Tuesday, December 25, 2012

What Happened To 'Em Part II...Congress and Cumberland

What Happened To 'Em Part II
Congress and Cumberland


I know what everyone's thinking...we know what happened to 'em, Rob...they got sunk!
Yeah, but what happened to the wrecks? Are they still on the bottom of Hampton Roads? Is anything left of 'em?

USS Congress: We'll start with the easiest of the two to deal with...U.S.S. Congress.

After sinking USS Cumberland on March 8, 1862, Virginia engaged USS Congress, ultimately setting her on fire with hot shot. Congress burned for hours before the flames reached her magazines sometime around midnight, give or take an hour or so. That's when she exploded...spectacularly, I might add. Then her still burning hulk, which had burned to the waters edge, slid off of the sand bar stern first and went to the bottom. But the question is, what happened to the wreck?
Virginia leaves U S S Congress burning after lighting her off with hot shot.


This ones an easy one. Congress sat on the bottom until September 1865, when her guns and fittings were salvaged. Most of her hull was then raised and towed up the Elizabeth River to Norfolk Navy Yard, right past the wreck of her nemesis CSS Virginia. Her burned out hulk was sold for scrap and she was broken up for the valuable undamaged timbers below her water line, the metal supports for her masts, and any other valuable components left undamaged. Also, some of her sails were apparently stored below, far enough below decks to be undamaged by the fire as they were used to make a memorial flag.

Because Congress sank in shallower water than Cumberland, salvage crews were able to build a cofferdam around the wreck and pump the water out in order to examine it in further detail. They determined that when her magazienes exploded it damaged her hull far too badly to even think about tryig to raise her in one piece Therefore she was only partially salvaged, with part of her hull left on the bottom

Ok,  some of her was still at the wreck site after the salvage operation. You have to keep in mind, though, the fact that she was raised almost 150 years ago so even though they left part of her hull on the bottom when they raised her there's likely very little if anything left at her wreck site today. With all the dredging that goes on in Hampton Roads, not to mention the constriction of the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge Tunnel right next to the wreck site, what little bit of her that may have been left on the bottom is very likely long-gone. 


Satellite image of the wreck sites straddling the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge Tunnel. The Congress site was marked on the image...I had to guestimate Cumberland';s location, which might be a further out


USS Cumberland: Cumberland, of course, also met her demise at the hands of CSS Virginia on March 8th, 1862, going down with all flags flying. According to a report made about 10 days after her sinking, she ended up about 2400 feet off of and perpendicular to the shoreline in about 65 feet of water with her masts visible and tilted at about 45 degrees. It was even suggested strongly at the time that she could not only be salvaged, but raised and repaired as her hull really wasn't damaged that badly.
Cumberland as she appeared a few days after her sinking


The wreck site today, from just about the same angle and location. If this was taken from where I think it was taken from, it's the only small...and I'm talking tiny... area near the wreck site that looks this rural and secluded. The huge expanse of the Norfolk International Terminal is just to the right, and a long pier is just hidden behind the trees on the right side of the picture.


I have a feeling that her masts were removed fairly soon after her sinking as a hazard to navigation. I couldn't find anything that confirmed it, but removing obstructions that could be put another ship on the bottom at the same spot would just make sense.

Cumberland hasn't been lonely in her watery grave. In fact she's had pretty high class company for the past century and a half or so but her wreck had nothing to do with the sunken ship that's been keeping her company. Politics and possible shenanigans, however, very definitely did. The Commerce Raider CSS Florida sank almost right next to her in November 1864 after being captured by the U.S. Navy and taken to Hampton Roads. Florida was at anchor and sank after a collision with a troop ferry that occurred under very questionable circumstances. Hell, the very fact that she was in Hampton Roads in the first place was more than a little questionable. Yeah, I think we'll take a more detailed look at CSS Florida and her fate in a later article! But I digress...Back to USS Cumberland!

Salvage work started on Cumberland as soon as the war ended with several firms sending proposals to the navy and one bid for $48,000 actually being accepted. The company that made the successful bid, however, rethought their proposal after examining the wreck more closely and backed out, never to be heard from again. Two other firms pulled the same stunt and further salvage of the wreck was held off until the Summer of 1865.

 Again the original plan was to raise her, tow her to Norfolk Navy Yard, and scrap her after everything useful had been stripped off of her. Hey, they managed to raise most of Congress after she burned and exploded, and Cumberland went down in one piece...she'd be easy to raise!

Guess again. Cumberland’s wreck went down in the middle of the main channel where the current ran at a constant two or so knots, moving the bottom sand around at will and consequently filling Cumberland's hull with several hundred tons of the stuff. They didn't have vacuum dredges back in 1865 so, with raising her both economically and technologically unfeasible, on the bottom she stayed. They did salvage her guns and some of her fittings, and possibly something else, a little item that generated lots...and lots...and lots of interest and speculation back then and still does to this day.

When she went down a chest containing some $40,000 worth of gold coin, the payroll for the crews of the Union ships involved in the blockade of Hampton Roads, supposedly went down with her. In case you don't have an inflation calculator handy, I did the math. That's a shade over half a million dollars in today's money. Yeah, that just might have generated a bit of curiosity, interest, and such.

