USS Monitor - From Angry Raft to National Treasure

[Music] [Music] a couple of weeks ago at the time that this video is released I was very kindly allowed to film at the Mariners Museum in Newport News Now amongst many other very interesting exhibits including a wonderful range of ship models you really have to see that there's quite an extensive collection regarding USS monitor which includes a significant portion of the original ship now whilst I've already covered the Battle of Hampton Roads there's a lot more to the story of USS monitor than just that battle at the time that this video goes live being the 6th of March there is a few days left until the museum runs its annual Battle of Hampton Roads commemoration event so if you happen to be within traveling distance of Newport News I would highly encourage you to go and visit there'll be a link to the museum and the event in the description there's also a lecture on the Battle of Hampton Roads itself by one of the directors starting at 12:00 noon Eastern Standard Time that does require you to register ahead of time but you can attend in person obviously space there is limited or you can view it virtually if you happen to be somewhere else in the world now for the rest of this particular video we'll be cutting back and forth between footage that I recorded at the Museum along with the excellent team who let me run around and do the filming as well as sections that have being recorded back here in the studio-h library that I call home but where did it all start so the story of USS monitor Believe It or Not doesn't start in Union shipyards the story of USS monitor starts with this vessel this is CSS Virginia or as you can see as they're loading the gun it soon will become so but even this vessel did not start life as CSS Virginia all of this starts at the very beginning of the American Civil War back then you have what's called gosport Navy yard now Norfolk Navy yard and as one of the major Fleet bases of the US Navy as it is today it had a lot of ships in it these rang from small sloops all the way up to the gigantic three deer First Rate USS Pennsylvania and some more modern vessels like the auxiliary steam toow prate USS miramac during the early stages of the Confederate Advance the Navy Yard was overrun a lot of the ships were not able to be moved in time some were but a lot of others were ordered to be burnt to prevent them falling into Confederate hands the USS United States a frig from the War of 1812 was also present now with meramac she was successfully set on fire but as with a lot of Wooden Ships once she Burns to the water line and water obviously then floods in that puts the fires out which meant the underwater portion of her hle was still intact orbe it a little bit sunk the Confederates in need of pretty much every warship they could possibly get their hands on decided that they were going to raise what was left of the marac and stick a bunch of wood and iron armor on top and create what we would today call a casate Ironclad they needed this because as I said they didn't have many warships the union had considerably more and were very rapidly bringing into service even more vessels these would then blockade Southern ports and that would cut off access to the global trade Network which would crash the Confederate economy and make it very difficult for them to continue fighting if you don't have many warships and your opponent has a lot and you're trying to get out of the blockade you either need a very big very powerful war ship but as we said Pennsylvania has just been burnt or you need something novel and CSS Virginia which is what marac was turned into was supposed to be this novel thing Ironclad warships weren't entirely new but they were a very recent Innovation and so it was decided Well if we can make this Ironclad it should be immune to most if not all of the guns that the union Navy can bring to bear and then put some powerful guns of your own go up to Point Blank Range and in the Theory between that and ramming you can destroy enough union warships to break the blockade let trade resume and that gives the Confederacy a bit of a leg up that's the theory in case you're wondering the reason they didn't use the Hulk of USS Pennsylvania amongst other reasons was the fact that meramac was actually a longer vet Hull and that thus more suited for conversion plus you know she'd already had auxiliary steam engines whereas converting C USS Pennsylvania into some form of confeder ironcloud would also have had to completely rework the hole to fit steam power now with all that in mind and the conversion work starting this is the 1860s secrecy is sort of a thing but not really everyone knew that the Confederates were building some form of Ironclad exactly what form of Ironclad it would be no one quite new at least initially but various news articles and publication soon showed up showing roughly what you could expect the union having seen how effective ironclads had been in the Crimean War at least ironcloud floating batteries realized that the only way they were going to counter this was to build their own Ironclad but what kind of Ironclad should they build this was an even larger problem because the Confederates were converting a half burnt out frigate with the relatively minimal resources they had available the union had somewhat more resources available and of course they didn't just want to mirror match the Confederacy they wanted something better but they also had to build things very quickly because they were behind because Virginia was already under construction and so they put out a call for designs dozens of designs were received some of them were clearly lunatic others of them were theoretically good but would take forever to build or would require technology that wasn't quite available yet and so in the end they went with three designs to spread the risk a little bit one was USS New iron sides this was a big armored frig but this would take a while to build and wouldn't be ready for several months in fact over a year the problem with that was that Virginia could be wreaking havoc whilst new irides was under construction the other two which were quicker and easier to build were the USS gal Galena or Galina depending on how you want to pronounce it which was effectively an armored Corvette turned out to be not so brilliant but was probably the most conventional of the designs and then you had the design by John Erikson for USS monitor which is essentially a very very angry raft it's a raft hole form a little bit of a Keel and a big turret mounting a couple of big doen guns on top this had the attraction of being very heavily armed very heavily protected relatively cheap to build and it could be built fast and so monitor starts her life as an emergency response to this thing so you saw the exterior the Mariners museum has actually also redone the interior of at least the forward section of Virginia in the casement so that people can get an idea of what monitor's opponent was like now you might notice a few things I don't know if it's quite in the shop but down here there are some traversing plates made of iron and much like the somewhat more complicated traversing plates you see on the upper deck of HMS Warrior which is a contemporary of these vessels that means that the big gun that you saw being craned over could be positioned here and can then fire dead ahead but then can be reallocated to fire slightly off to starboard or slightly off to Port the advantage of this of course is that it means you have just the one heavy gun but with a very wide Arc of Fire but still protected in large part by the ship's armor and that means you can have considerably more guns in other places rather than having three at the bow covering just a maybe a 90° fire Arc which would then restrict the number you could have down the side so just one at the bow maybe one at the stern and then Lots down the side cuz she is still designed for mostly conventional broadside action if she's not ramming somebody as you might notice the sides are sloping in this is one of the reasons why she's called a case my Ironclad the energy of incoming shells was to be absor absorbed by several layers of iron we'll talk about that in a second then multiple layers of wood as a backup and the whole thing secured by these bolts which you can see coming all the way through the whole ship's protective system but since we're talking about very very close range actions you know this is still the middle of the 19th century having this very heavy sloping also would help to deflect some of that energy away from the ship when the shots come in this would be a terrible idea in the early 20th century when shells are actually dropping in from long range cuz that normalizes the angle but at Point Blank Range which is what 19th century battles of forat this is actually a pretty good idea if you want to minimize the amount of material you're using for your armor whilst maximizing the protective value now you might be thinking well hang on a slope like this isn't that meaning you've got a lot more length which you need to protect well remember it's not just about the sheer amount of iron you're using here it's also about the thickness of iron that you're using because manufacturing of iron plate in the US generally and especially in the South where they had less of that kind of industrial base available to them was very limited in terms of what they could actually make in terms of thickness of iron plate so if you say had a couple of layers of 2in thick plate as an example then angling it you could massively increase its effectiveness whereas if you could make say a 4 4 and 1/2 inch thick plate you might just go with a vertical slab side the other advantage of these slopes is as you can probably see you've got lots of space around the lower portion of the deck where you can store supplies ammunition etc etc whilst not having to deal with the stability and size and weight issues that would come with having a slab-sided vessel because the up top it's only you know maybe just about 6 ft wide up here at the top and that means minimal amounts of affected stability which given the weight of iron mostly being up top there's not a lot of armor if any under the water that is a very important factor when it comes to designing your ship to make sure you don't just flip over the thing you've got to remember of course is that Virginia was not supposed to go out and fight in the deep ocean she was a blockade breaker but enough about Virginia back to monitor looking at the competition to get a response to Virginia in a bit more detail in many ways the Navy was effectively crowdsourcing an answer newspapers in Boston New York Philadelphia Baltimore and other cities ran the following advertisement the Navy department will receive offers from parties who are able to execute work of this kind and who are engaged in it of which they will furnish evidence with their offer for the construction of one or more Ironclad steam vessels of War either of iron or of wood and iron combined for sea or river service to be of not less than 10 or over 16 ft draft of water to carry an Armament of from 80 to 120 tons weights with provisions and stores for from 165 to 300 persons according to Armament for 60 days with coal for 80 Days the smaller draft of water compatible with other requisites will be preferred The Vessel to be rigged with two masts with wire rope standing rigging to navigate the sea a general description and drawings of the vessel armor and Machinery such as the work can be executed from will be required the offer must State the cost and the time for completing the whole exclusive of armament and stores of all kinds the rate of speed proposed and must be accompanied by a guarantee for the proper execution of the contract if awarded persons who intend to offer are requested to inform the department of their intention before the 15th of August instant and to have their propositions presented with within 25 days from this date part of the reason for this approach was simply because Ironclad warships was such a new thing in the world that the knowledge of how to construct one or even design one in the first place and doing so rather quickly could be anywhere in