• History & Archaeology

Pieces of History

Raised from the deep, the Monitor's turret reveals a bounty of new details about the ship's violent end

• By Wendy Mitman Clarke
• Smithsonian magazine, November 2002

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.

All that hard work paid off. They recoveredthe glass hydrometers that 25-year-old, first-class fireman GeorgeGeer would have used to measure thesalinity of seawater intended to fill theship’s boilers, and mustard and pepperbottles used to spice up the bland Navyfood. They found bones. The coal and sediment had preserved them remarkably well. “We found fully articulated skeletal remains,” says Wayne Lusardi,museum conservator at the Mariners’Museum in Newport News, Virginia.“Buttons were found at the wrists,down the thoracic cavity, near thewaist.” The dead sailor had carried aknife in his right front pocket; it wasfound resting on his right femur, enclosedwithin some wool fabric. Archaeologists believe the knife may yieldsome clues to the sailor’s identity. Later,they found a second skeleton. These remains are being treated as mias, andthey have been sent to the Army’sCentral Identification Laboratory inHawaii, where forensic anthropologistsare working to identify them.

Says Cmdr. Bobbie Scholley, commandingofficer of the Navy’s MobileDiving and Salvage Unit Two and headof this expedition’s dive operations,“We feel connected to the sailors, becausewe’re bringing them home.”

After seeing his iron home for thefirst time, Keeler wrote to Anna that“your better half will be in no moredanger from rebel compliments than ifhe was seated with you at home.” Itwas kind reassurance for a lonely wife.But the Union Navy was in a terriblehurry, for the Confederates had justunveiled a secret weapon, and hastewould almost undermine the Monitor.In April 1861, the Confederates occupiedthe Navy Yard at Hampton Roadsin Virginia and salvaged the Unionwarship Merrimack, which had beenscuttled nearby. They refitted her withsteam engines, sheathed her topsides iniron and armed her with ten guns, renamingher the CSS Virginia. (Unionsailors refused to call the ship by itsConfederate name, and many historiansperpetuated that insult well intothe 20th century. To this day, mostpeople still refer to her as the Merrimack.)The Virginia represented a seriousthreat to Union ships blockadingthe entrance to Hampton Roads,which ensured them access to northernsupply routes in the Atlantic and in theChesapeake Bay. The Union commandersfeared that their blockadingships wouldn’t stand a chance againstthe fortified Virginia. They neededbackup in a hurry.

By September, Union officials hadapproved a design. It took only anotherfour months to build the Monitor.With a complement of 11 officers and 48men, the ship set out March 6, 1862,from the Brooklyn Navy Yard in NewYork, bound for the Chesapeake Bayand the Virginia. A day into the voyage,the seas rose and the wind startedblowing furiously. The Monitor startedleaking. Water poured down throughthe turret on top of George Geer, whowas fighting a cold and had been tryingto rest in his hammock on the berthdeck. Paymaster Keeler looked up fromhis writing desk and saw waves washingover his small skylight. Waterflooded the stubby blower pipes, soakingthe belts that drove the ventilators.Toxic fumes from the coal-fired boilersfelled men where they stood, and theirmates carried fallen soldiers to the top ofthe turret for fresh air. Without sufficientdraft, the boilers began shuttingdown, leaving barely enough power torun the pumps.

It was an inauspicious—and nearly fatal—beginning for the Union Navy’s experimentand a portent of the ship’s fate.But when the storm blew itself out, theMonitor and her exhausted crew werestill afloat. Within three days after leavingNew York, they arrived in HamptonRoads in time to witness the Virginia’shorrifying handiwork that day: the 50-gun frigate Congress lay burning andwould soon explode; the sloop Cumberlandhad been rammed and then sunk; the steam frigate Minnesota sat groundedand useless off Newport News.

The next morning, March 9, 1862, theMonitor steamed over to the Union vesselMinnesota, whose crew memberswere frantically throwing whateverthey could get their hands on overboardin an attempt to lighten her andfree her keel. The Virginia approachedthe Minnesota, intent on finishing heroff. At first, the Confederate sailors paidlittle attention to the Monitor, whichwas half the Virginia’s length and satlow in the water. But when the Monitor’ssecond cannon-shot solidly hit theVirginia, the battle of the ironclads wasjoined. Hurling shot, sometimes from arange of only 20 feet, the two shipspummeled each other for four hours.