This chest was located in the Paymasters stateroom deep within the bowels of the ship, and required some seriously dangerous operations to even attempt to reach. Remember, this was the mid to late 1800s and diving technology wasn't all that well developed, ditto equipment for working and actually seeing anything beneath the surface. One firm blew a hole in her stern and worked their way forward towards the Paymasters cabin under dangerous conditions and with little or no visibility. One of their divers was actually pulled out of the wreck unconscious on a couple of occasions. (IMHO, that guy used his entire quota of luck up in those two or three dives. If a diver gets trapped in a shipwreck today, with all of the modern technology we have at our disposal, his chances of survival are not all that good. They were all but nil in the 1860s).


The wild thing is, all of it was for nothing because none of the teams that went after the chest ever found it. Records actually indicated that the chest was removed during the earliest salvage attempts in 1865, and that even then it may have been empty or nearly so as the pay had likely already been distributed. Any content found in the chest, of course, would have reverted back to the Treasury Dept. Word of the recovery of the chest wasn't spread widely at all, thus interest in the chest continued well into the 20th century, with the Navy getting inquiries about it into the 1970s.

The wreck was forgotten after the initial salvage and rush of treasure hunting, at least it was until one day in 1909 when the British steamer Queen Wilhelmina's anchor stopped dead when they tried to raise it. They tried using the steam powered anchor windlass to pull the anchor free of whatever had it but all it did was strain futily without budging the anchor another inch.  I'm guessing that when the windlass actually began pulling the bow down and over...or maybe when it started making really nasty, expensive sounding noises...they stopped trying to raise the anchor and called for a local salvage company to send divers down to unsnag it.

Guess what wreck Wilhelmina was anchored only a few dozen yards from, and whose anchor chain her anchor was snagged on. The diver's freed the Wilhelmina's anchor, then decided to raise the chain as well...all 1080 feet of it...so they wouldn't have to come out and dis-tangle any more anchors from the thing. I don't know if they tried selling it, or just decided to be charitable, but the entire chain ended up in Richmond, with 100 feet or so displayed in front of the Museum of the Confederacy and the remaining 980 or so feet dumped in a pile at Tredegar Iron Works, about a mile or so away. The chain is supposedly still there, or was a few years ago...sounds like a quick trip with a camera to me!

After all of the salvage efforts had pretty much petered out and most of the people who might have remembered where Cumberland went down had passed away the wreck's location was, well, forgotten. Fishermen knew something was snagging nets, etc, but there are a lot of sunken objects that could do just that. Other than muttered and not so muttered curses, depending on how expensive the lost rig might be, no one gave a thought to just what might be snagging and taking their nets. The area was just noted as a black hole into which fishing nets and lures were cast, never to return.

One of the first serious efforts to find the wreck (Along with that of CSS Florida) was launched in 1980 by Clive Cussler's NUMA in collaboration with the Virginia Research Center for Archeology. Despite several months worth of effort that search didn't even locate a clue to the Cumberland's or the Florida's resting places.

NUMA launched another search in 1980, this time teaming up with Underwater Archaeological Joint Ventures out of Yorktown, Va and this time they got smart and asked local watermen where they had been loosing nets, regularly breaking fishing lines, etc...A resource they had overlooked the year before. This time, using information provided by the locals and remote side scanning sonar they found two 'significant' wrecks. Significant in this usage meaning 'Big and Fairly Extensive'. Divers went down, explored the sites, and brought up loads of artifacts including Cumberland's ship's bell which  pretty much eliminated any question as to one of the wrecks' identity.
Further archaeological investigations of the sites took place back in 1983 and 1986 as well as some...er...unauthorized investigation and artifact recovery, most notably in 1989. That was the year that a pair of local watermen teamed up with a pair of local antique dealers and launched several low tech explorations of the wreck site...low tech in that they used clamming tongs to see just what kind of interesting and potentially profitable objects they could bring to the surface. In the process of 'exploring' Cumberland's wreck they damaged the wreck site, badly damaged several of the artifacts through amateurish conservation methods, and brought attention to themselves that was not even vaguely profitable. Interestingly enough when they were caught they claimed they had absolutely no clue that what they were doing was illegal. The US Government and Law Enforcement thought differently. In fact they very strongly frown upon such activities...They call it looting of a historic site. And a felony.

The idio...er, I mean seriously misinformed and misunderstood watermen unfortunately melted down some of the metal artifacts to make 'Made from metal recovered from …' Type tokens and trinkets. Many of the rest of them were damaged severely buy both the salvage and the botched attempts at conservation. After their trial, a good number of the artifacts that the watermen recovered were turned over to the Mariner's Museum collection, but unfortunately the above noted mishandling of the items damaged them severely before the Museum got them. Therefore they're in the Museum’s collection, but unfortunately not on display.

 Things are looking up for them though...nearly 300 artifacts were sent to the Warren Lasch Conservation Center (The very same conservation team that's working on CSS Hunley) using monies generated through a conservation grant through the Navy Cultural Resources budget.

As if unauthorized amateur artifact hunters wasn't enough of a threat to Cumberland's remains the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge Tunnel was built in the early 90s, connecting Suffolk and Newport News. The wreck sites straddle the Bridge-Tunnel with Congress' site just to the east, and Cumberland's and Florida's sites a little further to the west. This of course, potentially further imperiled the sites (And likely finished off what little may have been left at the USS Congress site.) but steps were taken to preserve Cumberland’s and Florida's wrecks. Over the last several years The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, The Naval History and Heritage Command, and The Hampton Roads Naval Museum have sponsored several surveys to ensure the sites' stability, the last one in June of 2012.

Recent image of Cumberland's wreck. This is from the port side...Virginia rammed her on the starboard side.


