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Mark K. Ragan's "The Hunley" sets the standard for books on the famous Confederate submarine. By Scott Boyd

Date published: 3/31/2007

THE MYSTERY of why the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley never returned from its final mission has baffled Civil War scholars, naval historians and ordinary people alike--all captivated by its remarkable story. Mark K. Ragan's newest book, "The Hunley," does not solve the mystery, but provides many fascinating new details about the elusive submarine, those who built it and those who discovered it 131 years after it disappeared.

The author's qualifications are straightforward: Ragan knows submarines. A certified diver, he owns a small two-man submersible and teaches submarine piloting for the Chesapeake Submarine Service. With a bachelor's degree in archaeology/anthropology and information systems management, he is also the official historian for the project that discovered the Hunley in 1995 and recovered it in 2000 from its watery grave outside of the harbor at Charleston, S.C.

This book is a good read. The presence of more than 300 reference notes does not detract from this, but reminds the reader that solid research underlies the fascinating story that Ragan tells. If you check the references, you'll see that most of them cite primary sources--letters and other documents found in government and academic archives; reports, logbook entries and messages from the government's official history of the war; and letters and interviews contained in newspaper articles a hundred years or more old.

Ragan is not rehashing what other Civil War historians say about the Hunley. In fact, it's the other way around: People writing books about the Hunley invariably cite Ragan as a source for various facts about the 40-foot vessel.

The book of his that they usually cite is "The Hunley: Submarines, Sacrifice and Courage in the Civil War," published in 1995. Ragan's 2006 "The Hunley" amounts to a revised, expanded and improved edition of the 1995 work.

Hard-core readers of his first Hunley book will be very pleased to know that in the 2006 edition Ragan introduces the complete text of (by my count) at least 15 letters, five newspaper articles and three miscellaneous documents related to the Hunley that are not found in the 1995 book. In the section where the subsequent lives and careers of Hunley-related people are listed, Ragan adds four new entries.

Date published: 3/31/2007