the country not just necessarily in the Navy or its favored contractors but it was also partially because the size of the iron clads that were already in service in Europe as both the British and French already had one ich commission Warrior and glir respectively and many more on the way rang from 6 to 10,000 tons in displacement at a number of Union naval officers appear to have concluded that this was the only way that you could build Ironclad warships commensurately such a vessel would take far too long to complete given the urgency of the situation that was developing further south and thus they thought it wasn't worth trying enough officers who didn't think this way were available to form a board to evaluate the incoming proposals though and as mentioned a number of ideas were put forward some of them showed promise but were seen as far too expensive others were structurally fragile unstable or exceptionally unusual one of which proposed rubber slabs to be used instead of iron for armor now this proposal might sound amusingly naive on the surface the idea of seeing cannonballs boinging away with comical sound effects but wasn't actually out of step with current thinking in other parts of the world the idea being actually that rubber wouldn't Splinter at all the way that wood and iron both would and once a shot had torn its way through the rubber the hole would either wholly or at least mostly seal behind it so it wasn't strictly speaking a form of protection against the shot itself but it would alleviate the effects of being hit by shot quite considerably assuming you couldn't stop the shot completely but in the end two proposals were accepted at first the FR USS New irons sides and the armored Sloop or gunboat USS Galina both had a projected cost of under $250,000 and a forecast completion time of less than a year that being the forecast whilst new iron sides was in some ways the most conventional design comparable to other ships that had already been built she was still only 2/3 the displacement of GL or about 40% the displacement of warrior her significantly smaller size meaning that a rushed construction schedule of 9 months was thought to be plausible now what you might notice is monitor is missing from that initial list this was in part because at the start of the competition John Erikson was on a US Navy Blacklist although it wasn't his fault in the slightest back in the 1840s he'd had a hand in designing the USS Princeton and he'd also had a hand in making a rather large high- press gun to go aboard it with this gun was named Oregon another man had designed a second similar looking gun which was to be the other half of the ship's main armament this gun was named Peacemaker and whilst the ship was demonstrating its capabilities to a rather high ranking set of VIPs a peacemaker exploded killing a number of the dignitaries including the Secretary of the State and the secretary of the Navy in fact Peacemaker was much more poorly designed than Oregon as the explosion had kind of given away but during the subsequent inquiry Erikson declined to attend on the relatively reasonable grounds that it was neither his ship nor his gun that caused any problems and therefore what was the point of him being there however in his absence peacemakers designer Robert Stockton somehow managed to pin the blame for Stockton's gun exploding on Erikson left out in the cold Erikson had persisted with inventing various new technologies for Naval Warfare but had had limited success in getting them actually accepted during the Crimean War he proposed this design to the French frch Navy this may look suspiciously familiar in any case in August 1861 he' tried to enter the new Ironclad competition but someone in the US Navy was still keeping up with his blacklisting and the proposal never reached the board however strange coincidence now intervened Cornelius bushnel the man who had the contract to build Galena wanted to address some of the concerns that the Ironclad board had raised about the design so he asked another Cornelius this one Cornelius H dam for help in evaluating the plans Dam owned a rather large Iron Works and was good friends with Ericson so he directed bushnel to Ericson who agreed to review Galina's drawings and whilst talking things over he mentioned his own ideas and showed them to bushnel impressed bushnel took Ericson's ideas to Gideon Wells the secretary of the Navy who in turn urged him to present the idea to the ironcloud board the board was where The Blacklist came up again but bushnel had friends in high places and he managed to get President Lincoln on board with the idea that broke the ice for two of the three board members but not the third bushnel went back to Erikson to get him to present his idea in a bit more detail but stung by almost two decades of rejection for something that was not his fault in the first place it took some persuading by bushnel but Ericson finally agreed only to find that by the time they actually got to the boardroom the board had rejected his design which they considered unstable however Erikson now had a chance to speak and this was a question of engineering not politics and so he immediately launched into what is Apparently one of the most eloquent and here is why you are wrong speeches in the history of Naval architecture although unfortunately no one thought to write more than the gist of it down after some further debate and particular questions on the matters of stability he had a contract in Hand by 3 p.m. the same day now he had to actually finalize that contract and agree detailed designs and then actually build the thing rather confident in his success Erikson set about ordering materials and actually started work on the ship's engine before he had the final contract in hand he and Bush also had to sort out funding for the project since the Navy would purchase the finished product but left Ericson to find the money to actually build it in the first place they would pay out some money partway through the building process if the Navy was satisfied with progress but the bulk of the cost of the ship would only be recompensed once the vessel was launched tried and had been tested under enemy fire at first as per the advert there was mention of rigging for cruising under saale but this seems to have been ignored by Erikson and Bushnell pretty shortly after the construction of the ship started the vessel began to take shape at Continental Iron Works in Brooklyn under the supervision of one Thomas Fitch Roland with parts and materials flooding in from factories and foundaries all across the union this included iron for the hull and iron for the ship's arm so here we have one of actually two monitor replicas that you'll find in the museum one is the whole replica outside but also in inside the museum they have essentially bits of a replica to help you understand how the ship is constructed because the one as I say outside is supposed to be pretty much what you would have seen if you saw monitor cruising around whereas internally they can do sections where you can see you know crew quarters and for our purposes here the side of the ship so in some ways the armoring of Virginia and monitor is relatively similar you've got massive thick Timber bulking behind to help absorb impact and contain iron splinters and then multiple layers of iron plating up front now whilst the technological issues that I mentioned earlier with the US iron industry did exist the us being about 5 to 10 years behind France and Britain in terms of iron technology at this point the union had a much bigger industry so what what you'll see with Virginia and actually with subsequent Confederate monitors is that they're having to beg borrow and steal iron plating iron beams iron sheeting whatever they can get their hands on pretty much on an ad hoc basis so almost no two conver ironclads are ever armored in exactly the same way in the Union's casee was they couldn't Mass Manu manufacture really thick iron plating which is ideally what they would have wanted to do they could Mass manufacture iron plates and so what they decided to do as you can see here is mass manufacture 1in thick iron plating and just add lots and lots of layers gradually obviously getting thicker as you get above the water line with the thickest being on the turrets now whilst lots of layered iron plates don't work quite as well as a single thickness iron plate of the same thickness so when you get to the taret for example 8 in they do have you know the whole thing of qu quantity as a quality all of its own so whilst let's say so this is three this is four this is five so this 5 in laminated iron section for example right at the top this isn't going to have the same resistive quality as HMS Warriors 44 and A2 in of iron plate but the union can manufacture this they can't manufacture the big iron plate and and they can add resistance to it by just adding more and more and more and more and more plates which is what they would do in the upper portion of the ship like the turret which we'll have a look at in in a minute the other thing which hopefully there'll be a photo showing you as well which you can see is the way that the ship is constructed this is essentially an armor plated skirt for the ship and it overhangs quite significantly so here's the outer portion this is actually where if you like the whole proper begins so you're talking about at least a good 4T in before the whole slope goes down towards the ship's Keel or the ship's bottom and this is also iron hole plating so unlike Virginia which is a wooden hole that has some iron strapped on top of it monitor as a purpose designed vessel right from the start has iron hole plating on her Underside as well as obviously iron armor up top now whilst this under hole plating isn't armor it's also not going to be shot at but it does have a few advantages for the kind of operations that they're expecting her to undertake I literal operations Coastal operations blockade Duty because one thing that had been proved by this point was that iron ships as long as they were well handled were much much better dealing with bumps and scrapes and groundings that you would get in coastal Waters as compared to Wooden Ships a wooden ship that went to ground on a sandbar or brushed against a rock or something like that would have either a chunk carved out of the whole planking or possibly a frame or worst case a keel broken by that kind of encounter you know absolute best case scenario maybe the copper plating would be ripped off which is still a bit of a complication whereas when they' operated the East India Company ship Nemesis which was not armored but it was iron hulled off of the Chinese Coast during the open Ian Wars they'd found that that ship had bumped into rocks hit sand banks Etc cuz let's face it the Chinese ghost at that point was not very well charted but she hadn't sprung any leaks the iron plating had been dented and dinged and you know when they docked her in India after the conflict she looked a bit like a moonscape but her integrity was substantially intact just needed to essentially panel beat the ship out and so for monitor having these underlying iron plates on her Hull made a huge amount of sense because if she was expecting to fight a battle in these shallow Waters off the US East Coast even if they had accurate charts for that particular area monitor may not be able to stick to those particular chart uh uh monitor may not be able to stick to those particular areas if she's under attack or if she has to go after an enemy vessel she's going to have to maneuver based on what that enemy vessel is doing not just oh well the chart says it's a bit shallow here at which point if she does touch the bottom or hit a rock or whatever this kind of construction offers her far more survivability than the conventional vessel and indeed far more survivability than the Virginia who if she was in a similar state which eventually obviously she would be fighting monitor if she did touch something that underlying wooden structure of the Confederate ship would suffer considerably more in fact even when they were relying on plates only 1 in thick there was only one Foundry in the whole of the Union was capable of making plates reliably at that