Cumberland still rests quietly on the bottom, mostly buried by sand and obscured by the murky waters of Hampton Roads. And while there are lots of questions still to be answered, she still holds one more big mystery With all of the salvage, exploration, high tech imagery and manual searching that's been accomplished one item has never been found, so the  question still remains...

Where is C S S Virginia's ram?



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NOTES, LINKS, AND STUFF.


A bit of a disclaimer here...Almost all of the information you can find online about the wreck sites is about Cumberland's wreck, for the obvious reason that she still sits on the bottom. Hopefully though I managed to get a little bit of interesting information on this thing about both ships...both of their crews fought courageously and gallantly against insurmountable odds, and both crews should be remembered and honored equally. 


Both Cumberland's and Congress Legacy is their part in The Battle of Hampton Roads, but both ships had distinguished careers before the Civil War as well. Her first trip was a Diplomatic mission to the Mediterranean and she was alsowas heavily involved in the Mexican American war in 1846. 

The courage of Cumberland's crew became legendary, and was lauded and applauded by both sides. Several poems and songs were written about USS Cumberland and her battle with Virginia, and a number of them are included in an article in  'The Daybook', the newsletter of The Hampton Roads Naval Museum...a link to it's provided below.

Some things never change, and one of thse things is politics getting in the way of Doing The Right Thing. Despite the universal applause and commendation given Cumberland's captain and crew they were not rewarded or even officially commended by the Navy, a slight which pissed off members of the Navies on BOTH sides. This was finally corrected in 1884 when prize money for neutralizing Virginia's threat to the blockade was awarded to Cumberland's crew...This is detailed in an excellent and very detailed article about the battle in 'The Daybook...It's the second Daybook article linked below.

When the waterrment and antique dealers who pilfered the artifacts from Cumberland's wreck site were tried and convicted, no jail time or fines resulted, the opinion being that the nere fact of a felony conviction on their records was punishment enough. I ruly hope they realized just how lucky they were...a felony conviction seldom results in absolutely no active punishment.
 
 

LINKS

All but inevitably we start off with the Wikipedia articles about both ships:


Cumberland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cumberland_%281842%29


NOAA has another very detailed and informative article about Cumberland...both before and after her sinking:


Extremely detailed PDF Document about Cumberland's wreck site, prepared bu the U.S. Navy underwater archeology branch in 2007. You need Adobe Reader to view it.:


Another good article, in the Hampton Roads Naval Museum's newsletter The Daybook about Cumberland's salvage and her wreck. Also in PDF format and also requiring Adobe Reader:


Another PDF format issue of The Daybook, with several excellent articles about Cumberland included. 




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Saturday, November 17, 2012

What Happened to 'Em? Virginia and Monitor

What Happened to 'Em After The Battle, Part I
Virginia and Monitor


So, after The Battle of Hampton Roads, The Virginia And the Monitor faded into history, never to be seen or heard from again...oh no, wait. Actually that's not what happened. Neither ship had a long career after the battle, and both died spectacularly...but in two entirely different ways.

Bein' a good Ol' Southern Boy, I'll kick this portion off with the fate of CSS Virginia...

 The U.S. Navy bolstered the blockading fleet with several new arrivals after the battle. One was USS Galena (One of the original Union ironclad design considerations, she was a conventional broadside warship that had armor added to her. From all accounts this addition wasn't a huge success. And yep, I'm going to take a closer look at her, too.). Another new addition was U.S.R.C E.A.Stevens, an experimental two screw ironclad owned by the US Revenue Cutter Service, and loaned to the Navy. USS Minnesota had been repaired and had rejoined the blockade fleet.

After her little dust-up with Monitor, Virginia steamed back to Gosport where she was immediately dry-docked for repairs. A new wrought iron and steel ram was fitted to her bow, her armor was repaired, new gun port shutters were fitted, and she was generally overhauled and reconditioned. Her crew was still determined to break the Union blockade as well as spoiling for another fight with the Monitor. They'd be unsuccessful in both endeavors

At about the same time Commodore Josiah Tatnall took over command of the Confederate Naval Forces in Hampton Roads from Admiral Buchanon.  He was to be frustrated in every turn during his short tenure. Not only did Monitor ignore his attempts to draw her into battle, Virginia stayed in dry dock for all but thirteen of the forty-five days that he was in command. He did note, in reference to Virginia's tendency to stay in drydock, that the Union forces were apparently overly impressed with Virginia's power and efficiency (And if truth be known, the South was equally over-impressed with her.)
Virginia's crew spent a good bit of the thirteen days they were afloat and not drydocked trying to goad Monitor's crew into a rematch. Wasn't gonna happen...Virginia's crew may have been spoiling for another fight, but Monitor, wouldn't come out to play. This had nothing to do with the collective attitudes of Monitor's crew, and most certainly had nothing to do with their courage. If anything, they were probably beyond frustrated and more than a little pissed off at the U.S.Navy brass, because they had actually been forbidden to engage Virginia.

 Virginia's crew didn't know this, of course. They made several sorties out into Hampton Roads trying to draw Monitor into another battle, but the two ironclads never engaged each other in battle again, much as Virginia's crew tried...and believe me, they definitely tried. In the process of trying to get Monitor to fight and likely pushing her crew to record-busting levels of frustration, Virginia's crew still scored a minor victory or two. On April 11th, the powers that be in the Confederate Navy decided that if the Monitor wouldn't come out and fight on her own, they'd make her come out . So, Virginia, accompanied by Jamestown and five other vessels sailed across Hampton Roads in full view of the Union squadron, figuring they'd come out and engage them...I mean the Confederate ships crews were all but thumbing their noses at the Union crews at close range. No freaking WAY they’d put up with that. Right??? Well...wrong. The crews of the Union vessels, under strict orders not to engage, simply watched and very likely fumed silently.

