Return to Virginia Business - December 2002

by Paula C. Squires

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Resting upside down in a conservation tank at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, it looks large and squat — this icon from the Civil War’s most celebrated ship. The 120-ton gun turret of the ironclad Monitor is best known for hammering the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia with cannon balls during a famous battle for the Hampton Roads harbor in 1862. Nine months later, the Monitor sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C. Recovered only this past August, the turret draws visitors from near and far who come to get a peek at it through two small portholes carved in the 91,000-gallon tank.

For now, the turret itself is off limits to all but archaeologists. They’re excavating the interior, a damp, cave-like place where a fine mist drips constantly, keeping temperatures at a stable 47 degrees to protect against corrosion. Here, in the bowels of the turret, the Monitor slowly gives up secrets as the archaeologists dig through mounds of black, mucky silt in search of fragile artifacts. “It’s like a big treasure chest. You just never know what you’re going to find,” says Wayne Lusardi, one of the project’s conservators.

The turret is the latest catch for the Mariners’ Museum, a magnet for naval history buffs and business executives with a love of the sea who come to browse its comprehensive collections. For hobbyists in maritime history, Virginia is a good place to be, offering several prominent museums within a day’s drive. Besides the Mariners’ with its treasure trove of more than 35,000 items, there’s Nauticus — home of the battleship Wisconsin — on Norfolk’s waterfront. It offers everything from interactive exhibits simulating battlefield conditions to touch tanks where people can pet a starfish. A few hours away at the U. S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Md., visitors can browse exhibits of historic flags, naval medals and prints.
Still, the turret is the most exciting find in years, and the Mariners’ Museum and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which organized its recovery, graciously invited Virginia Business to take a look. Gingerly stepping down a wet, slippery ladder into the turret, I get an eerie feeling. I’m probably standing in the same spot where the ship’s gunners once stood.

Though coated in silt and rust the turret’s two 11-inch smooth-bore Dahlgren guns are clearly visible. Though rare, the Dahlgren guns are not as historically important as the gun carriages themselves, designed especially for the Monitor’s turret and unique in the world today. The wheel, which helped manipulate the gun carriages, is still there, dotted with tiny shell concretions. Besides ship machinery, archaeologists are unearthing human objects — a gold ring, a comb, a fully intact boot, even tiny mother-of-pearl buttons — stark reminders of the men who lived and worked on the Monitor before it slipped beneath the waves on that fateful New Year’s Eve 140 years ago.
Archaeologists know that two crewmen died inside the turret, because they found their skeletal remains. The small, gold ring and a pocketknife were found on the bones. “The fact that we helped bring home American service men, MIAs, was a very worthwhile cause for me. It’s something that I’ve never done on other archaeological projects,” says Lusardi, who has worked on other big-name shipwreck recoveries, including Queen Anne’s Revenge, Blackbeard’s flagship in Beaufort, N.C.

It might still be possible to learn the identities of the remains. They’ve been sent to the U. S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii where scientists will try to match them to DNA from the descendants of Monitor crewmen. Indeed, modern technology has played a big role in the turret’s recovery and is the reason more historic shipwrecks are being found now than ever before.
A series of steps led the way to recovering the 22-foot-diameter turret whose revolutionary rotating design and walls of armored plate sparked a new class of naval warships. Located in 240 feet of water about 16 miles off Cape Hatteras, the wreck site was 110 feet below the recommended limit for recreational divers, notes John Broadwater, manager of NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and director of turret excavation.

Only highly trained professional divers, many working from a pressurized bell on the sea’s bottom, could spend enough time on the ocean floor to find artifacts. Over the course of the Monitor’s five-year, $14 million recovery, most of the financing came from the U. S. Department of Defense, which saw it as an opportunity to train Navy divers in deep sea salvage. It wasn’t the only training opportunity: The conservation tank at the Mariners’ was designed and molded by students at the nearby Apprentice School of Northrop Grumman Newport News.

When divers went to raise the turret last summer, the same rough seas off Cape Hatteras that downed the Monitor nearly scuttled the recovery. All told, it took a 500-ton crane connected to an eight-pronged steel claw, plus a football field-size barge to lift the vessel’s largest and most well-known artifact. And when the turret finally broke the surface, “There is just no forgetting that moment,” says Broadwater. “This is probably the most famous piece of a shipwreck in history.”

Artifacts collected from the Monitor on earlier expeditions are already displayed in a permanent collection at the Mariners’ and include the ship’s anchor, a bottle of Gray’s Hair Restorative (a precursor perhaps to our modern day Rogaine?) and a brass lantern that historians believe may have cast the red distress signal seen just before the Monitor sank.

Now that the museum can also claim the turret, Civil War scholars and tourists are expected to flock to the 550-acre park complex. “There’s nothing like the power of the magic of the real thing,” says museum President John B. Hightower. And if the turret’s magic isn’t enough, patrons can always explore vast collections of international ship models, maritime paintings, navigational instruments and intricately carved figureheads. The museum’s library, which boasts the largest maritime collection in the Western hemisphere, already draws scores of researchers and genealogists from around the world who pore over maps, ship’s logs and letters detailing life at sea dating back to the 16th century.

As my visit to the turret ends, I climb out reluctantly. Although mud splatters my clothes and notebook and my hands are so cold I can barely write, it’s hard to leave. I may never get that close to history again.

If you’re going:
For more information on museum hours and admission,
call (800) 581-7245.

Virginia Business - December 2002