeder streams, Loschen and his brother found decades-old rusted metal and some oddly formed tree roots whose shape suggested they had grown over something curved that had rotted or rusted away. The site was on a bank revealed by low water on Bowman’s chute.“It’s breathtakingly beautiful out there,” says Loschen, who spends much of his time exploring the more remote, forgotten and forbidding parts of old Shreveport. He points to the 1864 Venable map of the defenses of Shreveport which shows several small buildings near where he found the artifacts.
“There’s your sub base,” he said. “On the Venable map there’s an island out there. My theory is if you’re going to have a clandestine sub base, you’re going to put it out there. Look, there are structures out there, near what I found out beached — it has to be.”
Others disagree…the rest here