When the Confederate crews realized that the crews of the Union ships weren't going to so much as shoot a spitball at them they took it up another notch. They quickly moved in and captured a trio of merchant vessels, namely the brigs Marcus and Sabout and the schooner Catherine T. Dix. They did this, again, right under the noses of the watching Union fleet. To rub salt into their wounds, the Confederate prize crews flipped the captured vessels' flags upside down, then towed them back across The Roads, in full view of the Union crews fifteen hundred or so yards away. This was probably one of the strangest 'battles; of the entire war, and I would have truly loved to have been a fly on the wall...er, bulkhead...on any of the vessels involved, be they U.S.Navy, Confederate Navy or captured merchant vessels. I have a feeling that the conversations would have been priceless.

This wasn't Virginia's last attempt to engage Monitor by any means. On May 8th, , a day shy of The Battle of The Ironclads two month anniversary, Monitor and the rest of the Union squadron ventured out and started shelling the Confederate shore fortifications near Norfolk. Virginia's crew (Likely thinking something along the lines of 'We actually do something when our people are attacked) steamed out and headed for the attacking squadron, crew at battle stations, guns loaded and ready, and...and...

The Union squadron spotted Virginia boiling across Hampton Roads with a bone in her teeth, turned tail, and ran beneath the guns of their own shore batteries on the North side of the James River and on Rip-Raps Island. These batteries then started firing on Virginia as she advanced on the Union squadron...at one point shells from the shore batteries were falling a half mile or so beyond her (And the gunners must have been pretty lousy shots as not a single round is reported to have hit Virginia). At this point, Commodore Tatnall decided that he's accomplished his goal...they had put a stop to the bombardment. Virginia returned to her anchorage. She had two days to live.

Two days later, on the tenth of May, Federal forces took Norfolk. Their arrival had been anticipated for a while actually, and all of Virginia's tenders took part in removing Confederate property, and taking it up the James...we'll get into their fates in a bit. Virginia's crew had a problem though. She was actually a steam powered self propelled battery, and had no sea keeping ability what so ever. Anything rougher than near mill-pond conditions would sink her in a heart-beat. So escaping into the Atlantic was out of the question, even if she could have made it past the beefed up blockade fleet.
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Heading up the James, towards Richmond would have been her best option, but they had another problem. Remember her deep draft...guess what. The repairs and modifications made after the battle made her heavier, increasing her draft by about a foot. Back then there was a sand bar at the mouth of the James.(Still is, in fact, but the channel through it is kept nice and deep and wide these days). The depth at the sand bar back then was somewhere between 18 and twenty feet. Virginia drew between 23 and 24 feet.

There was absolutely no way they'd make it over that bar, not without being lightened considerably. They threw coal and supplies overboard, lightening her until she barely had enough coal aboard to make it to Drewry's Bluff, (Just south of Richmond), and until a couple of feet of her unarmored wooden hull was exposed. Even after all of this her draft was still too deep to make it over the bar.

Tatnall decided that there was only one other alternative left. Norfolk was in Union hands, and the Navy Yard would soon follow....she no longer had a home port. She also had no way to escape Hampton Roads. And she absolutely couldn't be allowed to fall into Union hands.

Her guns were unloaded and placed aboard another vessel to be transported to the Confederate base at Drewry's Bluff, then she was taken up the Elizabeth River and run aground just off of Craney Island. Her battle ensign was lowered and removed. Her decks were swabbed sown with fat, tallow, lamp oil, and anything else that would burn, and powder trails were lain throughout her hull and gun deck. Lt Jones was the last man off of her, and he dropped a match onto one of the powder trails before quickly boarding a small boat with the remainder of the crew. They pulled hard for shore, watching as flames quickly took hold of Virginia, rolling from the gun ports as heavy smoke pushed from vents and seams.

Artist's impression of Virginia burning off of Craney Island


Artists impression of Virginia exploding off of Craney island. This isn't entirely accurate as it was well after midnight when she blew up...it would have been dark rather than daylight.


 Early on the morning of May 11th, fire finally reached her magazines and she exploded spectacularly, scattering pieces of her casemate for a hundred or so yards in all directions. her remains going to the bottom in less than a minute.

In 1865 the schooner Priscilla tore her hull open on the wreck and sank next to Virginia's remains, resulting, belatedly, in the wreck being declared a Hazard to Navigation. More explosive charges were used to flatten the wreck.

 Because she was on the bottom within all but wading distance of Craney Island it stands to reason that she was heavily salvaged. In 1874 B.J.Baker and Company salvaged a good bit of her, then the most extensive salvage was accomplished by Captain William West in 1875-76. In 1875, one of his lighters, loaded down with old iron and a couple of cannon (Apparently all of her guns weren't removed) sank at the Portsmouth ferry landing. In 1876, A good portion of her hull was raised, pumped out and towed to Gosport, then dry docked in Dry Dock#1...the very graving dock where she was built. Her machinery was removed, and she was broken up for scrap and souvenirs. Some of her woodwork was used to make canes. Unfortunately, no pictures of her wreck in the graving dock are known to exist.

Though this map's from 1812, this gives you a pretty good idea of what Craney Island looked like in 1862. I also added an approximation of the present day Reclamation Area, and the wreck site.