thickness also at the appropriate dimensions for the turret plates that was The Foundry of Abbott and Sons in Baltimore the armor plate for the Hulk would come from other areas which could manufacture the smaller plates necessary but the turret could only be sourced from one manufacturer the ship was laid down in early October 1861 and by the end of the year the engine was in place and had been tested by mid January she'd been assigned a captain one lieutenant John L Warden who was still inov himself trying to get back to health after having been released by the Confederates in a prisoner swap by the end of the month the ship also had a name since the vessel officially was still private property until the balance of its cost was paid by the Navy which in the contract was stipulated as mentioned as being only once she'd been proved under enemy fire it meant that Ericson got to name it he chose the name monitor using the sense of the word that implied constant observation along with warning of punishment for infringements interestingly enough this also technically means that at the Battle of Hampton Roads monitor was a privately owned warship at the very close of January although the ship was only partially completed monitor was launched she still needed about 3/4 of her turret plating installed and only one of her two 11-in doen guns had actually arrived at the dock side now to be clear they weren't actually building the turret Ikea like on the ship they had actually tested the thing beforehand but what had happened was that when they' originally constructed the turret at the Iron Works the first three layers of 1in plating had been riveted together so they thought were pretty much solidly locked the outer five layers were bolted together and also bolted to the inner layers and once they'd assembled it all and realized yes the turret works then they realized it's also far too heavy to transport all as one piece and so they'd had to disassemble it and then reassemble it aboard monitor but by the end of January they hadn't quite gotten around to bolting on those outer five layers again nonetheless into the water that she went to the immense disappointment of a relatively large number of people who' showed up having placed bets that she'd sink immediately work continued to fit out the ship and a few days later the Navy seemed to have remembered that they had originally wanted rigging and they sent a note asking Warden to ensure that she was fitted with sales he appears to have decided that this note had tragically fallen down the back of the couch by the 25th of February 1862 she'd received the first entry in her log book recording that the weather was fine commissioning had taken place at 3: in the afternoon and men from The Old Ship of the line USS North Carolina now a receiving ship had been taken aboard as crew interestingly enough the ship's guns the 11-in doens were not the specific guns intended for her she was meant to be armed with that caliber of weapon but slight delays in the ship's construction which by contract was supposed to be 100 days which would have meant completion of the ship on January the 12th meant that the guns built specifically for monitor had been purloined by other vessels the Navy however was worried that if they failed to provide an Armament it might invalidate a number of the their acceptance Clauses in favor of Ericson and so they pulled 11-in doens number 27 and 28 from the gunboat USS Dakota spelled da a t ah and these were the ones that were duly installed the size of the gun used on monitor was in large part dictated by the size of the turret which was actually relatively small for the 11in gun let alone some of the larger weapons that ericon might otherwise have preferred in actual fact a heavy set of friction slides were needed just to ensure that the 11in guns wouldn't recoil straight into the back plates of the turret the actual Hull of monitor was considerably shorter than her appearance would suggest as the armored raft that comprised the most visible portion of the ship included significant overhangs at each end to ensure that the anchor well up front and the screw and Rudder A Stern were protected against enemy gunfire apart from the turret the only other visible feature as monitor sat in the water was a small Pilot House up front her sea trials began on March 3rd with a number of changes being made to correct issues identified in this test this included an additional set of cross bracing beams in the turret testing a revised steering mechanism as the first one had proved effective along with some adjustments to the labeling and instructions for the friction brakes as upon the first firing of the guns it turned out that the tightening and loosening of these devices was not particularly intuitive and both guns ended up smashing into the back of the turret when discharged the resulting dents in the bulkhead still being visible to this day the ship's Compass also turned out to need correcting as shockingly sticking it inside an iron box which they called The Pilot House played Havoc with its ability to point in the right direction now something else that relatively recent evidence suggests was present on the ship but which has not here to for been depicted in artwork was a gun Shield or mantlet which was an additional flat-faced thickness of armor installed on the face of the turret around the guns to afford more protection to the part of the ship most likely to be hit this feature does actually appear on the final set of ship's plans and it seems quite likely that the piece of armor in prebble Hall that was removed from monitor is actually part of this Shield the reason for the lack of information on this part of the ship's design seems to be that no one actually really thought of it of much use in the aftermath of her first battle and it is recorded as having been rather rapidly removed thus only being present at bought the ship for less than a month of her total life and being long gone by the time anyone to thought to take official photographs more information on this potential gun mantlet can be found in the April 2024 edition of Naval History magazine published by the US Navy Institute press but in any case the need for monitor on the front line had grown more urgent CSS Virginia was reported to be commissioning herself and thus on the 6th of March monitor left port in company with two steamers and a tug this Voyage didn't go particularly well the ship's shallow draft was accompanied by an even shallower freeboard and despite only a moderate Breeze she almost didn't make it waves washed over the deck and water poured into the engine spaces this soaked the leather belts that transferred power from the engine to other parts of the ship like the ventilators and the pumps the soaked leather stretched and with the Lost tension it failed to transmit energy properly thus all the ventilation fans shut down and fumes began to choke everybody who was below deck the crew largely ended up taking Refuge at top the turret whilst the ship continued under toe miserably thinking about the possibility of having to take to the boats as the wind rose and with them the waves the ship had been designed with two small collapsible funnel boxes but these would be replaced in the end with a somewhat taller structure as well as a number of similar removable air intake tubes once she would eventually make it back to Port largely on the strength of accounts from this particular incident still she did make it to Hampton Roads arriving on the night of the 8th of March to the Fire Light of the devastation that had been Unleashed by CSS Virginia's first foray earlier that day against the frigs Cumberland and Congress the following day the 9th would see monitor sail in and engage her Confederate counterpart in the second and more famous part of the battle of Hampton Roads now as I've already covered that battle in quite some detail I'll just leave the relevant Link in the description and if I can make it work possibly somewhere on screen at the moment as well having survived that encounter monitor instantly became a beloved icon of press and people alike while she remained watchful just in case Virginia should emerge again from Port since both ships had survived a few bits of battle damage were being repaired especially the Pilot House fire onto which had hit and wounded Lieutenant Warden this issue with the Pilot House would eventually be addressed by adding plates of sloped armor to turn the box-like structure into more of a truncated iron pyramid but that would happen a bit later the turret gunshield mentioned earlier appears to have gone ashore during this immediate aftermath of Hampton Roads on the 21st of March as various other ironclads began to arrive the a small floating battery and the Galena respectively monitor was freed up for other action although only for operations nearby just in case Virginia emerged again and she was required monitor joined a number of gunboats for a bombardment of a Confederate position at se's point and soon she was free for General operations as the union recapture of gosport Navy Yard left CSS Virginia without a Home Port and after having considered a number of other options her crew were forced to burn her to prevent the ship being captured thus free of the need to fight another Ironclad for the moment monitor joined a number of other ships heading up the James River eventually leading to the attack on May 15th on Fort darling on drury's Bluff oddly enough this was about as close as you were going to get to a rematch between Monitor and the now deceased Virginia as a good portion of the latter's crew had ended up Manning these Shore based guns but in this case the Confederate Gunners came off somewhat the better in part because monitor was physically incapable of elevating her guns high enough to properly engage the fort and instead Confederate fire was concentrated on other ships including Galina which was badly damaged which then forced the union flotilla to retreat still monitor's combat efficacy was such that a slightly enlarged version the pic class had already been ordered to address the fact that the 11in doen had been unable to pierce Virginia's armor the new ships were specified to be armed with 1 11in and one 15in doen the smaller gun would still have use against unarmored ships and Shore imp placements whilst it was hoped that the larger gun would be powerful enough to deal with armored targets eventually Dolen would also experiment with the 11-in gun and gradually up the total charge that it could take which would improve its penetration power later in the American Civil War this would max out at 30 lb of powder as a full charge which would then go on to create a myth that monitor had only been firing half charges at Hampton Roads which is categorically false at the time of the battle the tested and proofed full charge for the 11-in gun was 15 lb of powder regardless of what later modifications might have been made other improvements in the pics included moving the pilot house or top the turret as unless you wanted to knock out or kill the captain you can actually fire monitor's guns on about 30° Arc forward whilst the pilot house was occupied another factor that became readly apparent as the temperature soared since June had found the ship still on the James River and the internal temperature of monitor in some parts was reaching over 60° cus or about 145° F was the need for considerably better internal ventilation the new captain Lieutenant Jeffers had also not particularly endeared himself to the crew after replacing the wounded Warden he was an expert in guns and Gunnery but seemed otherwise to have all the personal and Leadership skills of a particularly cranky hog a failed attack on the Swift Creek Bridge on the apom matx River was followed by a somewhat more successful engagement where monitor fought alongside the paddle steamer USS maratanza against the CSS heer which was disabled and captured with much valuable intelligence aboard including plans for mines which were to be deployed in the river and a scheme to board monitor with fast steam tugs the boarding Crews would use wooden wedges to freeze her turret in place and then use chloroform and turpentine to either knock out the