Divers Save the USS Monitor

N E A R  C A P E  H A T T E R A S, N.C., Aug. 1, 2002 -- More than 200 feet down in the murky waters on the floor of the Atlantic, Navy divers are trying to save history.

There lies the wreck of the USS Monitor, the famous Civil War ironclad warship. The divers are saving what they can of it before it dissolves in the sea.

"You're diving on a piece of naval history," said Cmdr. Bobbie Scholley, the officer in charge of the 70 divers working on the Monitor. "Our Navy probably would not have grown to the place that we are today without the sacrifices and the technology that the monitor represents."

Every schoolchild learns the story of the Monitor, which fought the Confederate ironclad Virginia in on March 9, 1862. The two ships could barely dent each other. They battled to a draw in the waters off Hampton Roads, Va.

But in one four-hour battle, they made all other warships obsolete.

The Turret

The genius of the Monitor's design was primarily in its famous round gun turret. Unlike anything that had come before, it could be aimed — no more turning the whole ship to point the guns at the enemy. With just two guns, the Monitor could take on ships with 100.

"It was virtually unstoppable by any ship afloat at the time," said John Broadwater, the scientist in charge for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Race Against Time

Unfortunately for the Union, the Monitor did not do well in heavy seas. It sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras on Dec. 31, 1862. Sixteen men died when it went down. The wreck went undiscovered until divers found it in 1973.

The original plan was to leave it there in peace. But scientists gradually realized it was falling apart. Corrosive sea salts and swirling currents were doing what no Confederate ship could.

So each summer since 1998, a team of 70 Navy divers and 50 support people has been living on a giant barge, anchored over the wreck. The divers work around the clock, seven days a week, to recover what they can.

The ship is too badly damaged to be brought up whole, so the divers concentrate on major parts that future generations will appreciate. They've already recovered the ship's engine, propeller, clock, nameplate and hundreds of other artifacts; now they are working on the turret.

The work is dangerous. Some 240 feet down, the water pressure is so great that divers can only work in half-hour sprints, before they have to spend three hours in a decompression chamber.

Scientists plan to bring the turret to the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Va. There, it will be placed in a giant tank, and gently cleansed of the salt water that is destroying it.

But first they must raise it — all 150 tons of it — from the ocean floor. They plan to do that in the next few days, as soon as the sea is calm enough.

"I probably won't be breathing — which is a bad thing for a diver," said Scholley. "There's going to be a lot of pride, and a huge feeling of reward, when she comes on deck."

The Monitor was one of the most important ships in the history of military technology. Winston Churchill once said its turret was the greatest innovation in naval warfare since the cannon.