 Thing is, there has always been a good bit of controversy concerning just how much of her was actually salvaged. It was reported that her bottom timbers...most of what remained of her hull...broke in two when they raised her, part of it settling back to the bottom.
Craney Island, of course, still exists, though not in the form and shape it had in 1862. A large area that didn't exist in 1862 was formed from reclaimed dredged material, and has been made into a wildlife refuge. The actual Island itself (Now a peninsula) was made into a fuel farm and ship refueling station in the early portion of World War II. ***Note...the U.S.Navy site about the fuel depot notes that it's been a fuel depot since 1918.*** During the process of building the site, the Elizabeth River was dredged to 42 feet from it's original 18 foot depth, potentially, and very likely dredging any remains of Virginia out of existence. End of story, right? Ahhhhhhh...wrong!


C S S Virginia's wreck site, denoted by the red oblong just to the east of the Craney Island Reclamation Area. That area, BTW, is entirely man made. The actual island, now a peninsula, is just to the south of the wreck site, and is now a U S Navy Fuel Depot (Their largest, in fact). The channel to this fuel depot was dredged to 42 feet in W W II, likely obliterating any remains of Virginia.  To orient you, the wreck site's at the mouth of the Elizabeth River, and Norfolk International Terminal is immediately to the east. The bridge on the extreme left of the pic is the south end of the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel.

NUMA...Clive Cussler's outfit...searched for her in the late 90s, and found nothing. But the story doesn't end quite yet. In 2003, while surveying for a possible eastward expansion of Craney island, two wrecks, right next to each other were found, and speculation is that this could be the wrecks of both Virginia, and of the schooner Priscilla. A boiler was actually raised...but it can't be one of Virginia's boilers because both were raised during the initial salvage operations. So far, there has been no determination made as to just what these wrecks may actually be. SO we may never know. And if it is Virginia, it's likely that not much of her's left. But it'd be nice to think some parts of her are still on the bottom of the Elizabeth River, within sight of the waters where she made history.

While Monitor got most of the modern era glory, some artifacts from Virginia remain. This is one of the cannon that was damaged during her battle with Cumberland and Congress
 

USS Monitor.

After The Battle, Monitor was tasked with defending the blockade fleets wooden warships...exactly what she'd been sent to do in the first place. And as noted above, she was absolutelony forbidden to engage Virginia again unless she was attacked, and by 'Attacked' they apparently meant 'Broadsides At Point Blank Range, which wasn't going to happen. Her commander had basically been told 'If Virginia even looks like she's going to try to engage, you are to retreat'. Bet Monitor's crew just loved those orders.
But being good officers and sailors, they followed those orders to a 'T' and there was never a 'Battle Of The Ironclads II...The Rematch', much as both crews would have loved it. This doesn't mean she didn't see any more action of course. She shelled fortifications in Hampton Roads, as noted above. Then, on May 15th, 1862 she steamed up the James River along with four other gunboats to engage and hopefully neutralize the batteries at Drewry's Bluff (Just south of Richmond and about a mile or so from where I'm writing this.).
Painting of The Battle of Drewry's Bluff. Monitor is visible near the far bank of the River at he beginning of the bend to the left, broadside to the gun emplacement. Her guns could not elevate high enough to engage the guns of the fort effectively. Note the obstacles just below the gun emplacement...several ships were sunk mid-river to keep Union naval forces from reaching and shelling Richmond. While most of the obstacles were removed after the war, there are still some remains of these obstacles buried beneath the mud on the river bottom. Dredging has done a pretty good job of breaking any remains up.





Same view today. The gun emplacement shown in the painting has been recreated at the site, and I was actually standing just to the right and ahead of the cannon when I took this shot.  The bend in the river hasn't changed much at all in 150 years, though the area is far more wooded than it was then. Don't let the woods fool you...this is just off of Jeff Davis Highway, near Richmond, and heavily developed...note the modern industry just up-river. There's also a fuel tank farm just north of the site.

Unfortunately her design got in the way of her mission...Drewry's Bluff was and still is just that, a bluff, and gun emplacements were a good fifty feet or a bit more above the James River. Monitor's guns wouldn't elevate enough the engage the battery effectively. Fort Darling's (The actual name of the fort at Drewry's Bluff) guns, however, could rain shot and shell down on them with near impunity. The other four gunboats found this out all too well when they were turned back by the fort's guns after a battle which lasted about four hours. One little note here...one of the Union ships that participated in the battle...and actually gave the Confederate gun crews something to think about...Was USS Galena...one of the original ironclad concepts looked at by the Ironclad board. She'll be examined iun more detail ay some point.

 After being turned back at Drewry's Bluff, Monitor returned to Hampton Roads and remained at anchor for the rest of the summer, backing up the blockade fleet. Then in September she went to Washington Navy Yard for an overhaul and refit (Again, the weather must have been pretty calm for both legs of this trip as she had to go up the Chesapeake Bay to the Potomac River. Trust me, the bay can get pretty rough when it wants to).

She'd been back in Hampton Roads for only a couple of months when she was ordered to Wilmington, N.C. to reinforce the blockade of that port. USS Rhode Island...a big side wheel steamer that acted as a capable Jack Of All Trades for the U.S Navy...was assigned to tow Monitor.
Rhode Island had towed several of the low freeboard Monitor class gunboats south over the preceding months with no incident, so maybe that gave them a bit of false confidence. Maybe they had forgotten just how close Monitor came to sinking while being towed from New York to Hampton Roads. Or maybe they forgot how quickly the weather could turn ugly out on the Atlantic during the winter. One thing is known for sure...this turned out to be one of the top ten bad decisions of The Civil War.

