Red River and Cross Bayou will hum with activity in a way they haven't since the Civil War when famed diver Ralph Wilbanks returns to Shreveport in February.

Wilbanks, who discovered the wreck of Confederate submarine Hunley in 1995 off Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, with the backing of best-selling adventure author Clive Cussler, plans a return visit to explore parts of the waterways he first visited in 1999 with fellow diver Steve Howard.

"We plan to get to y'all around the 20th of February but it could be slightly later," Wilbanks said in an e-mail to The Times. "Now I have Harry Pecorelli working with me. He was with me when we found the Hunley."

Wilbanks has been featured in Cussler's series of nonfiction books titled "The Sea Hunters" and also appeared under his own name in fictional settings in at least one of Cussler's novels.

But his enduring mark in undersea annals will be finding the ill-fated Hunley in Charleston Harbor. Divers sought the Hunley for decades, and in a sense it was the Holy Grail of American undersea historical exploration.

With Cussler's backing, Wilbanks visited Shreveport in the late summer and early fall of 1999. Using a 25-foot research vessel bearing the sign of Cussler's nonprofit organization, the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), he and Howard towed side-scan sonars and magnetometers through the brown river and bayou waters, searching for traces of four Confederate submarines.

Official Civil War records indicate five such boats were in Shreveport in 1864 and early 1865, with one apparently dismantled and sent overland to Houston. However, when Union naval officers accepted surrendered Confederate naval stores in the summer of 1865, no submarines were turned over, although a just-completed ironclad, the Missouri, was given.

"This is very important, historically and archaeologically," said Gary Joiner, military historian, author and cartographer who worked with Wilbanks during the 1999 visit and will assist him again.

Finding the boats, Joiner said, "would prove what we know the records and the literature to be. Every indication is that those subs were here and that they never left. That Clive and Ralph are involved shows the importance of this because both are world-famous for their archaeological pursuits. I consider Ralph to be a maritime Indiana Jones."


©The Times
January 30, 2006

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Archaeological diver Ralph Wilbanks (below) prepares to dive in Cross Bayou in Shreveport in late September 1999.

Wow, that is right off of Spring Street, I drove by there everyday going to school and remember the Naval yard. Actually Cross Bayou is a historic site because of it. Thanks a bunch Tony. Here is a picture of the sign

COOL!!! Man I wish I could go down there and watch the activity unfold...I mean, I know it sounds weird, but just to see a boat with the innitial's N.U.M.A. written on the side would be like.....SOOOO cool...liked a dream :P I know we have people in the forum from around that area, any of you gonna go check it out???

David and I are tossing it around because my grandmother still lives there and it is right around the time we are going to Mardi Gras, granted it's 5 hours out of our way but only adds 2 additional hours to our trip so we are seriously considering it. In the mean time my grandmother will save me any and all newspaper articles.

What book was that?? I noticed that his name was familar when I first read it and then I came to this...

That's awesome. I hope they get everything their looking for this time around. I wonder what they felt like when the found it... I would love to be a maritime historian...that would be so much fun!!

Awesome. Julie if you go post lots of picture. :lol: :lol:

*update*

SHREVEPORT, La. -- Civil War submarines known to once be in Shreveport but unseen since that conflict continue to elude searchers.


"The submarines look like they will stay an enigma for a while," said Ralph Wilbanks, the diver who led underwater efforts that found the Confederate submersible Hunley off Charleston Harbor in 1995. "We have looked in the bayou and we didn't see anything we didn't see last time."

Wilbanks, together with fellow Hunley discoverer Harry Pecorelli III and diver Darrell Taylor, spent the last week in February in Shreveport, dragging side-scan sonars and magnetometers in countless lanes on mapped grids on the Red River, Cross Bayou and Cross Lake, looking for nagging mysteries from the Civil War to World War II.

As with Wilbanks' first visit to Shreveport in 1999, the current survey was underwritten by best-selling author Clive Cussler and his nonprofit, volunteer National Underwater and Marine Agency. Cussler said his decision to send Wilbanks and his crew back to Shreveport was based on "new data where the river changed course ... Apparently nothing was found again."

Wilbanks thinks the submarines were abandoned and salvaged after the Civil War.

"I think it's reasonable to think they may have just melted (them) back down and made steel out of (them)," he said.

Wilbanks and his crew also made scanning runs over the site of the suspected grave of the Civil War warship Grand Duke, out in the middle of Red River just north of Cross Bayou.

They got some hits there but results were inconclusive, with the sources of strong magnetometer readings under tree stumps and driftwood.

"There are some targets in the river and some very strong targets on the Bossier side," said Shreveport cartographer and historian Gary Joiner. "Some of the targets in the river are currently protruding above the channel floor a few feet. The Bossier side is currently very shallow in this area and we could not get the instruments near it."

While there, Wilbanks decided to spend a few days scanning Cross Lake to try to find a World War II B-26 bomber long rumored to have belly landed and sunk into the muck.

"We decided, since we were coming all the way out here, we'd look for this plane, too," Wilbanks said.

"Finding what you're looking for, that's the most exciting part," said Pecorelli, who's worked with Wilbanks since the mid-1990s.

"Most of the time you find out where things aren't," Wilbanks said. "You very seldom find where things are. The other thing is, you either find it in the first lane or the last lane."

Precedent has shown that these historic treasures do exist and are just waiting to be found.

Several decades ago, a fisherman on the Red River noticed something sticking out of a crumbling bluff. It turned out to be a dugout canoe, several millennia old, and one of the area's richest historical finds.

Known wrecks of Civil War-era vessels include the transport Kentucky, just south of LSU-Shreveport, and the Union ironclad Eastport, near Montgomery.

Even though the recent survey didn't turn up the subs or the airplane, it has increased the store of knowledge of the Red River and its tributaries.

For years, Joiner has thought the submarines might have been scuttled in an area near the old Battery Walker, which is now under dry land at what Bossier City calls Cane's Landing.

Using ground-penetrating radar might be the next step, he said, but that area was used as a dump for many years, and items from the intervening 14 decades would shield the Civil War material from detection.

These searches are tremendously important in terms of adding to the store of history, Joiner said.

"We are practicing forensic history. We are using the best technology available today in this research. We are working with some of the best known researchers in the world .... Shreveport is, at this time, one of the focal points for this advanced research because it was important during the Civil War and the research and development then might exist today."

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Thanks Tony! w:

Nice update. Thanks. w: