Mission Highlights

During their long drift, the crew faced many challenges and made important discoveries. Maintaining the sub's interior environment was a constant struggle. The temperature dropped precipitously at depth, leveling out at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit for much of the mission. The sub was stocked with hundreds of pounds of silica gel to absorb moisture, but even so, humidity remained between 72 and 100 percent. Carbon dioxide levels were kept in check with lithium hydroxide panels and bacterial contamination had to be continuously monitored.

Outside the sub, the Gulf Stream offered its own challenges. Since the ocean bottom was not reliably mapped, the sub often had to make sudden maneuvers around obstacles like coral heads and shipwrecks. The current, like a river, was fraught with internal waves and powerful eddies that bounced the sub around and once even ejected it from the Gulf Stream completely, necessitating a support ship to tow her back in.

Abundant marine life was drawn to spotlights mounted on the sub's hull, providing a fantastic show for the crew. Enormous numbers of squid, broad-billed swordfish, a 30-foot medusa jellyfish, several shark species, tuna and swarms of plankton all danced around the vessel. The acoustic equipment on board even captured dolphin and whale conversations. The creatures in the current were generally harmless, save for one freakish swordfish attack. The crew became puzzled mid-mission by the sudden disappearance of sea life for 11 days and the total absence of the deep scattering layer, a dense belt of plankton they expected to encounter.

When the Ben Franklin surfaced after 30 days, 11 hours and nearly 1,500 miles, the mission was declared a great success. To this day, the data gathered by the crew is valuable in ocean and climate research as well as space travel. But while the Apollo 11's splashdown was international news 23 days earlier, the Franklin's splashup was barely noted.

Aftermath

The Ben Franklin's future was meant to hold many more long-term undersea missions after her maiden Gulf Stream voyage. She did make a few more dives. On one 24-hour mission off Florida, Robert Ballard, the man now famous for conducting more than 100 deep-sea expeditions, was a crew member. But in 1970, the sub was badly damaged when she hit a coral reef.

As the '60s came to a close, scientific priorities began to shift from manned, general exploration to specialized research with robotic equipment. The Ben Franklin was bought and plans were made to convert her for commercial missions. The project never got off the ground, though, and the sub ended up in a Vancouver shipyard where she rotted — discarded and forgotten.

Reconstruction

In 1999, the unique submarine was donated to the Vancouver Maritime Museum, where she was lovingly restored and her story documented. In September 2003, the Ben Franklin was rededicated at the museum with a reunion of the original crew, ushering in an era of renewed interest in an extraordinary mission.