HATTERAS, N.C. - Just after midnight on the last day of 1862, the U.S. Navy's famed ironclad warship, the USS Monitor, foundered while under tow in a storm off Cape Hatteras.
Sea water poured in under the ship's 22-foot-wide rotating gun turret. It doused the ship's boilers, silenced its steam engine and stilled its pumps. The Monitor - veteran of the historic clash with the Confederate ironclad Merrimac 10 months earlier - was sinking, and its sailors were scrambling to escape their iron coffin before it plunged 220 feet to the bottom.
Forty-nine of the Monitor's crew were saved that night. But the remains of 16 others, and their ship, have rested on the sea floor for 140 years, embraced by sand and silt, and guarded by sharks and moray eels.
Now, another generation of American sailors has returned to the wreck. Their mission: to recover the Monitor's turret, its guns, and any human remains it might still shelter.
Working 24 hours a day from a barge anchored over the site, Navy divers have already cut the turret free of 45 tons of deck iron and timber that covered it. On Friday, while vacuuming sand and silt from the turret's interior, they uncovered the first of the Monitor's two cannons.
By month's end, if all goes well, they expect to raise the turret - 130 tons of Baltimore iron - and send it to the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, Va. The museum already holds the Monitor's anchor, propeller, steam engines and other objects recovered since its resting place was found in 1974.
Ship, remains respected
The $7 million cost of this year's expedition will be paid by the Navy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the museum.
"NOAA realized the Monitor was dissolving and was about to collapse completely," said museum spokesman Justin Lyons. "As historically important as the ship is, they saw it was important to recover as much of the Monitor as could be recovered."
Navy divers on the 300-foot barge Wotan express only respect for the old warship - for the stubborn integrity of its armor and for its sanctity as a war grave.
"We [divers] spend a lot of time in the Navy doing recovery of fallen sailors and pilots, and in a way we're doing the same things" on the Monitor, said Rick Cavey, 38, of Columbia, Howard County, the Navy project diving officer on the Wotan.
"If we do find sailors down there, we will be returning them for a proper burial - 140 years late. Those men were heroes. ... They were part of the people who kept the Union together."
The Wotan is an island of steel anchored in cobalt-blue water, 16 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras, just out of sight of land.
As long as a football field, it is dominated by an immense red crane capable of lifting 500 tons from the sea floor. The remaining space is crowded with portable offices, control rooms and machinery, compression chambers and trailer-like living quarters stacked three high. They're home to the 64 Navy divers on board and other personnel - more than 100 in all.
Generators and compressors create a constant din. Burly divers who aren't in the water or performing topside chores are likely to be sunning themselves or lifting weights. It is an overwhelmingly male place commanded by one of the Navy's few female diving officers, Cmdr. Barbara "Bobbie" Scholley.
"This is a large-scale, complex, deep dive for us, and we don't get that very often," she said, adding that the training is invaluable.
Cavey, the diver from Maryland, said the assignment is a privilege for his men. "They're walking where no sailor has walked for 140 years," he said. "It makes a lot of the guys feel really proud of being on this expedition."
Because of the great depth and pressure on the sea floor, divers descending directly from the Wotan can work for just 40 minutes on the bottom before returning to the surface.
To extend the work time on the bottom, others - called "saturation" divers - descend in pairs in an 8-foot-diameter diving bell. On the bottom, each man swims from the bell and spends six hours working on the wreck. At night, they're guided by helmet lights.
After 12 hours, they're hauled back to the surface in the bell, still at a pressure equivalent to the sea floor. They're transferred to pressurized chambers on the Wotan, where they will spend the next 12 hours. While they sleep, eat and shower, a second team replaces them on the bottom.
The cycle repeats every 12 hours for 10 to 14 days before the divers can finally decompress - a 70-hour process.
On July 5, divers using high-pressure water jets and metal saws finished cutting away the iron plates and pine deck timbers that still lay atop the capsized Monitor's turret. Since then, they have been slowly vacuuming sand and silt from the turret's interior, carefully sifting the debris for artifacts, sailors' belongings and possible human remains.
Before the end of the month, the team expects to lower a lifting device over the turret, like a big drum settling over a smaller one. Eight steel claws will then slip beneath the turret and its guns to support them on the trip to the surface.
Naval arms race
The Monitor's massive turret and peculiar design were dictated by a naval arms race with the Confederacy.
After Virginia seceded from the Union in May 1861, federal forces at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay withdrew north across Hampton Roads to Fort Monroe in Hampton.
But before they abandoned the Gosport Navy Yard, in Portsmouth, the Union forces sank their wooden frigate USS Merrimac - which was under repair. They burned it to the waterline to keep it out of rebel hands.
