|
Monitor’s
prized turret finds a home
by
Paula C. Squires
Click
to enlarge |
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
|
|
