About the Bonhomme Richard:

As far as I know, NUMA never had any luck locating it. I asked the sonar men what they had been looking for. What is left of a wooden ship nearly two hundred years after it sinks in a place with strong currents? The main item they were looking for was ballast which would all be set together in one place. The rocks would have made a pile where they fell. Then there should be cannon scattered about the site in a fairly compact debris field.

I spent part of this morning looking for my Hunley/Numa t-shirt. Today seemed like a good day to wear it but I am afraid that somewhere between Washington and Sonoma COunty, it found its way into Davy Jones' locker or some other hard to reach place.

I do want to repeat one thing abut raising the Hunley. The crew are being recovered, not desecrated. They are being brought to a place marked by an appropriate gravestone where people, including their descendants, will be able to come and feel the closeness, the opportunity for communing, that it affords. Some people will use their moment to feel pride that they share the same blood as those men who died on the Hunley, others will reflect on their courage and probably most of us will wonder if we ever would have had the courage to do what these men did if it were our homes and families that were threatened. Having the remains of the Hunley, itself, nearby will make the reality of what the nine men did, their sacrifice, all the more concrete.

To say that these men should not be honored because lawyers will try to make an issue of them or because sensational journalists will use them to sell their publications is a cop out. We can honor them for living up to a higher standard than most of us will ever be called on to face. We may disagree with the government we understand they were supporting but to say these men were misled, misguided, uninformed is more of a slap in the face than moving them from the bottom of Charleston Harbor could ever be. The men who made up the Hunley's crews knew that their country was under attack, that their friends and families were suffering from lack of jobs, food, and sheter and that in battles throughout the South, Virginians were fighting and dying. That was enough for them to feel that risking their lives was their duty.

And we are left with the question, "What ideals do we have for which we would risk our lives?"

Sourdough brought up one mile from the Union Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Nashua, NH