Sixteen miles off northCarolina’s CapeHatterasand 240 feet beneath thesurface of the Atlantic, theocean bottom was as gray,pocked and silent as the moon.Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution’s Johnson-Sea-LinkII submersible slowed, and pilotDon Liberatore turned on itssonar. A thick smudge of whitelight pulsed like a heartbeat onthe readout, growing bigger bythe second. “It’s coming upright now,” Liberatore said. Hetoggled a switch, light floodedthe void, and the chiseled bowof the USS Monitor, the CivilWar’s most celebrated ship, appearedon the screen.
Liberatore steered the sub over theMonitor’s forward section, a wreckageof iron plates and frames that oncecomposed the officers’ and captain’squarters. Here, beneath a dim skylight140 years ago, acting assistant paymasterWilliam F. Keeler wrote to his wife,Anna, describing life aboard “our ironmonster.” Here, too, in the wardroom,commissioned officers shared meals,debated politics and discussed their innovativelittle ironclad’s next assignmentin a war that was tearing theyoung United States apart.
The sub moved slowly farther aft andhovered next to a 9-foot-tall, 22-and-ahalf-foot-wide revolving turret, the firstin naval history. Schools of small orangefish called red barbiers flittedabout the iron cylinder. “I feel like I canreach out and touch it,” said JohnBroadwater, his voice rasping in thesub’s headphones. An underwater archaeologistand manager of the MonitorNational Marine Sanctuary, Broadwaterwas among the first to explore thewreck after it was discovered by scientistsaboard DukeUniversity’s vesselEastward, in 1973, and has since championedthe effort to recover parts of it.He has guided the five-year partnershipbetween the National Oceanic and AtmosphericAdministration, whichoversees the sanctuary, and the U.S.Navy, whose divers have retrieved theship’s propeller, engine and hundredsof other artifacts. This past summer, theteam went for the turret itself. In July,Navy divers discovered that the two 11-inch Dahlgren cannons had notdropped out of the turret, as some historiansspeculated, when the Monitorsank on December 31, 1862, landing upsidedown on the ocean floor. Theyalso learned that at least two membersof the crew who were lost on that“night of horrors,” as Keeler put it, diedin the turret itself, their last and onlyrefuge from the storm-lashed sea.
The union navy brought out theMonitor on January 30, 1862, amid muchskepticism. “We heard every kind ofderisive epithet applied to our vessel—she was called a ‘silly experiment,’ an‘iron coffin for her crew’ & and wewere styled fool hardy for daring tomake the trip in her, & this too by navymen,” wrote Keeler. Designed bySwedish-American inventor John Ericsson,the Monitor was a hodgepodge ofcomponents never before joined: steampower, iron construction, a revolvingturret. Resembling a 173-foot-long blacklozenge, it looked more like a submarinethan a surface warship. The flatdeck cleared the water by only 14 incheswhen the ship was loaded. In themiddle sat the gigantic and ungainlyturret, shaped like a pillbox.
For centuries, the vagaries of windand current had played a major role inall naval battles. Wooden sailing shipsjockeyed with each other for hours oreven days, trying to come up broadsideso they could engage their guns withmaximum effectiveness. The Monitorchanged all that. With its iron constructiondesigned to deflect enemy fire,and its 400-horsepower steam engine,the Monitor eliminated traditional ships’two major weaknesses: a vulnerabilityto cannon shot and restricted maneuverability.But the revolving turret wasby far the Monitor’s most enduring innovation.Armed only with two16,000-pound cannons, the turret wasbuilt of eight layers of inch-thick ironbolted together and seated in a brassring. Two small auxiliary enginescalled donkey engines rotated the turret,enabling the Monitor to fire uponan enemy no matter where the shipwas situated.
This past summer, Broadwater anda crew of U.S. Navy divers werecamped out on the 300-foot derrickbarge Wotan, anchored off the NorthCarolina coast. Working in teamsaround the clock, 7 days a week for 41days, 162 divers had readied the Monitor’sturret for bringing it to the surface,cutting, hammering and dredging theirway through tons of concreted coral,coal and sediment to clear the turret’sinterior. When the capsized Monitorsank to the seafloor, a coal scuttle landedon top of the turret, filling it withtons of coal the crew had bunkered justbefore leaving the Chesapeake. At thisdepth, the surface-supplied divers hadat most 40 minutes before they had tobegin the 70-minute climb to sea level,stopping at way points so that theirbodies could slowly get rid of accumulatednitrogen that can cause the debilitatingand sometimes fatal diving sicknessknown as the bends. Once they’dfinished their last stop at 40 feet, theyhad only five minutes to swim to thesurface, climb onto the barge’s deck—where the team stripped off their 175pounds of gear—and get into the onboarddecompression chamber for up totwo more hours.
All that’s risky enough, but nearbywere the cowboys who ride evenwilder ponies—saturation divers, whodon’t return to sea level for up to tendays. In teams of two they worked onthe wreck for 12 hours, then climbedinto a diving bell pressurized at 230 feet.Winched back from the depths ontothe barge, the bell was joined to a clusterof huge, white decompressionchambers where the divers could safelyeat, sleep and live for the duration oftheir ten-day shift. Life under pressureis uniquely dangerous, even for ordinaryactivities. A tiny air bubble in acough drop can create a vacuum thatwill suck the lozenge against a diver’stongue or mouth with remarkableforce, leaving a painful ulcer. And returningto sea level was a 66-hour tripthrough another chamber.
Which is why they love it, of course.“Out of the Blue, Into the Black,” readone diver’s T-shirt, quoting Neil Young,who probably never considered hislyric quite so literally. Pound forpound, there was enough testosteroneon the Wotan this summer to supplyViagra Nation. These divers are thefront line for maritime disasters of allstripes, from the crash of twa Flight 800to the terrorist attack on the USS Cole.They dive on wrecks where they canbarely see and the bodies still have faces.