crew and capture the vessel or set it on fire as applicable August the 15th would see Jeffers relieved by Commander Stevens Jeffers and monitor's chief engineer were being recalled to help oversee the construction of more monitors back up north and the end of August finally saw the ship allowed back to Hampton Roads a welcome relief for the crew after spending a stifling hot summer on the James River being targeted from the Riverbanks by Sharpshooters which forced them to stay inside the ship a lot more than they would have liked but Steven's command whilst popular was shortlived after a month he too was reassigned with command now being given to John Bankhead at the end of September she was finally recalled to Washington Navy yard for repairs USS New iron s sites had recently been commissioned and the first of the pics weren't too far off and with no immediate Confederate ironclads having made a recent appearance on the James River it was considered safe to take her off the front lines arriving at the Navy Yard on the first of October the crew found themselves being given a hero's welcome and 14 days leave which of the two was more welcome to the crew I leave up to you to determine the repairs ended up taking a little longer than expected as on November the 6th bowing to public interest the Navy authorized an afternoon wherein the ship would be open for the general public to tour it with most of the men still on leave thousands of people swarmed the ship practically unsupervised which meant that when the ship was checked over the following day almost everything that hadn't been solidly bolted down had been stripped and stolen for unofficial souvenirs including paradoxically all the door knobs which had been carefully unscrewed still the ship was ready for sea Again by the 9th having been repainted refurnished and now featuring a telescoping 30ft funnel also new were expanded living quarters better ventilation cranes and davits to support some ship's boats which could now be stored aboard instead of having to tow them and an extensive awning set which would keep rain and sun off of the turret roof and the weather deck many of the crew will also knew the just over month-long refit having seen many men reassigned to other duties she thus headed back to Newport News to await further orders which would then arrive on Christmas Eve 1862 USS Rhode Island would tow her to North Carolina where she would be joined by a number of her pic class descendants however the weather was now and the days ticked by and the crew realizing their Passage would likely be in less than ideal conditions set about trying to seal the turret deck interface with oom along with the gunport shutters the Pilot House viewing slits and anywhere else that looked like it might take on water and wasn't completely vital to the ship's operation finally on December 29th the weather seemed to clear and the Rhode Island toad monitor out to sea heading straight for the depressingly but accurately named graveyard of the Atlantic but on the morning of the 30th the waves began to rise and the weather began to deteriorate and the day went on with the weather getting worse and worse by 5: in the afternoon the crew had been forced to take shelter below deck by 7:30 in the evening one of the massive horer ropes that were Towing her snapped now deprived of stability in the toe monitor began to roll alarm ly and the turret began to rock opening up the oakam seams and letting water pour in the pumps were started but a lot of water had already gotten into the coal bunkers amongst other places and the wet coal failed to burn well the steam pressure began dropping almost as fast as the barometer and the waves began to hit even harder any crew not actively involved in trying to keep the pumps running were ordered to stand at top the turret being pulled through the waves meant the bow was almost constantly being buried in the water and it took several signaling attempts by the crew to get the Rhode Island to finally stop and hold station but the waves just kept rising and with them so did the water levels inside monitor every single pump was going as fast as steam pressure would allow and the crew were now recalled from the turret to form bucket brigades but by 10: in the evening the water was a foot deep in the engine room by 10:30 the this exact red distress Lantern was hoisted and the steam pressure to the engines was reduced to try and keep the pumps in action but this meant that the ship now lost station keeping and began whipping around on the end of the remaining hor line two men drowned trying to cut the line a third was luckier and managed to hack his way through it with a small axe by 11 the boiler fires were at risk of being overwhelmed by water and the Rhode Island was signal to send over its boats monitor it seemed was going to be sinking fast one of the crew later recalled mountains of water were rushing across our decks and foaming along our sides the small rescue Boats were pitching and tossing about on them or crashing against our sides mere play things on the Billows the howling of the Tempest the Roar and dash of waters the horse orders through the speaking trumpets of the officers the response of the men the shouts of encouragement and words of caution and the whole scene lit up by the ghastly glare of the blue lights burning on our consort formed a panorama of horror which time can never a face from my memory not everyone made it off the Monitor and not all of those that did made it into the boats the survivors made the short trip back to the Rhode Island but the cut haa line Tangled that ship's Paddle Wheel and it looked for a little while like the two ships might be driven together and both lost luckily the line was freed in time by midnight the rising water had killed the very last of monitor's power Rhode Island's Boats were still running a desperate ferry service as each boat could only take just over a dozen men at a time many of the men on monitor stripped down to be better able to swim throwing clothes and possessions back into the turret where they'd be found over a century later but soon monitor sank by the stern capsizing as she fell to the seabed and Landing upside down the turret at some point in The Descent falling off and coming to rest somewhat further off and off center than it had been in life a total of 47 men would be rescued with 16 lost some trapped inside the ship others Swept Away in their attempts to cross the heaving deck and reach the Rhode Island's boats and so it seemed monitor had passed out of the history books its memory preserved only by whatever small items the crew had managed to salvage the illicit souvenirs from the November open day and that odd bit of remaining gunshield that had was later installed at the US Naval Academy almost 100 years would pass and then in 1950 the US Navy decided to test a new sonar by searching for the wreck they found something of about the right size and shape in approximately the right location but then appear to have lost interest in 1955 a private Expedition looking for the wreck caught something with a wire drag which led to a claim that the wreck was in less than 50t of water and about 2 mi from the cape hatus Lighthouse most subsequent searches would look in this area as a result to no avail then in 1970 one captain petkin of the naval research laboratory plotted the Rhode Island's course based on its logs predicting that the sinking had occurred considerably further out 3 years later several different groups had all resolved to try and find the ship many of the Expeditions looking at that closer in area but some used petkins work to look much further out one aboard the survey ship Eastward was actually mainly in the area for a Geological Survey with finding monitor a secondary objective if they got the main one done with time to spare they did complete their main work and managed to discover 21 contacts in their search box one of them seemed very promising but turn out to be USS YP 389 a troller turned Patrol boat that had been sunk by the submarine u701 in 1942 with only a few days to go they headed for the Northeast portion of their search grid and a new Target popped up it wasn't considered anything special but it was about the right size so it was considered worth a shot the cameras recorded some confusing images and slightly bewildered the team headed home but somewhere along the way way one of the crew had an epiphany they had of course been looking for a flat deck and a big round turret but then they were looking at either a drawing or a model of Monitor and turned it the other way up then compared this to the photos and suddenly it all made sense this second wreck they' looked at was monitor it was just upside down of course the photos were what you could achieve with an early 1930s waterproof camera on the end of a long line that was being dragged through the water uncertain depths in the hope of seeing something that they'd actually managed to get in the correct depth range without losing everything attached to the line was something of a miracle and as it was the clearer Stills camera had been snagged on the wreck and lost so the only available footage was from the much blurrier video camera from which they could take Stills so although the announcement of the Rex Discovery was made in March 1974 further Expeditions were planned plan to verify this this of course led to another Expedition shortly thereafter by the ship Alcoa sea probe a highly Advanced underwater survey ship that the US Navy was already looking to evaluate in real world conditions along with some funding from National Geographic the ship deployed a search pod that consisted of station keeping thrusters lights a still camera video cameras and its own navigation system plus almost every sort of sonar imaginable soon the team had assembled over 1,600 images and a chain gang was started feeding prints from the ship's dark room because of course this was the era of film cameras over to a large cabin where the freshly developed photos were analyzed and then trimmed and stuck together with tape to form a massive Mosaic of the wreck which with the resulting coll's massive resolution could not be anything but monitor this verified that she was was upside down and the turret was poking out of the starboard AR quarter of the rack whilst also revealing that much of the underwater hole forward where the accommodation had been was in an advanced State of Decay and collapse whilst the reinforced engine platform deck had held the AR portion of the hle together far better the armor belt was also substantially intact and thus supporting the raftlike upper Hull that had been above water in life amusingly the resolution was so good that the camera that had been lost on the first expedition was also clearly visible sitting on the wreck with a short section of severed line wafting in the current however the confirmation of the ship's exact location now posed a problem at around 240 ft deep and about 16 M offshore the wreck was officially outside the jurisdiction of both Federal and Coast Guard Authority but easily within range of almost any vaguely seaworthy craft which if it equipped with a rather crude grappling claw could wrench parts of the ship off for Salvage if there were people aboard this hypothetical ship who had technical diving skills it would even be possible for scuba divers to reach the wreck and manually search through it luckily a couple of years previously the Marine protection research and sanctuaries act had been passed this allowed the national Marine sanctuaries to be established up to 200 nautical miles from the shoreline with whatever Pro protections and restrictions the US Secretary of Commerce decided to establish monit recite thus rapidly became the first such Sanctuary under the protection and supervision of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or Noah for short various authorized follow-up Expeditions established more details about the site and would recover small artifacts such as the red distress Lantern shown earlier but inevitably talk soon turned turned to salvaging the historic wreck along with the question of course of if this was even possible an idea was floated to use the glomar Explorer to lift the wreck