But it soon became clear that theMonitor’s guns were not capable of deliveringa deathblow to the Virginia.The guns’ designer, Capt. John A.Dahlgren, had expressed some concernsabout the integrity of the untestedcannons, so Lt. John L. Worden, theMonitor’s captain, had ordered his gunnersto load only one charge of gunpowderper firing. Later tests showedthese cannons could have handled threecharges, and historians have speculatedthat, had they done so, the Monitorwould have severely damaged or evensunk the Confederate vessel. As it was,the cannon only cracked several ironplates. As for the Monitor’s vaunted turret,at first it wouldn’t turn at all, becausethe drenching ride south had rustedthe control wheel. Even when ChiefEngineer Alban Stimers cleared the rust,he found the turret difficult to control orstop in time for an accurate shot.

Still the Monitor had made its point.

The Virginia’s balls had pocked anddented the turret—one vicious hitknocked unconscious two men inside.But the Monitor’s eight inches of armorand ability to fire from any position hadproved its tactical worth. Safe withinthe ship, none of the crew was seriouslyhurt; only Worden was badly injuredwhen he peered from the pilothousejust as a shell exploded. “Ourship resisted everything they could fireat her as though they were spit balls,”Geer wrote to his wife, Martha.

History would call the battle a stalemate,but by thwarting the Virginia’s effortsto sink the blockading fleet, theMonitor had preserved the Union’sstrategically important control of theChesapeake Bay. From President Lincolnto ordinary citizens, no one couldget enough of the little ship. Lincoln visitedthe vessel shortly after the battleand on other occasions during thespring and summer. Even NathanielHawthorne visited the ship“People seem to regard her as asort of irresistable war monster & anyonearriving from her as somethingmore than human,” Keeler wrote. Themen of the Monitor were heroes, bearersof their tormented nation’s right stuff.

It was an early morning in august2002, and the metal deck of the Wotanwas beginning to bake. Inside the graymetal container that served as the Navydive team’s command center, Scholley,Chief Warrant Officer Rick Cavey andJohn Broadwater anxiously watchedvideo monitors showing divers working240 feet below. A cold front wascoming from the northwest and a tropicaldepression spun to the south, eitherof which might suspend diving and puta disappointing end to the $14 millionproject after five long years of effort. Infour days, funds would be exhausted.

The divers had already centered a 25-ton, eight-legged grappling claw calledthe Spider over the turret and lowereda platform next to it. With the turretsafely embraced in the Spider’s clutch,what remained was to attach eightshackles and lifting straps to the legs;raise the turret and place it on the platform;anchor the Spider to the platformwith turnbuckles and more shackles;and then lift the whole thing.

That was the plan. But for the pastthree days rough water and strong bottomcurrents had made it impossible. Bythe next day, the approaching frontwould turn this unforgiving stretch ofwater into a maelstrom of 30-knotwinds and six-foot seas. Broadwater andScholley had been considering the possibilityof coming home empty-handed.It was now or never.

About 7 a.m., divers headed down tothe site and started attaching the 135-pound lifting shackles. Though the surfacewas calm, the bottom current remained“at the edge of the margins,”said Cavey. One of Cavey’s diversfound that the only way to fight thecurrent was to stab his knife into theseabed and pull himself along.

The sound of the ragged breathing ofthe divers filled the combox, a smallspeaker broadcasting the communicationamong the divers below the surface.When they talked, either to eachother or to colleagues on the surface,they sounded like Donald Duck, due tothe special mix of oxygen and heliumthey breathed.

Near the combox, a support team of22 additional divers listened and waited.A fully suited diver sat heavily in achair, ready to go below at a hint oftrouble. Another, dressed only in runningshorts, boots and tattoos, kept hiseyes riveted on the panel that controlledthe gas mix that the divers breathed.Several oversaw the umbilicals, a seriesof hoses that supplied the divers withair, communication and warm water,which was continuously pumpedthrough their suits. Another diver kepttime, checking a series of stopwatchesslung around his chest like bandoliers.

