If you don't remember (or never heard of) the submarine Hunley, it was an eight-man, human-powered submarine built by the Confederates as a blockade breaker. The idea was that it would approach a ship from underwater, plant an explosive, back off, and blow it up, and sink the ship.
It almost worked. The slight problem was that after it blew up the ship (in water that was shallow enough that the ship didn't sink all the way, so the crew got off), the submarine sank and everybody onboard drowned. When it was found several years ago -- one of the great marine archaeological finds of history - they still couldn't figure out why it sank. Well, it filled up with water, of course. But was the crew helpless?
That's still not certain, but it turns out the Hunley had an escape mechanism - that wasn't used. It had two big keel weights that could have been released, making the ship much more buoyant and hopefully getting to the surface where the crew could at least have a chance to swim for it.
Well, for some reason, the Hunley crew didn't release the weights. We may never know why. But we do know that they could have had a better chance than they had.
Mystery of the secret Confederate submarine Hunley is SOLVED: Scientists finally reveal why world's first sub to sink an enemy ship then sank itself, killing all eight crew on board
The real, recovered Hunley during the preservation effort, before they dried it out:
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