whole this founded somewhat on the twin grounds of cost and the fact the last time the ship had tried to lift something in this case a sunken Soviet submarine although that was still classified at that point but various US Navy officials who were involved in the process knew something of the Expedition and they knew that glar had only got a bit of the submarines bow to the surface the rest of the sub had not exactly come out of that experience in good shape and the last thing anyone wanted was for monitor to have survived over a century only to be sarily ripped apart by a set of industrial claws that were trying to salvage her the next couple of decades would see a number of further expeditions to record more data carried out but matters came to a head in 1991 when an emergency expedition in response to reports of an authorized anchoring on or near the site found evidence of a significant impact on the ship which had caused fairly extensive visual damage the armored sections had held up fairly well but the more fragile whole frames particularly those forward showed significant collapse this accelerated plans for artifact recovery and large objects such as the ship's anchor and propeller would be brought up over the next few years although after so long in seawater they needed to be immediately moved to preservation tanks these Expeditions also revealed that even with the advances in underwater archaeology made over the preceding decades there was little realistic chance of recovering the entire ship much of it was far too fragile to withstand lifting or possibly even excavation and there was no facility large enough to preserve the whole ship at once in any case lifting just the bits that would survive would likely destroy all of the more fragile sections and so it was decided to recover the small artifacts from the engine room then recover the engine and the associated parts of the ship since these were still in relatively good condition and after this the turret would also be recovered granted this would involve cutting through part of the wreck which would include a section of the armor belt but most of the affected area would already have been cleared by the recovery of the engine Associated artifacts and it would allow for the preservation of a substantial portion of the ship these operations lasted years with preparations including the recovery of the propeller starting in 1998 where the engine being raised in 2001 and the gun turret coming to the surface in 2002 the Mariners Museum in Newport News had been selected as the location for the treatment preservation and display of the recovered artifacts the museum would also go on to create a dedicated exhibit to tell monitor's story which would eventually come to include a fullscale replica of the ship which you can walk on and around if you happen to visit it now let's take a look at some of those displays now of course monitor story doesn't end with her sinking it took a while but she was rediscovered and when she was rediscovered well the Atlantic had not been kind this obviously is not me time traveling nor is it me displaying phenomenal underwater Powers this is another replica that they've got in the museum so this is a replica that pretty much shows what monitor's turret was like at the time when it was rediscovered now one of the things you might immediately notice is this gun Carriage is upside down because the ship had of course flipped as she went over so the whole ship was upside down which includes the turret so where I'm standing now is is actually the turret's roof and these beams up here are actually the base of the turret and what looks to you like rocks Etc this is actually sedimentary buildup that had you know occurred in the 150 years or so between the ship sinking and the present day as you can see there's lots of sea life accretion lots of rust the doen gun itself is actually in a remarkably good condition uh given the amount of time it spent down here but the problem wasn't just how do we get this thing up to the surface the problem on top of that was once it gets to the surface having been immersed in saltwater for so long and all the other Trace elements you get in sea water whilst this rust was bad enough and would take a while to clean up the percolation of salt and other materials minerals Etc into the iron would lead very rapidly to rusting and delamination and disintegration if corrective action wasn't taken pretty much immediately upon Salvage which meant that before any Salvage work could begin they had to decide how exactly they were going to preserve the ship so much like with a VSA and Mary Rose which obviously are wooden vessels where you had to take them out of the water and then put them in a polyethylene glycol spray which would displace again the salt water and minerals from the wood and preserve the wood that way you can't do that with iron but you can use electrochemical processes which we'll look at in a little bit so just next to the replica of the turret in its condition as found we have another replica of the turret pretty much obviously in cross-section as it would have been whilst the ship was in active service so as a cross-section obviously not everything is there you can see we've got the port side gun Carriage but no gun that allows you to see the starboard gun carriage and you therefore can see how the gun on the staro gun would be when it's actually aimed and ready to fire versus the position of it once it has fired with this port side Carriage you can also see the overall framework of the turret how it was arranged how it was supported and the mechanism actually continues further down to a lower level which we'll go and look at in a minute but you can also see the way the armor is configured now I mentioned before when we were looking at This ship's side profile that the armor up here was thicker and layered but it's very clear here in this rather nice replica how you've got the multiple plates of 1in armor and also around here at the turret face where the guns are actually pointing out how there are some slight differences in the way the bolts are holding the armor together here because they've got to have the gun ports there which is of course a structural weakness as opposed to how it's all held together at the back where it's just continuous plating all the way around so let's continue on down and we'll have a look at some more actual monitor artifacts along with this replica and the interesting thing of course is that we've got this replica turret here but right behind the camera we have the full-sized monitor replica out there and both turrets are aligned in exactly the same direction so what you see here is exactly what you also see outside right so we are now in the lower section of the turet replica so we saw that up top this is the moving mechanism this is how the turret rotates so we're essentially down in the Machinery space is the engine room if you're on the actual ship now what you might be able to see if you've got a large enough screen is that unlike the turret of a battleship or a cruiser that you might see elsewhere in the US up where the turret gunhouse sits on the ring there's no pinions there's no racks there's no cogs there's nothing so this no ball bearings either this turret is not moving like a conventional turret would in the sort of the more modern sense in fact whilst there is obviously a small steam engine set which is going to enable you to rotate the turret and that's what this big gear in the middle is for to actually get the turret able to rotate you have to lift it very slightly because normally it's just sitting and friction is keeping it sealed which is important cuz you don't want water coming in but friction is also going to prevent you from being able to rotate it and here and here is the mechanism that allows you to turn the turret so what happens is you have a big wedge which is goes into a gap on this side and that is connected to a screw thread on this side so when you want the turret in its conventional travel position which is what it it's in at the moment it would be set up like this but when you want to lift the turret so that it can actually be turned then you have to get a big wrench and rotate the nut that's on this screw thread and that will pull this wedge through into here and obviously as the wedge is pulled through this gets lifted which is connected to the central spindle which is then connected to the turret so the whole turret lifts up only by about an inch or so you don't need to do any more than that and now the turret is free to be rotated and then you can either keep it like that if you want or you can lower the turret back down again and open fire now this is a fairly elegant solution to the fact that monus is a fairly small ship turrets are very much in their infancy and she's also having to be built at ridiculous speed so even if they'd wanted to adopt a more quotequote modern turret layout system the resources that would have been needed to manufacture and install hundreds of ball bearing or roller bearing mounts all around the turret would have been you know that's quite a lot of time and money which they don't have when they're trying to build monitor also you would have had to have some kind of turret break or turret lock so when the ship's moving about so to make sure the turret doesn't just spin under its own free and potentially also break the drive Motors whereas with this your lock is just to unscrew this nut slightly which is a lot easier and of course the last thing is a little bit of a catch 22 situation when it comes to jamming because if you have a roller bearing or ball bearing or whatever kind of bearing run system around the turret at the bottom of the gunhouse if that takes a Direct Hit or the hole flexes you can get the turret jammed which is not good however if someone's just standing next to the turret there's not an awful lot they can do about it with this system you can hit the turret as much as you like and it's not going to jam this rotation mechanism this can only really be destroyed if you manage to get under the hull or through the hull armor which is a fairly tall order because even if you do get a Shell through you still get pretty much to the heart of the ship and then hit it with enough Force to actually do something substantial the flip side to it is that if the turret is up and rotating if you do have somebody outside and let's face it monitor just has these two big guns she doesn't have anything much the way have anti boarding mechanisms then someone with another wedge could just stick a wedge under the rotating turret and freeze it in place and then there's not a huge amount you can do other than possibly try and pull this wedge through to raise the turret even more at which point person outside can just Hammer the wedge in even further and this was actually considered as a potential counter to us turreted monitors in the 1860s by various navies because the monitors weren't particularly fast they weren't particularly agile the idea of being able to catch up with them and put men aboard was relatively viable of course there is the possibility that monitor could defend itself with rifles but outside of the pilot house there's not really anywhere to do that so a little bit of a catch 22 situation but for a ship that has to be built really really quickly this is a much simpler and easier solution and at the end of the day if you have this solution in the water and it's working and able to fight the Virginia that's much better than a theoretically perfect solution that you're only going to have a year or two later down the line and if you want a bit more detail on how the turret rotated here's a copy of the original drawings looking at that wedge mechanism and as you can see as the wedge pulls in the entire turret spindle and everything is on a bearing as the wedge pulls in that allows the bearing to be lifted which allows the turret to rotate and if the wedge is down then obviously the turret can't rotate because the turret then sits on a brass ring on the the top of the hole which means it's essentially friction locked you'd be trying to turn the entire turret against the friction of its entire circumference embedded on brass which isn't obviously