She left Norfolk under tow for Wilmington at 2PM on December 29, 1862 and encountered calm seas and light winds for the first twelve or fourteen hours of the trip...this changed at about five the next morning when swells started running. She had steam up for her ventilation fans and pumps, and her funnel was fitted so she wouldn't ship water into her furnaces through her furnace exhaust uptake, which among other Bad Things, would put out her fires. Before she left Norfolk, oakum caulking had been forced into the gap between her turret and her deck. She was also using her engines to assist in maneuvering. But she was not designed to handle heavy seas.
They entered the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream at about 6:30PM on the thirtieth...Monitor pulled up alongside Rhode Island and Commander Bankhead advised that if they got into trouble he'd hoist a red lantern to the top of her turret mast...then they trailed back in tow. The weather kept getting rougher and Monitor, rather than riding the waves, plunged through them, often appearing to be entirely submerged. To make matters worse one of her towlines let go, and she really began to yaw and roll. This motion, as well as the the shock of her armored raft coming down...hard...against ocean's surface as she plunged into a trough knocked hunks of oakum out of the gap between turret and deck, and water began pouring in through that opening as well as every other vent and hull opening it could find. By 8pm her bilges were full and there was an inch of water in the engine room.

Bankhead ordered her pumps started...first the small Worthington bilge pumps, then her big 3000 GPM centrifugal pump, and they kept up at first...then were breaking even...then started falling behind. Water was reaching the coal bunkers and the damp coal wasn't burning hot enough to keep her steam pressure up. Normally kept at 80lbs, it dropped to 20 lbs.

 Rhode Island tried to turn her into the wind, and this seemed to help for a short time, but by 9:30 PM, she was once again plunging through deep troughs that submerged her briefly to the top of her turret...where several crew members were huddled including Ships Surgeon Grenville Weeks who was able to give a blow by blow description of Monitor's death.

Very likely the best known rendition of Monitor's sinking, with Rhode Island in the background, and the crew desperately trying to get aboard one of Rhode Island's boats as another draws near that ship.
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.By 10PM, her ventilation blowers were spitting water and it was obvious that Monitor was doomed. Even with both pumps running and the big centrifugal pump tossing an eight inch thick stream of water overboard, they weren't able to keep up with the rising water. Bankhead decided to make preparation to abandon ship while she still had steam up for the pumps. He ordered the red lantern hoisted, and ordered the towline...which had sagged, making her even more unmanageable...cut. Master Mate Louis Stodder, Boatswain's Mate John Stocking, and Quarter Gunner James Fenwick immediately climbed down the side of the turret and struggled forward against the seas, Fenwick and Sticking were swept overboard, becoming the first two crew members lost in the ensuing disaster.. Stodder managed to cut the line, then somehow made it back to the turret.

The is lantern was the last thing anyone saw of Monitor before she went down...and was the first artifact recovered from the wreck site. It was found on the bottom next to the turret, amazingly intact but in very fragile condition. It was sent to the Smithsonian Institute for preservation, and spent 7 years there before being returned to the mariner's Museum for display.

 
At 11PM, Rhode Island's engines were stopped, and her boats were launched and their crews pulled towards the Monitor, which is riding lower in the water by the minute. Rhode Island is about to have her own problems though. At 11:30, Bankhead ordered Monitor's engine stopped so all steam could be used for the pumps...but this quickly became a moot point as water finally and inevitably poured into her furnaces, with a sizzling roar that very likely sent stinking steam throughout the ship. That, as they say, was the ball game.

 Bankhead officially ordered the crew to abandon ship. Weeks and several other sailors, hanging on to the safety ropes for all they were worth, headed forward. Three of them are immediately swept away. William Keeler, whose letters to his wife gave us such detailed insight to life aboard Monitor and one the best blow by blow descriptions of the battle that exists, had to slide down a rope from the top of the turret when he found the ladder to the deck packed with terrified sailors. A wave slammed him against one of the lifeline stanchions, and he barely made it to one of the boats.

Neither ship was under power and they drifted together...literally, catching one of Rhode Island's launches between the two hulls. Miraculously the boat not only stayed afloat, but sixteen of Monitor's crew managed to scramble aboard and were taken aboard Rhode Island...but not before a little extra drama occurred aboard the paddle wheeler. Her captain, meanwhile, had ordered her engines started back up in order to pull away from Monitor, but she immediately managed to run over her towline and get it tangled in one of her paddle wheels. Rhode Island's engines were stopped, then several of her crew climbed into the wheel box to try cutting away the towline (Bet THAT was a ride in those seas!) and managed to cut it free by 12:15AM on the 31st. 

By 12:30 most of Monitor's crew had gotten aboard Rhode Island's boats, but there wasn't quite enough room and several of her crew have to hang on to the top of the turret as the boats pulled back to the paddle wheeler, discharged their passengers, and one of them, under command of Master's Mate Rod Brown, returned. They literally had to talk several of the ironclad's crew off of the top of the turret,....these guys had seen several of their mates washed overboard, and it took a good half hour to pick up the remainder of Monitor's crew. Then they noticed two or three of Monitor's crew hanging on to the turret...and these guys absolutely refused to come down.

Brown promised to return for them and pulled for Rhode Island, which by now, was a good two or so miles distant. Brown and his crew made it to Rhode Island, dropped the Monitors crew members, and pulled hard for the distant, wildly swinging red lantern. Their efforts were in vain, though. Shortly after 1:30AM on Dec. 31st, 1862 Monitor, went down by the stern and turned turtle, taking at least two, and possibly three crew members with her.