On the sea bottom, saturation diverChief Petty Officer Keith Nelson, alongwith two other divers, wrestled the lastshackle into place. “That’s it!” he said.Then Nelson helped the operator of theWotan’s 500-ton crane gently pluck thedislodged turret from the sea bottom.As it began to separate, the three diversfound themselves in a total blackout assediment swirled around them. Whenthe current finally swept the bottomclear, the crane slowly moved the Spiderover the platform. Slight swells atthe surface turned the 235-ton load intoan underwater wrecking ball: slammingdownward, it left four-inch indentationsin the platform’s three-eighthsinch-thick steel plate. Finally, the crewgot the platform attached, and the liftbegan. When the Monitor’s turret brokethe water’s surface, starfish and coralfell off, and seawater sluiced out itsgunports and over the clearly visibledents that the Virginia’s cannonballshad inflicted 140 years ago. Broadwaterstood momentarily speechless beforejoining the rest of the barge in stentorianwar whoops of victory.

Two months after the battle ofthe ironclads, the Union took the portof Norfolk. The Confederates groundedthe Virginia, set her on fire and let 18tons of powder in her magazine makesure that not one rivet would go to theUnion cause. Her nemesis gone, theMonitor sailed up the James River tospend a tedious, sweltering summershadowing Union Gen. George Mc-Clellan’s abortive peninsula campaign.“I have charge of the Thurmomitor,”Geer wrote to Martha on June 13, “and found in my store room, which is farthestastern, it stood at 110; in the engineroom 127; in the galley . . . 155; on theberth deck where we sleep 85.”

For the sailors, poor ventilationranked high on a long list of complaints.In October, the Monitor arrivedin Washington, D.C. and underwentseveral weeks of refitting, but then sherushed to Hampton Roads again, thistime to join two other monitor-classironclads ordered to take Wilmington,North Carolina. On Monday, December29, the Monitor left the Chesapeakeunder tow by the side-wheel steamerRhode Island.

Tuesday morning a storm startedbrewing. By nightfall, the Monitor wastaking the rough water head-on. “Theheavy seas rolled over our bows dashingagainst the pilot house &, surgingaft, would strike the solid turret with aforce to make it tremble,” Keeler wroteto Anna. The pounding soon took a tolland waves began sweeping the turret.Water—the Monitor’s most relentless enemy—started filling the ship. “I staid bythe pump untill the water was up to myknees and the cylinders to the pump engineswere under water and stoped,”Geer wrote. “She was so full of waterand roled and pitched so bad I was fearfullshe would role under and forget tocome up again.” By the time he and thelast dozen men got to the turret—theonly way to reach the deck—the Monitorwas sinking. They saw the Rhode Island’sboats coming to take them off.

“It was a scene well calculated to appallthe boldest heart,” Keeler wrote.“Mountains of water were rushingacross our decks & foaming along oursides.” As the men climbed down theturret and crawled toward the boats,the sea snatched at least two of themand swept them to their deaths. Therescue boats smashed against the ship’s side, the wind howled and the menscreamed into the roaring blackness.“The whole scene lit up by the ghastlyglare of the blue lights burning on ourconsort, formed a panorama of horrorwhich time can never efface from mymemory,” Keeler wrote. Geer jumpedfrom the turret and made for a boat justas a wave swept the man next to himoverboard. “As soon as the Wave hadpassed over . . . this time reached theBoat and was Saved, and I can tell youI would not like to try it over again.”After shedding most of his clothes,Keeler tried to climb down the turretbut found the ladder stacked with terrifiedsailors. He slid down a line hangingfrom one of the turret awning’sstanchions, and a wave immediatelyswept him across the deck, slamming him into a lifeline stanchion. “I graspedwith all the energy of desperation,” hewrote, and he pulled himself along theship deck’s lifelines until at last hereached a boat and was hauled aboard.

Atop the turret, a single lantern burned red. Just before 1 a.m., as the last boat left the Rhode Island to retrieve the remaining men, the light went out. The Monitor, along with 16 men, was gone.

Inside the turret, the only smell is ofthe sea. Coral clings to the metal shell.The one-and-a-quarter-inch-thick boltsthat hold the iron sheets together looklike gigantic rusty polka dots. The dentsmade by the Virginia’s cannon are thediameter of a soccer ball. Woodenblocks with hanks of rope lying in theirsheaves hang as if still waiting for a handto turn them. Ramrods and other toolsused by the gunners are scattered about.As soon as the turret was raised, archaeologistsfound the second skeleton.“They were lying very close togethernear one of the hatches in the turret’sroof,” says Broadwater. Preliminary excavationalso found fragments of a woolovercoat, rubber buttons with “U.S.Navy” inscribed on them, a comb madeof India rubber and, from one of thesailors’ pockets, a silver serving spoonwith an engraved design on it.