going to happen this picture as with with that of monitor's original turret construction is obviously courtesy of the Mariners Museum they have access to hundreds and hundreds of pages of highres digital copies of the original plans and technical drawings for monitor which make very interesting viewing artifact preservation is of course an ongoing task this is where they do it at the Mariners museum for the big stuff there is a viewing Gallery which you can see here off to the left which those windows um I'm looking at it from from a slightly higher perspective at this point and you can see closest to us the big Square tank has the ship's engine in it this big hexagonal tank that actually contains the monitor's turret and just beyond that which you can actually see through the windows from the viewing Gallery but you can't see from my position up top are the tanks containing the doen guns but that's not all you can see as well as the previously recovered artifacts which are on display in the exhibits themselves some of which you've seen during the course of this video as I mentioned at the top of the video at the time that this video releases which should be the 6th of March there are 3 days until the 9th of March 2024 which will be the Hampton Roads commemoration Day event at the Mariners Museum now admission to the museum is very reasonable it's $1 per person and if you go there on the 9th you'll get to see something that the general public has not seen since the ship hit the water in early 1862 that being the skeg beam that supported the rudder and shielded the propeller that has been in preservation for about two decades and is now ready for display for those of you who can't make it here is something of a sneak preview that I got whilst I was there along with some rather fascinating information on the preservation process and a look at some some of the key artifacts that they have in storage right so here we are in one of the preservation and artifact rooms now monitor is a bit of a unique consideration compared to a lot of Museum ships because of course she's a sunen vessel that's been recovered which means that a lot more preservation has to be done to the artifacts as compared to a let's say USS New Jersey or USS Midway which have only ever been above water but also unlike Mary Rose or VSA she's not a wooden ship she's an iron ship so there's a lot of different preservation methods that have to go along because polyethylene glycol and ion don't really work now I can say this but it's much much better to talk to the professional who actually has to deal with this day in day out so if you could introduce yourself to is I'm will Hoffman I'm the director of conservation and chief conservator at the Mar's Museum Park I've been here for about 15 years and worked um many years on USS Monitor and USS monitor artifacts and our big challenge with monitor or any artifact that's been at the bottom of the ocean especially with metal is ocean salts and ocean salts cause really aggressive corrosion if not removed so much of our work within the laboratory is desalination so if you ever visit a lab such as the bat and conservation complex here at the Mariners Museum you see these large tanks why artifacts submerged is we're trying to remove those ocean salts so that ultimately we can remove the salts clean the artifacts and get them out on display or for research to the public so obviously when you've got wooden artifacts the polyethylene glycol displaces some of the salts and minerals that built up in the wood so how does how does the tanks here how do they do that with the Iron Work sure so what we're doing is um both what we call chemical desalination passive desalination or electrochemical work and basically what we're doing is we're using alkaline solutions that compete with chloride to drive it out of the artifacts but we also use electrochemistry to cem convert corrosion sort of back from rust more toward Elemental iron or metal and that what that does is that then helps to accelerate the breakup of the corrosion the Marine growth expose more of the object's surface to the Treatment Solutions to accelerate that desalination so it can be very long it's a very long process because it takes combinations of mechanical cleaning with hand tools um techniques we also use dry blasting here as as um a blasting medium to remove corrosion um so there's multiple cycles of that so uh takes a long time yeah it's well it's it's definitely worth it cuz I mean this is I mean talk us through briefly what what is this I mean it kind of at first inspection it might look like some kind of very weird Kit tanker but we I know it's not that but what what are we looking at so we are looking at the very bottom of USS monitor so this is the the the skag assembly of the ship and what a skag is it holds up your propeller and your Rudder and so um you're looking at the very bottom corner of the outer Hall of USS monitor this is the very bottom of the ship and this large rivet pattern here is where the beam actually attached to the ship and so this long um structure here all composed of rod iron held uh the propeller shaft which came out just about here to the propeller and the rudder was mounted in the end so um we have at the Museum about 210 tons or the fifth of monitor with the minority being the engineering section and the hole after the ship and so this is a large part of the structure the physical structure that made up The Vessel okay and I notice with the raw iron and some of the other raw iron artifacts on display it almost looks like an old Timber beam that's been spray painted black so that's a particular property of RW iron when it rusts yes so RW iron is a forged material so often you think about a good example is katana's Japanese swords how they fold them metal well rod iron is as worked material and so um at that time period you couldn't really do with steel and high volume and so you'd be converting um cast iron or gray iron into a malleable material and so you you see those big steam Hammers and you're changing physically the grain structure of the metal you're taking octagonal metal grains and crushing them flat and driving carbon out and so as the metal is worked and folded you get this structure these elongating metal grains and what we call stringers of carbon in mix and so when it corrodes it corrodes along that grain structure so we often call it fibrous rod iron because it looks like wood but it really shows how far the corrosion can penetrate within that structure so what you see here is all solid metal we've lost a lot of the surface and so what's unique about this is when it was originally produced it would have looked just like steel so as it corrodes AC we start seeing where where the the metal was worked but we also see where the metal was worked together so if you you know in if you've ever seen blacksmithing where they hot work pieces together and they Forge it together we can actually see that in the structure where they join these pieces together so one really interesting thing about archaeology but especially archaeological conservation is part of the work that we do is is in conservation to understand the material we have to understand how objects materials degrade all those mechanisms but then that also provides ins it in how the things were made and the stories of people that made them so we can sort of look and really start understanding at the back end how this this component was produced what went into it we can potentially do material analysis and provide us more of that story of the people from the time period okay and to sort of to emphasize just how vital this preservation process is um obviously as you said you've got all these layers this is where the corrosion gets in so when you fish an artifact out of the water it's not that oh this artifact is Rusted and we want it to look nicer it's a case of well if if we don't stabilize it that is going to is continue the corrosion in the open air in fact probably accelerate maybe yeah so um so you take a brand new piece of mild steel let's just say right off the mill you throw it outside up to say 70% humidity there's not enough moisture for corrosion to happen so with artifacts especially metal artifacts Mar green environment what will happen is they will corrode in the open air at less than 11% humidity very dry and that's due to Chloride so um you know you leave your rake out it gets wet we call that flash rusting iron wants to be its or form it wants to be H hematite and rest will go right to that chlorides produce a type of corrosion the primary one is called a kagon which is very voluminous it will just grow and grow and grow and grow it's self-catalytic and so if you've ever walked along the beach in salt water you see iron falling apart it's do that process and so we know from the science in the field around the world you're never going to be able to get all the chloride out but what we're trying to do in the laboratory is kind of basically there's three things we try to do in a museum with iron objects with any most archaeological objects is one especially with iron is we're going to do as much work in the lab to desalinate to remove as much of that chloride as possible that's going to be Then followed up with surface Coatings to act as a moisture barrier sometimes a consolidate for the surface and then the third part is the museum environment if you control the environment the humidity levels those three things combined the goal is to to basically extend the life of the object as much as possible and the challenge in particular for monitor is scale so you mentioned the Mary Rose and the Vasa to date monitors the largest Marine metal shipwreck recovery and conservation effort ever undertaken worldwide by volume of material they are very similar projects and so when you get to these Grand scale projects many of the things that you're doing no one's ever done before at that scale and so you have to take a lot of what's learned out the field and really sort of curtail it and modify it for your specific need there can be things that you can translate directly but a lot of it is figuring out how we're going to do this at this scale and that's really what a lot of the challenges monitor is when all these auts were were recovered they're covered and encase Marine growth there was research done to kind of understand you know there's an uh an information out there of the history drawings and plans but again just cuz something's on a plan doesn't mean it actually made it to the artifact and then it's specifically understanding what is what and so early on all this stuff came up and we as between us and Noah and and other partners fig out what we have where it went how are we going to conserve it what tank it's going to go into there's all this planning that you only have partial information on so all these projects you're making as educated guesses as much as possible and then figuring out a path forward and pivoting and changing and evolving over time as you learn new things and develop new techniques for your application and I think that's that definitely is something people should bear in mind because Vasa was the first big wooden ship to be taken up and preserved with polyethylene glycol but if you look at the final outcome although Vasa is really well preserved you look at the final outcome of that versus the final outcome of Mary Rose where they took all the lessons they learned from Vasa and applied them marry Rose's material condition is arguably a much better outcome because they've built on that work as you said this is the big the the biggest iron wack so the stuff that you're doing is effectively that same generation of work effectively as what they were doing with Vasa with Wooden Ships so you're kind of setting the groundwork on how to do this large scale preservation for future iron wrecks that may be fished up at some point yeah um we've we've actually learned lessons there's uh there real sort of first ship that was done for Metals a ship called the SS Sano is recovered uh in Australia and they were the first ones to uh really deal with machine steam engine uh off the off the Zano on the smaller scale we've learned a lot of lessons in the field learned a lot of lessons from