That, of course, wasn't the end of the story either for Brown and his crew or for Monitor. Rhode Island was firing rockets off and 'showing blue lights', apparently steaming away from them. In reality they were searching for them, and they continued the search for the rest of the night and most of the next day but they missed them and ultimately assumed they'd been lost in the rescue attempt. Late on the afternoon of the 31st,  Rhode Island called off the search and headed for Beaufort, N.C.

Brown and his crew spent a wet, cold, uncomfortable, and down right nasty night aboard the open boat before being picked up by the schooner A Colby the next day. They were taken into Beaufort as well, and ultimately returned to Rhode Island a couple of days later.

Monitor went down 26 miles Southeast of Hatteras, eleven months after she was launched...it wasn't the last she was heard of either.


The Monitor's wreck rested on the bottom of the Atlantic, smack dab in the middle of the renowned Graveyard of the Atlantic for 112 years. The Navy had a pretty good idea where she was...at least the general area...and plans to salvage her were even made. One problem. The technology to find her didn't really exist yet. Searches were carried out, (Using grappling hooks on the ends of long lines)and claims she had been discovered were even made...but there was no way to verify the claims. Given the number of wrecks in the area, they could have 'discovered' any of a number of sunken vessels.

In 1973 a team from Duke University aboard that school's research vessel Eastward decided to take a whack at finding her, and they actually did research and planning and such. They researched the Rhode Island's course and logs, and got hold of a nautical chart of Diamond Shoals and environs there-of from that era, and commenced to 'mowing the lawn'...searching long narrow strips by sailing back and forth towing a sonar buoy...along a strip of ocean measuring 5 miles long by 1 mile wide. They discovered no fewer than 22 wrecks in the process (They don't call Diamond Shoals the Graveyard of the Atlantic for nothing!). Each wreck was compared to a 'Footprint' of what they expected Monitor's wreck to look like, then they narrowed the possibilities down to one choice. The length was right, the beam was right...but where was the turret?

They dropped a waterproof movie camera and a still camera over and towed both over the wreck (And promptly lost the still camera when it snagged on the wreck, causing them to have to get another still camera and rerig) and shot hundreds of still frames and hundreds of feet of film.. Now keep in mind that this was 1973...nearly 40 years ago. State of the art technology back then would be junk now. They got all kind of still pics and film, and all of the video was grainy, fuzzy black and white. The stills, from what I gather weren't much better.

They did know that the wreck was on a sandy bottom 220 feet down and it was the right length, beam, and shape. But where was the turret? And the pilot house. They had a flat expanse of iron hull...oh Crap. She must be upside down,. She was indeed, and that was NOT what they expected.

Ultimately they found the turret, also inverted of course, peeking out from beneath the overturned hull near the stern. A bit under a year later, in April '74, another expedition aboard the deep sea research ship Alcoa Seaprobe was launched. She was a far more sophisticated vessel. She had dynamic positioning capability, allowing her to hover over the wreck without anchors, and she also had a deployable pod that contained side-scan sonar and far more sophisticated TV and still cameras that recorded thousands of images and hours of higher quality video. The stills were used to make a photo-mosaic of her, and the video convinced the most skeptical doubters. Monitor had been found.

The photomosaic made back in '74. The stern is to the left in the picture...look closely at the lower left and you can see the turret peeking out from beneath the hull.


A much later picture from NOAA of the Monitor's stern lying on top of the turret.


A schematic, also from NOAA, of the way Monitor's wreck lay on the borrom before recovery efforts started. Much of her hull had collapsed and the propeller shaft had actually fallen through the hull by the time recovery efforts started in earnest.



OK...now what to do with her. First they had to protect her. The sitting Governor of N.C. nominated her for National Underwater Marine Sanctuary status on Sept 26th, 1974. The Secretary of the Interior listed her wreck site on the National Register of Historic Places on Sept 26th, 1974. On Jan 30th, 1975 The Monitor and a column of water one mile in diameter surrounding the wreck was designated as the first U.S. National Marine Sanctuary.

Ok, again, now that they'd found her...what were they gonna do with her???

The full story of the preservation and recovery efforts is far too long and involved to be detailed in their entirety here. She's in good hands though. One of the first acts that occurred after declaring her a U.S. National Marine Sanctuary was to make the Mariners Museum in Newport News, Va her keeper and guardian, so to speak...all recovery and preservation efforts were handled and/or coordinated by their team.

Two of Monitor's most innovative features are at the Museum being restored even as I type this...her engine and her gun turret. The original plan was to raise her and restore the entire ship, but that idea ran into a couple of major hurdles...and they are named 'Money' and 'condition'. The money part was almost a moot point....she would have broken up if they had tried to raise the entire hull. As it was, the propeller and it's shaft had fallen through the inverted hull and were resting on the bottom, shaft angled up into the hull making her appear at fist glance to be right side up when viewed from that angle. The propeller and shaft are both at The Mariners Museum now along with the engine and turret and hundreds of other artifacts. Her sunken remains have become an artificial reef (In fact, have been one for about 150 years now) and home to multitudes of marine life.

Monitors engine over the years after it was recovered. Top is immediately after recovery, with so mauch 'Concretion'...hardened deposits...on it that it's features are all but obscured. The middle and bottom are pics as the concretion was painstakingly removed and the engine revealed.  All three of these pics are flipped to show the engine as she would have appeared in Monitor's engine room, BTW. The engine is upside down in the recovery tank, just as it was on the bottom for 140 years. before being recovered.



Monitor's turret breaks the surface on 8-10-02, just over 140 years after she went down.

