For more than a century, their significance to American history was as lost as their cause. They lingered in obscurity at the bottom of the ocean, their story one without an ending.

For many of these people, the particulars of their history mattered little. Some didn't even know the names of the sailors. Saturday, it seemed, was more a day focused on the larger themes.

"We are here to honor their bravery, their courage and their sacrifice," said state Sen. Glenn McConnell, the Hunley Commission chairman, who led the men to their grave. "We are here to give them the burial that fate denied them."

Even though it was camouflaged as one of the biggest Confederate re-enactments on record, Saturday was still unmistakably a funeral. If the pageantry of the week misled anyone, that fact was clear when the crewmen's caskets lay in the aisle of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. These were real men who lost their lives.

James A. Wicks left behind a wife and four daughters. Joseph Ridgaway had been part of a large family. Frank Collins' family was broken, but splinters of it survive to this day. Dixon had miraculously survived the Battle of Shiloh only to be lost on the Hunley.

The fate of the European natives on the sub may be even sadder. Those men most likely left their homes years before, filled with the promise of life as a sailor. Their families were left to wonder about their fate.

Frozen in time by saltwater and sand, the crew of the Hunley found an even larger family posthumously. For the men and women who recovered the sailors and researched and studied them for several years, this was a very real goodbye and a bittersweet ending. They joined the few scattered descendents, most of them from Wicks' oldest daughter, in saying farewell to people who had come to feel like family.

Over the past weeks, there have been questions raised about the appropriateness of honoring men who fought for a cause that sought to preserve slavery. The people who helped lay the men to rest have not skirted the issue but have warned their critics not to judge history by modern standards. The eight men of the Hunley's final crew lived in a different world, and it is impossible to know their motivations a century after the fact.

For most people, this day was about honoring history and brave men and acknowledging that they played an important role in history. Maybe the rest is too complicated to be whittled down to a sound bite.

"I was in submarines in the Navy back in the 1970s," said Dennis Blejski, a member of the Hunley Honor Guard. "But I grieved for the Russian submariners in the Kursk, which was lost the same month the Hunley was raised. In my time at sea, they were our adversaries, but I knew what they were going through. In a way, they were our brothers."

Warren Lasch, chairman of Friends of the Hunley, said in his funeral remarks that is one of the lessons of the Hunley.

"All Americans have an obligation to remember their history," Lasch said.

At the end of a two-hour ceremony, Sgt. Wayne Wilson sounded taps on his bugle and the men of the Confederate privateer Hunley were committed to the earth. They were laid in a common grave, in the order they sat in the submarine, alongside the other 13 men claimed by the Hunley.

Lasch and some of the crew's descendents threw roses into the graves as McConnell read their names off a roster. The men go to their graves with questions lingering and blanks to be filled in about their mission and their fate. But the story now has an ending for these eight simple men -- sailors, adventurers, pioneers.

After 140 years and two months, they have been returned to the earth from which they came, their final rest interrupted by history and mystery.

They left Charleston as the anonymous crew of a secret weapon, and they returned as immortals. Their story will be told for generations, their contribution to maritime history finally recognized. After all these years, their mission is finished.

May they rest in peace.

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