I'm hoping the budget for your podcast allows this to be like a Ken Burns documentary, where my voice will get low in Southern and a lonely fiddle will play behind me.

I dare you to put on a Southern accent.

No, yeah, just the entire podcast.

I just commit to the bit entirely.

This is going to be a civil war story.

So let's go back.

Let's go back to a February night in 1864, towards the end of the war.

We're in Charleston Harbor, in South Carolina.

And on the harbor, there is a union ship called the Hussetonic, and a watchman is making his

nightly rounds.

Well, the watchman sees a log.

He sees a log in the water, and he squints a little bit, and then he goes, why is that

log slowly and steadily moving towards us, like a sea creature? Logs don't do that. What's going on?

And he had heard, and most of the Union forces had heard rumors about this secret torpedo weapon called

a fish boat that the Confederates had. And so they sort of were aware that this might be happening.

And he tells a superior and the superior's like, no, no, no, it's a log. Trust us. It's a log.

It was not a log.

It was the first battle submarine.

They realize that this is a weapon or this is a boat of some sort.

And they start shooting at it, but it's too late.

It puts its spar into the side.

Explosives go in, boom, boom, and it takes down the Hussetonic.

...