The recovery efforts were actually a joint venture between the Navy, The Mariner;'s Museum, and NOAA. The propeller and shaft were raised first, in 1998. Her engine was raised on July 16th, 2001 and the biggie...recovering her turret...took place on Aug 10, 2002. Both Engine and turret are undergoing detailed and thorough preservation and restoration...a process that will likely take as much as 15 years (But considering that this started in 2001-02, the process should be drawing fairly close to completion.)
Also, a full scale model of Monitor has been built at the Mariner's Museum. Trust me when I say The Mariners Museum is one of the must visit stops if you're ever in the Hampton Roads area.

***Notes, Links, and Stuff***

One thing that's always saddened me a little about the ends of The Virginia's and The Monitor's careers is the huge difference in what happened to them the after their sinking. Great effort and expenditure has been made to preserve the Monitor and to restore her most innovative features, and rightly so. Virginia, however, has been all but forgotten. Very little, if any, remains of Virginia compared to Monitor. A couple of her guns remain (The ones damaged during the battle). Her ship's wheel is on display. A few pieces of her armor remain. It's likely that somewhere some of the commemorative canes made from her timbers are tucked away in attics or closets somewhere. Of course there's a reason for this. The fact that Monitor was on the side that won the war had a lot to do with it, but the locations where the two ships went down had far more of an effect.

Monitor went down in open ocean, is at a depth of 220 or so feet, and posed no threat to navigation. Virginia, on the other hand, was at a depth of about 20 feet (Portions of her were possibly exposed though there's no confirmation of this), was in the middle of a channel in one of the busiest ports in the country and the world, and her wreck actually caused the sinking of another vessel. Also, she'd been stripped (Supposedly) of anything useful before she was blown up. And oh, yeah,,,she burned and exploded, so her wreck wasn't intact. Then her wreck site (Supposedly) was smack dab in the middle of the new channel that was dug to access the Craney Island Fueling Depot built during World Was II, though the finding of a pair of wrecks right next to each other has called that fact into question.
Had she been scuttled in seventy-five or a hundred feet of water out in the middle of the bay with all guns still aboard, I have a feeling her wreck would have met a far different fate.


Tatnall was actually court-martialed for destroying CSS Virginia. He was honorably aquitted of all charges. The court came to the same conclusion that Tatnall came to. Due to Virginia's deep draft, and the fact that attempting to lighten her didn't reduce her draft enough to allow her to pass over the bar, and on top of that exposed her unarmored hull, destroying her so she wouldn't fall into enemy hands was about the only option left to him.

*****

The search for Brown and his crew after Monitor went down is one of the best examples I can think of how much technology had changed only 40 or 50 years after the war, much less by now. During The Civil War there was no long range communication capability between ships at sea. Rhode Island was on her own in the search. By the early 1900s...forty years later...ships were being equipped with wireless telegraph, and she could have called in the troops so to speak (And indeed could have sent out a distress signal when Monitor got in trouble) Of course any similar incident now...and since at least WWII...would have resulted in a heavy response of both aerial and seaborne resources. The wild thing is, finding them would have relied on the exact same thing...someone looking at the right spot at the right instant. The modern era, and modern technology just put far more eyes in the search, evening out the odds tremendously.

***** 

Both of Monitor's big Dahlgren guns were still in the turret when it was raised, along with their innovative gun carriages....a pleasant surprise as it was first thought that they may have tumbled out when the turret broke free...but there were other artifacts that were puzzling. Silverware, the remains of a wooden chest, and other personal possessions that had the staff and crew undertaking the restoration of the turret kind of rubbing their chins and shaking their heads. Back in the day, it was common for sailors to have their own personal silverware, often inscribed with their initials. One theory is that the crew was actually trying to save the chest, which may have contained the silverware, got it as far as the turret, and decided that saving it wasn't even close to practical. Another is that when she turned turtle as she went down, the chest fell to what was then the overhead of the galley and through the hatch way into the turret (The timing would have had to be astronomical though as the turret was held in place by gravity alone, so it fell free almost as soon as Monitor rolled over). It couldn't have fallen through the deck as the ship deterioated...the turret ended up beneath the stern of the ship, which, of course, was the engineering and machinery portion of the ship.
 


Personal possessions weren't the only thing found in the turret, which of course, was also filled with silt and mud. The skeletal remains of two of the crew were also found. They were likely the two crew members who were still on the turret when Brown headed back for Rhode Island that last time...they probably went back inside the turret for some protection from the storm.

Efforts are being made to identify the remains, which were treated as MIAs and taken to The Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. (And again this is beyond the scope of this particular article...but it will be looked at in more detail!)


LINKS

As I've noted before it would be all but impossible to include every site dedicated to or including info about Monitor and  Virgina. There are just too freakin' many of them! Here are just a few,

Again, this is one of the most comprehensive sites about CSS Virginia On the Web:


A short but informative article about the discovery of the Monitor. It's a fun site to browse as well, especially if you're into shipwrecks and nautical history


Marinors Museum blog that covers all facets of the Mriner's Museum's Monitor recovery, preservation, and restoration efforts.


NOAA site about Monitor's discovery:


Smithsonian Magazine article about the recovery of Monitor's gun turret.


Timeline showing the events of Monitor's final voyage and sinking:


Not specifically about the Monitor and Virginia, this is s blog about naval operations in the Civil War (AKA War Of Northern Aggression ;) ) It's detailed, and generally awesome. Be prepared to have a lot of time to read...if you're into Naval history or Civil War History, you WILL get hooked!:

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