The turret arrived August 10 at theMariners’ Museum in Newport News,Virginia, where all of the artifacts recoveredfrom the Monitor are undergoingconservation, and was immediately immersedin an 86,000-gallon conservationtank. Thermometers, bottles and lanternchimneys; gimballed lantern holdersgraced with ornate Victorian filigree;bilge pump parts and ladders; the 36-tonengine encrusted with marine life—allbathe in a variety of containers, fromsmall tubs to construction-size Dumpsters,where a cocktail of chemicalsslowly removes the corrosive salts thathave permeated the metal parts.

It will take months for archaeologiststo finish the excavation of the turret anddiscern its secrets. And it will be years—an estimated 12 to 15—before the metal ofthe turret will be stable enough to beremoved from the conservation tank soit can be displayed for public viewing atthe soon-to-be-built USS Monitor Centerat the museum.

Meantime, Broadwater and his teamwill try to find a way to return to theship. They want to stabilize what remainsof the hull and perhaps exploresome of its forward sections, whereWilliam Keeler wrote his long lettersand the officers of the Monitor raisedtoasts to their doughty little ship. Now on the ocean floor, what’s left of theMonitor rests quietly, perhaps withmore stories yet to tell.

Excerpt from The Atlantic Monthly, July 1862by Nathaniel Hawthorne

At no great distance from theMinnesota lay the strangestlookingcraft I ever saw. It was aplatform of iron, so nearly on a levelwith the water that the swash of thewaves broke over it, under the impulseof a very moderate breeze; and on thisplatform was raised a circular structure,likewise of iron, and rather broad andcapacious, but of no great height. Itcould not be called a vessel at all; it wasa machine,—and I have seen one ofsomewhat similar appearance employedin cleaning out the docks; or, for lack ofa better similitude, it looked like a giganticrat-trap. It was ugly, questionable,suspicious, evidently mischievous,—nay,I will allow myself to call it devilish; forthis was the new war-fiend, destined,along with others of the same breed, toannihilate whole navies and batter downold supremacies. The wooden walls ofOld England cease to exist, and a wholehistory of naval renown reaches its period,now that the Monitor comes smokinginto view; while the billows dashover what seems her deck, and stormsbury even her turret in green water, asshe burrows and snorts along, oftenerunder the surface than above.The singularityof the object has betrayed me intoa more ambitious vein of descriptionthan I often indulge. . .

Going on board, we were surprisedat the extent and convenience of her interioraccommodations. There is a spaciousward-room, nine or ten feet inheight, besides a private cabin for thecommander, and sleeping accommodationson an ample scale; the whole welllighted and ventilated, though beneaththe surface of the water. Forward, or aft,(for it is impossible to tell stem fromstern,) the crew are relatively quite aswell provided for as the officers. It waslike finding a palace, with all its conveniences,under the sea. The inaccessibility,the apparent impregnability, of this submerged iron fortress are most satisfactory;the officers and crew get downthrough a little hole in the deck, hermeticallyseal themselves, and go below; anduntil they see fit to reappear, therewould seem to be no power given toman whereby they can be brought tolight. A storm of cannon-shot damagesthem no more than a handful of driedpeas. We saw the shot-marks made bythe great artillery of the Merrimack onthe outer casing of the iron tower; theywere about the breadth and depth ofshallow saucers, almost imperceptibledents, with no corresponding bulge onthe interior surface. In fact, the thinglooked altogether too safe; though it maynot prove quite an agreeable predicamentto be thus boxed up in impenetrableiron, with the possibility, one wouldimagine, of being sent to the bottom ofthe sea, and, even there, not drowned,but stifled. Nothing, however, can exceedthe confidence of the officers in thisnew craft. It was pleasant to see their benignexultation in her powers of mischief,and the delight with which theyexhibited the circumvolutory movementof the tower, the quick thrusting forth ofthe immense guns to deliver their ponderousmissiles, and then the immediaterecoil, and the security behind the closedport-holes. Yet even this will not long bethe last and most terrible improvementin the science of war. Already we hear ofvessels the armament of which is to actentirely beneath the surface of the water;so that, with no other external symptomsthan a great bubbling and foaming,and gush of smoke, and belch of smotheredthunder out of the yeasty waves,there shall be a deadly fight going on below,—and, by-and-by, a sucking whirlpool,as one of the ships goes down.