New Orleans's Big Fish  "Mystery Submarine"

An article in the April 1910 edition of Confederate Veteran tells of a "huge fish of a strange appearance" that was found on the shore of Louisiana's Lake Ponchartrain "some years after the war." "It was constructed of iron, the fins or wings were moveable... When the body was opened through a little trap door, the skeletons of three men were found in it." The "big fish" created a great deal of interest, and the people from New Orleans flocked to see it. One man who visited the object was seen "wringing his hands and exclaiming: 'This explains it all, and for years I have thought them to be traitors!'"

Upon questioning, the man explained that he had invented the vessel and enlisted three men to man it with the intent of blowing up Union gunboats in Lake Ponchartrain. "He was to direct their movements by signals from the shore. The boat fish left the shore; but as the men did not respond to his signals nor return, he concluded that they had turned traitors and gone over to the Yankees. ...The machinery of the boat had evidently gone wrong, and the men died where they were. The skeletons were interred near where they were found, and a small monument marks their last resting place."

A September 1989 article in Civil War Times tells of a "mystery submarine" that was found in Lake Ponchartrain in 1878, dredged up during construction of a canal and deposited on shore, where it was forgotten until rediscovered in 1895. This vessel was misidentified as the Pioneer, a predecessor of the CSS Hunley, and put on display at the Louisiana State Museum near Jackson Square in New Orleans in 1957. The "mystery sub" was 20 feet long, 3 feet 2 inches wide, and 6 feet high, and was propeller-driven by two men turning cranks inside the vessel. "In midship cross-section, she suggests a racing yacht model," wrote historian William M. Robinson Jr.  Simon Lake, a submarine historian, wrote, "From a study of the form of this vessel, she should have been very stable, and I am of the opinion that she could have been successfully navigated submerged had she been properly ballasted."

Fascinating Fact:  It is speculated that the unidentified vessel called a "big fish" in the 1910 article and the "mystery sub" described in the 1989 article are one and the same.


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