that but then now scaling that up and understanding these projects take time um but I would say one thing in particular with Arch ological conservation especially with projects Marine Metals is every and this goes pretty much for every archaeological site no two are the same so you can take the lessons from one project but how your object deteriorates degradation is based on burial environment it's based on ocean currents it's based on you know what the materiality the quality of materials and so it's very difficult to make broad generalizations right you really have to learn learn your material learn your objects learn what it can take so you can take a lessons learn from other projects and our our field is small enough that we really work with our colleagues but then you have to take what they've come up with and then apply it and often what happens for us really there's kind of three areas when you're presented with a conservation problem that you don't have expertise in or you don't have an exact method you're going to try first thing we do in our profession is a literature review you're going to figure out what everyone else has done talk to your colleagu colleages and say do you have an approach that may work for us and we and we go in we say oh this might work we we take it we do testing to see if it's going to apply it is very rare that it works directly so then your next course of action is being all right I'm going to take it have this technique it's it semi works I'm going to modify it from my particular criteria and then the third of course is no one has ever done it to that scale or had the same challenges cuz they're not dealing with 25 ton steam engine they're not dealing with this volume we're going to have to create a new technique to be able to solve our problem and we ride often between the second and the third so you take the lessons learned to your point from others but it's very rare that it's a onetoone application because you're dealing with whole different criteria par it up and with the with this particular piece and the sort pieces immediately behind it what kind of stage are we looking at at this point with with this section compared to obviously it's or originally been on the seabed and then you've got stuff that's fully preserved as as far as it goes which is on display so whereabouts on that scale are these pieces sure so um these components of the hall structure actually finished conservation so obviously the ultimate goal is to get them out on display so um really our ultimate aim is to reconstruct the engineering of the ship in its entirety so that basically someday visitors can stand with the within the engine remove monitor so right now these components have gone through their cleaning their desalination they've gone through their surface Coatings and now we're moving them into um midterm storage so that we can um we can set the stage for really building out the final plan for how we're going to display the materials um the other thing that we're we're now working our way into especially with these component parts is um start and begin the plan of how we're going to refit them together um uh understanding exact placement what we can and can't put back together again we're just sort of touching upon working on that stage because it's very difficult when things are in treatment to be able to start piecing things back together so we're beginning to work on What's That long-term plan now okay cool now there is a plan over there speaking of plans should we go and have a look at that and we can have a bit of a chat about what exactly we actually have sure right so we are we now have the plan of monitor or a plan of monitor um now obviously there is the turret we there's two well technically three replicas of it in the museum and then the actual one which is in preservation so you've obviously got the stir at your end coming up to the bow the anchor well at my end what parts of monitor do we actually have left sure so um monitor long skinny ship tur in the middle ship We Believe sank Stern first just like the bismar in the Hood the turret was only held on by gravity and so when the turret flipped over during its sinking the turret fell off and came to rest just right about here if you can imagine this plan turned down in your mind and so in the late '90s when the National Oceanic Oceanic and hemispheric administration decides to do major recovery their ultimate goal from the effort is to recover the signature artifacts from the from the ship with the primary one the ultimate culmination being the turret so because the turret happened to be underneath the engineering section Noah made the decision to recover it between 1998 and 2001 Navy divers and no archaeologists as well as a uh whole group of Partners recovered floors steps railings five of the ship steam engines the steam steam condenser engine room flooring all the bulkhead structure underneath the engineering section the skeg assembly as well as the propeller and propeller shaft we also have the main steamline from the ship so for all intent and purposes this entire section of the ship was recovered from the engine room not the upper not the upper deck but everything below it as well um as the following year in 2002 the turret so we have about 20% or fifth of the vessel at the Museum and the rest of the vessel is going to be presumably left in place it's still it's still left in place on the seafloor and the and part of the drive for that is again like our contemporaneous projects it's a huge amount of effort and with the artifacts that we have we can tell the story of the ship and the crew MH yeah I suppose if you've got if you've got this section and the turret well pretty much all of this is crew quarters so so with the best will in the world you know that they probably not preserved quite as well as the heavy machinery so one of the challenges with the monitor is that so we often hear monitor the term Ironclad well it it's that's it's not really an ironclad ship it has what we call an armor belt here monitor's Hall is actually iron and has Pine and Oak and five layers of iron on the on the Outer Edge but it's really an iron Hall shap and so part of that real monitor story is that is that change that it is a true steamship so there are no sales on it and um it has changed when we think about changing Naval C culture of course we think of the battle with the with the turret but we also have this whole idea of at least the way I often look at it is if you're familiar with the Crystal Palace and you think about all the technology from the day coming together in one place monitors it for a ship but if you also think about you know you're starting into um modern architecture and you think about how we replac start replacing brick with iron what happens your facade just becomes decoration it becomes it's it's less structural for monitor really monitor has an iron hall and then it has reinforced angle iron holding that v-shaped Hall and so this also enables you to start seeing this lavish interior because all of this the this the cabins the wardro the office quarters that physical structure is not loadbearing and so what happens on the seafloor and one of the challenges with the archaeology as the ship's upside down the angle iron supports holding the hall structure in place midship forward begin to collapse and so when the divers started going down into the rec site we have beautiful photographs and video inside the engine room because the ball catch structure held this partnership intact and of course the two fire two boilers kept this part intact so for of the midships ballhead it's very difficult the arrangement in 1979 they uh did go down and excavate across the wreck and we got a um over close to 120 artifacts in that uh in that excavation from the C's cabin dat room back but really our story uh is a story of the propulsion engine this system which again if you think about it at that time period you had crew with sales all that rigging crew all of that well now you have an engineer you have Engineers with and you have this whole change in culture as well as um if you think about it where on a frigate were the officers located Stern Stern well what's in the stern of monitor it's just the propeller of the engine you have the engine room so now you're moving all the officers forward so there's all these subset set stories that run through through Monitor and I think it's probably quite important to point out to people if you've seen uh a painting of monitor or you know on the surface the ship seems to start here and run to here but all of this is not habitable or usable space nor is this this is this is the core of the ship yeah and again the the primary goal was to try to keep everything below the water line the engines the systems because if you most paddle wheelers if you're familiar with pad wheelers they had a big beam in the middle big walking beam which is basically a watt engine and the challenge was all you had to do disable that ship was either put it through the paddles or just put a piece of artillery right to the beam and so the goal having this compact engine was to bring everything below the surface of the water to really um to ensure that the operation machinery would continue because that's all the ship was relied on so it another interesting note is the entire ship the turret the engines the blowers all the systems the auxiliary boiler feed pumps all of that ran on the boilers it was the only source of power and so therefore that system an integrated system had to work and was always kept going the entire time monitor for all intents and purposes monitor was down in Hampton Roads fair enough right well thank you very much for this briefing and uh let's look at some other bits of the ship sure right so continuing our look at artifacts from monitor these are actual artifacts taken from the turret so these are all associated with the ships with the guns with the guns okay um so you know what you're looking at here are things that were actually at the Battle of Hampton Roads yep and were used sorry very no that's very very actively used so um I guess let's start off with this what looks like a a big lump of brass but if I pan this across you can see it has a left stop and right on it so what what is this so what you're looking at is the indicator plate you going to pick up the [Music] Jets it seems all right yeah they're f-22s from Langley so what we're looking at is the control plate uh for the turret mechanism so obviously the turret is so the turret is designed to move left or right and to stop so how do you how do you control that so this plate was found in the turret uh adjacent to the um the actual control lever for the turret so we don't know it's exact placement but it's it it provides you that ability to get that human interaction so we often think of monitor as this big machine you know first revolving turret on a ship Battle of Hampton Roads all of that but then we always part of the goal for Recovery is bring it back to the people so if you can put yourself in there with all the the gun Crews working the guns and then the engineers driving the turret so it's a very that moment of bringing you as an individual to the story so this this is obviously is going to then the lever will be connecting to the engine the donkey engines that are driving the turret round correct although as we know at the Battle of Hampton Roads about halfway through it stopped being of any real use cuz the turet started to keep going of its own accord but still you know the if if nothing else th this is the uh plate that you can imagine some poor person in the in the turret looking at going yes I know but you're not obeying what I've got on that instruction and it brings you that moment of we think about Hampton Roads and and the battle both of Virginia they were mon were relatively although the Virginia had been the day before still relatively untested ships and so you're going into a battle not knowing if this is going to work or not with Machinery that's untested monitor had just come down from New York and so it was it was when they say that cliche trial by fire but it was you were going to go out there and hopefully it would work so it gives that tries you know the