But the rebels quickly raised it again and found that the hull and steam engines were intact. Union spies reported the Virginians were scavenging iron - even tearing up railroad tracks to get iron - to shield the Merrimac's hull. They were also building an armored casemate, or enclosure, over its gun deck and 10 cannons.
The sloping iron walls would deflect both solid shot and exploding shells. Its guns, meanwhile, threatened to be "a battery of heavy ordnance so formidable that no vessel of the ordinary type, of small dimensions, could withstand its fire," said Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson.
There had been ironclad ships before, said naval historian James Tertius deKay, author of Monitor, a 1997 book on the ironclads. The French had used them effectively in 1855 against a Russian fort during the Crimean War.
But the Union Navy feared that a rebel ironclad would destroy the wooden warships blockading Virginia's ports and protecting the last Union toehold in Virginia, Fort Monroe.
"This would have been the straw that broke the camel's back," deKay said, "proof that the North could not protect what it held."
Fells Point iron
The U.S. Navy rushed to build its own ironclads. Ericsson proposed a radical design, a ship built almost entirely of iron, powered only by steam. It would be small and maneuverable, able to penetrate shallow coastal waters. Enemy gunners would have a slender target, its deck rising just 13 inches above the water.
The Monitor would carry just two cannons - deadly 11-inch Dahlgrens mounted in a rotating gun turret. Its gunners would be sheltered, and they could turn quickly to direct their fire without waiting for the helm to turn the ship.
With the help of Cornelius Bushnell, Ericsson and his partners won a $275,000 Navy contract, promising the first ship in just 90 days. The H. Abbott & Sons mill in Fells Point produced the turret iron - eight layers of 1-inch plate rolled in November 1861. Assembled, the turret was 9 feet high, 22 feet in diameter and weighed about 130 tons.
Ericsson launched the Monitor from the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Jan. 30, 1862. But it nearly sank on March 6 while under tow to the Chesapeake. High winds and waves sent sea water pouring under the improperly sealed turret. The pumps quit, engine ventilators failed and carbon monoxide almost suffocated the crew.
The Monitor wasn't designed to go to sea, deKay said. "Its purpose was the stop the Merrimac, the only reason it was built. They took a chance that they would be able to get it down there, and they just barely made it."
When they arrived at Cape Henry at 8:30 p.m. March 8, the Monitor's crew thought they were too late.
Earlier that day, the just-completed Merrimac (rechristened the CSS Virginia) had chugged north across the Hampton Roads to Newport News. With Union fire bouncing off its armor, the Merrimac rammed and sank the Union frigate Cumberland, killing 121 men; set a fire aboard the USS Congress that reached the powder magazine and blew the ship to splinters, then shelled the grounded USS Minnesota.
The Merrimac counted just two Confederate dead. Among the 11 wounded was its captain, Franklin Buchanan, a Baltimore-born officer who had married into a wealthy slave-holding family on the Eastern Shore.
President Lincoln's panicky war secretary, Edwin M. Stanton, fretted that the fearsome Merrimac would sail up the Potomac and shell Washington.
But when the Merrimac returned the next day to finish off the Minnesota, the Monitor was waiting. The two ironclads exchanged gunfire for four hours - the first engagement by two metal-clad ships in naval history, and the opening of a new era in warfare.
The Monitor's revolving turret was hot, dirty, noisy and hard to control. The view was poor; the gunners got their bearings confused as the turret spun around for them to aim and fire.
The ships maneuvered and fired at close range, bouncing munitions off each other's iron skins. Each rammed the other, without doing any damage. Finally, the Monitor took a gunshot to its pilothouse, blinding the captain.
His second-in-command withdrew to assess the damage. Merrimac's commanders did the same. Each crew believed the other had quit.
Significant victory
But what appeared to be a draw was in fact a Union victory, said Naval Academy history Professor Craig L. Symonds: "The U.S. Navy was still in Hampton Roads, and the war goes on. Virginia never again challenges the Union Navy."
The significance of the fight was immediately apparent. Two days after the battle, the New York Herald said it "establishes the utter uselessness of wooden ships, with their old-fashioned popguns, against iron-plated battering rams and Dahlgreen [sic] cannon."
Once it's recovered, the Monitor's turret will be transported to the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, where chief conservator Curtiss E. Peterson will begin the painstaking work of saving it - using electro-chemical processes to stop corrosion and remove 140 years of encrustation. In all, it's a process that could take 10 years.
The skills and dedication of the people working to recover and preserve the Monitor have impressed and reassured Edward Kubler, whose great-grandfather, Cornelius Bushnell, helped build the ship 140 years ago.
"I was vehemently against this at first," said Kubler, 60, of New Haven, Conn., who visited the Wotan last week. "But when I met some of the people involved with this, I started to change my opinion."
"The Navy is using the best of its skills and talents," he said. "Those divers are learning a great deal. That turned me the other way, and it was all right."
For information, go to http:// oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/.