one of the things about artifacts is that they're ultimately the connection to the story that people that made and use them so the reason why we do these efforts and do these projects is to bring us to the connection to the people and for the battle for the turret artifacts like this control plate really pull you in yeah definitely I mean it's yeah I can as with the um when I did the Battle of Hampton rad as a video that it's it's amusing now obviously it wouldn't be amusing for them at the time but it was amusing now to look back and think of you know the turret just getting permanently stuck in a rotation Loop but then when you look at that it's it's that for me is it's the human element of someone just looking at that and Pro probably smacking with that it's like work damn it get I want to be pointed in the right direction there's a quote from Buchanan um I don't remember I I'm paraphrasing here but basically he says you know as the Virginia goes out either we're all going to die or we're going to go on as Heroes and that kind of that kind of mindset you know is we think about it now tanks turrets artillery Hitting off of them but back then this is pre the tank this is pre all of that this is the first time these things are happening and so it's it's really powerful and then I suppose we move on to so what have we got here this little brass so this is the forward site on on uh one of the guns so this would be the John Ericson gun so after the battle ultim eventually the both guns get engraved one Eric and one warden so this is the the gun number um that the gun was uh designated and so this would be the forward site that's mounted on the gun and then what we have behind it is a is a sight cover so this would have set when the gun wasn't in use to protect it so we have these were all found in the turret but they weren't found in place so again one of the things that we learned from the Archaeology is that the tools were all spread all around within the turret and that just gave us that view of the sinking and the tumultuous things moving around within the turret so again that's part of the archaeology understanding how these artifacts got to where they are when they were found but also then trying to provide Insight in how they were used right and then we've got this this boxed item so this is one of the firing hammers so um this would have this would have this mounts in a in a block on the gun but what you're looking at actually was used to fire uh projectiles against a Virginia that that so that would have been essentially the last point of contact that the um projectile and charges had before they were sent out through the through the gun barrel that this is the thing that ignites everything the best way to put a lot of the work that we do is our job in preserving these artifacts is in many ways must be like how a doctor looks at a patient your job is to preserve the material and to ensure that that they're going to last for future generations and sometimes you sort of take a step back from what what do these actually mean but when you see these artifacts and understand what I'm holding actually did the job and it brings that connection back to the people and that's ultimately what what we're doing all this work for all right and then we've got this big brass lump here on the top left so what we have here is the rear sight Mount so this one there's a Long Rod that comes down with elevation mark markings in it this one broke off during the sinking but this would have mounted on the rear of the gun and there would be a sight through here which a sight line that would go from the back of the gun to the forward sight and that's how they would Target the gun and you can see the reason why this is now no longer on the gun is one of our challenges within conservation is material type so uh this is copper alloy material and you can see because it was attached to an iron artifact it's very well preserved and so in conservation especially of metal materials the methods to conserve and preserve iron Alloys are different from copper Alloys are different for the organic materials so one of our primary challenges in the lab is to un is to do as best as we can to separate the different components apart from each artifact conserve them separately with the goal to reassemble it as much as possible but what you often find in part of recovery and the conservation effort as you can see on is we learn more about the people so you can see the file marks on the inside where this was where this was filed by the worker at The Foundry um you can see this indicator uh 11 in that's the type of gun this came from and then one thing that that really is a takeaway uh at least from a personal note is we often there's this view the 1860s with the Dark Ages what could they do back then and one thing that we really get is now today we're all form follows function we're all like just you you buy a spet from the hardware store and only the machined edges where it's threaded are cleaned up but here you have Aesthetics all functionally this could have been left rough cast but they've milled it smooth they've they've rolled these fillets in here and so it's functional and beautiful and at the time would have been polished and so it provides this insights in production and the lives of the people that made these artifacts and so this is the rear sight Mount and then this is the rear sight cover so then this would have sat over the top over over the top of the site protecting it okay yeah and that's bit bit more of a s a properly made unit compared to on some of the earlier Cannon where that would have been just a like a bit of lead flashing or something yeah and but the importance especially as you know ordinance changes over time is just this is your operation of the gun and also especially in the turret things are moving back and forth and you want to protect um you just want to protect your um the sighting equipment fair enough and then we move over to this massive great claw-like object so what are we looking at so we are looking at the shot tongs so these would have lifted um either solid shot or explosive shell into into the guns themselves um so that could be uh if my memory serves so that could be either a 156 lb solid shot or explosive shell and presumably that would be a multi-man job to lift this we believe so um if you look at later Ironclad so monitor is the only monitor class monitor paic they're already making changes and there's there's drawings we found where they had sort of a rail system that attached the roof of the turret turret of those ships to be able to basically pull the shot up from below cuz um monitor had two 11-in doens Erikson wanted 15 but they weren't available at the time so these came off of the uh uh USS Dakota which was at the Brooklyn Navy yard was up in was up in was up in New York okay so monitor's actually using guns she's taken from another ship availability so they eventually add and I always forget Bic it's a 15 and it's a brook on that's a brook it's a um I forgotten now there is a 15in on it and it's and they change the gun ports they they swivel instead of open like this um but again when we think about monitor so in part monitor was was n designed for the US Navy Ericson was was trying to Hawk I was use the word Hawk was that design was going back to trying to a similar earlier iterations of that back to the French and so when you get to the time period of the construction of monitor what you're really dealing with is you have a timeline you have to go with what you know is going to work uh on over just over a 100 days you're trying to get this uh ship built and so you're using the information you have have and the and the um and so Erikson had come up with the designs and so he went with it and then as the ship's under operation they're already making iterations they're changing the turret function they're going from the turret sitting on the PO on a post to Turret spinning around a post you're changing all that Arrangement absolutely fascinating especially cuz you know as you said you know there it's the personal connection it's not a case of you know here's an 11in doen and its fittings like the one that was at Hampton Road these are the fittings right and the equipment for the guns these were rampton roads these actually fought in the Civil War against Virginia and you know the people that we read about the crew you know they would have touched these exact artifacts in the course of their duties yeah let me bring out one more to get my keys of the personal items we have one of the greatest parts of the collection of of personal items come from inside the turret and uh that's really a lot of the galley contents because the galley was right below the turret and the best of our belief as the ship turned over it dumped the some of the galley contents into the turret and one of the the the largest groupings was silverware and so we think about the turret now as this big machine guns moving all these kinds of things and it things like this bring you back down that human element these are the artifacts that um are the objects that the crew used to eat eat food and you really can't get much more personal than you know eating utensils one on one so it again for us um as as a um institution but also as just you know the the the team behind conserving these artifacts coming back to that human story of why is all this work all this effort gone into such a project this is not just the same for us it's for all the other big projects is to make that connection the story of the people and so you know that often it's the big guns the engine the Machinery but it's these little personal objects again pull you down from the big picture into the story of the individual absolutely fascinating and shockingly very modern you you could almost pick that up in a fancy fancy Cutlery store and and that's old old is new but also you know things don't necessarily change as much as we think they do you know an example would be all of the Milling a metal lathe up until modern CNC the only difference between a 19 19th century um metal lathe and and a more modern one was a more modern one used GE ears and electric motor whereas the 19th century one used pulley and and um a different and leather belt to a steam engine but the physics doesn't change you know and so it's again why we recover these artifacts is each individual person that looks at him you just made a personal connection to it through the solware and that's why we do what we do and why all the work went into recovery thank you so much for letting us see all these unique artifacts and obviously there's plenty more out on display in the museum and being preserved in in the uh preservation area which is where we are now so definitely you know if you want to see this and more come down to the museum and and have a look because there is so much of the history being told here uh far more than could ever be told in in this video series so thank you very very much you're welcome so once again thank you so much to the wonderful staff at the Mariners museum for welcoming me there and giving me access to these fantastic historic artifacts as mentioned in the beginning of the video there is obviously also the lecture on March 9th as well as the general commemoration event lecture about battle Hampton Road starts at noon once again you do need to register for that if you want to attend in person spaces are limited or you can register to watch it online so even if you aren't able to make it to the museum tune in from wherever you are to hear a bit more about the Battle the big one that monitor is famous for and I think we can safely say that monitor and her Legacy are in very good hands over at the Museum so hopefully you've learned a little bit from this video a bit of a long one as far as the channel goes but see you again in another one that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pin post for dry do questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 392,048

Keywords: wows, world of warships, USS Monitor, CSS Virginia, Battle of Hampton Roads, USS New Ironsides, USS Galena, Mariners Museum, NOAA

Id: i-MnWzZpxSc

Length: 106min 45sec (6405 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2024