The Monitor Chronicles : One Sailor's Account : Today's Campaign to Recover the Civil War Wreck - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684869977 ISBN 13: 9780684869971

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Synopsis

An account of ongoing efforts to recover the nineteenth-century wreck of the USS Monitor features more than one hundred photographs, paintings, and technical plans, as well as never before published letters from a common Civil War sailor who served aboard the famous battleship.

About this title

About the Author

The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia, is the official repository for Monitor artifacts recovered from the wreck site in the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. The Museum is responsible for the complex task of conserving these historic objects, and for exhibiting and interpreting them for the public. The letters of Monitor sailor George S. Geer, donated to The Mariners' Museum by the Carl Espy family, are part of the Museum's extensive holdings of documents, artworks, and artifacts related to the Civil War. Congress has designated The Mariners' Museum, along with a sister institution in New York City, an American National Maritime Museum.

Reviews

During the Civil War, some 172 feet of seagoing iron, with a deck a mere foot-and-a-half above the water line, made the world's navies instantly obsolete. That's maritime history, retold here. The human story, too, is told by one of the ship's crewmen.The Monitor, the Union's cheesebox on a raft, was the brainchild of the brilliant, feisty John Ericsson. It changed naval warfare forever, and it changed the lives of its sailors. Civil War historian Marvel's (Burnside, 1991) text is composed largely of letters from the Monitor's fireman George Geer to his wife in New York. They date from the time Geer boarded the newly commissioned warship in January 1862 through its foundering in rough seas the last day of the same year. Within weeks of her launching, the Monitor engaged in its historic duel with the Confederate Merrimack (rechristened the Virginia), which withdrew. Each ship's guns were unable to penetrate the other's armor. Marvel's exposition is clear and succinct, as are Geer's letters, in beautiful penmanship and atrocious spelling. Though his depictions of events occasionally tend to be wrong (elevating routine siege fire to major battles and exaggerating casualties), his narrative of the heat and fumes, the crew's bad food, and the scourge of Confederate sharpshooters on shore is remarkably interesting, with a mordant wit often evident. His occasional dispirit, his money worries, his efforts to gain a promotion, and his regular husbandly assurances of his well-being (especially after his survival of the sinking of his ship) attest to the conflict's human concerns. We learn nothing of Geer's postwar life, and Mrs. Geer's letters did not survive (although it is interesting to note that the mails went through with more dispatch then than they seem to today). A final chapter deals with continuing efforts to recover the wreck of the historic ship. A unique history, unusually accessible because it is taken largely from the pen of a long-dead sailor. No prior knowledge of maritime practice or Civil War arcana necessary. (100 b&w and color illustrations) -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In 1862, George Geer boarded the U.S.S. Monitor as a fireman and engineer and stepped into history. In regular correspondence with his wife back in New York, he recorded the workings of the machinery and crew on the newfangled "cheesebox on a raft," as the Union ironclad was called. He also described the famous battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac, the posturing of commanders, and the sinking of the Monitor off the coast of North Carolina during a storm in 1863. This book collects Geer's very readable and revealing letters and augments them with an intelligent commentary on Union naval technology as well as the combined naval and military operations during the Peninsula campaign of 1862. A biography of Geer is included, while a concluding chapter surveys recent efforts to raise the Monitor from her watery grave. Whatever the success of the latter enterprise, this book triumphs as the best inside-the-hull account of life aboard an ironclad and gives Civil War sailors a rare voice in a subject area crowded with soldiers' accounts and the preoccupation with the war on land. Highly recommended for college and major public libraries.DRandall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: The Duel

At the age of forty-three, Lieutenant John L. Worden had been twenty-seven years a sailor and seven months a prisoner of the Confederacy when, on January 13, 1862, the Navy Department celebrated his release by placing him in command of its newest and most unusual craft. The ship lay under construction at Green Point, Brooklyn, New York. The deck stretched 172 feet from stem to stern, with a beam of forty-one feet, almost perfectly flat, and covered with iron sheathing. A brass ring twenty feet in diameter sat just forward of the centerline, waiting to accept a cylindrical turret, while the plated box of a pilothouse peeked up near the prow.

This awkward little tub represented the genius of a Swedish immigrant named John Ericsson, who asked that the virtually invulnerable gunboat be called the Monitor. With little fanfare, the ironclad hull slid into the water on January 30. To the surprise of many in the shipbuilding trade, it floated, its deck barely eighteen inches above the waterline. Shipfitters and mechanics installed the turret, a nine-foot cylinder with a wall eight inches thick. On one side of the turret, the muzzles of two eleven-inch guns loomed through oblong ports.

A slight man with a long, bushy beard, John Worden's demeanor did not match the classic image of the stern, iron-fisted navy captain. In an age when most naval officers treated their crewmen little better than draft animals, Worden had the knack of winning his men's affection, as well as their respect. Between his affable nature and the renown of his peculiar new ship, he experienced little difficulty shipping a crew. Other skippers were not so lucky. That winter, with so many new vessels under construction and so many men enlisting in the army, commanders at other ports were begging unassigned sailors from other stations to fill their complements. Recruiting agents were telling potential new hands anything that would persuade them to sign up. Besides his wardroom, steerage, and warrant officers, Worden needed the services of only forty-two souls, and in one visit to the receiving ship North Carolina and the frigate Sabine, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he had more volunteers than he could possibly take.

One of those who stepped forward was a bright, ambitious young man who had just enlisted for a three-year hitch. Twenty-five years old, George Spencer Geer hailed from Troy, New York, where his father and brothers operated a stove foundry. In the forty months since his marriage he had lived in or near New York City, but he had not prospered there. Geer had lost his job and gone into debt to support his wife, Martha, and two young children. The little family lived in an apartment owned by an impatient landlady, Mrs. De Long, at 25 Pitt Street, just off Delancey Street in a crowded tenement neighborhood of what would become famous as the Lower East Side. So, like more than a few men of his station in life, George Geer had joined Abraham Lincoln's navy on February 15, 1862, less to help save the Union than to earn some money and learn a reliable trade. His experience working with the steam engines in his father's foundry may have tipped the scales in his favor, for the navy accepted him as a first-class fireman. It was a rating that paid a tidy thirty dollars a month, whereas a coal heaver or a deck hand earned only eighteen. For Geer, it was a hopeful step into a new life.

Geer first shouldered his seabag on board the North Carolina, a "devlish old hulk," as he would write of her. The vessel teemed with recruits and with families saying good-bye. Martha appeared, accompanied by her sister Rachel, and she found her husband already beginning his education in the ways of the fledgling United States Navy. He showed her a chunk of the dry, nutritionally bereft hardtack that would make up the better part of his diet over the coming three years. In return, Martha brought her husband a bag of clothing and the few personal items the navy would allow him. Later he would find that she had also tucked three biscuits into his meager cache of belongings -- a homely gift of parting from a young wife who would be mostly fending for herself in the months to come.

Amid the hustle that winter day in Brooklyn, Geer handed his wife one month's advance wages -- a sum allowed by the paymaster, with the assurance that at the end of each month Martha Geer would receive an additional allotment of half her husband's pay. As she would soon discover, however, the U.S. Navy in 1862 was itself struggling to make ends meet while supporting the war effort, and navy agents eager to snare recruits might promise almost anything. George Geer had been told that the advanced funds would be taken from his pay only gradually, and that the monthly allotments could begin immediately. In truth, Martha Geer would have to scrape by for months before seeing another nickel.

Another lesson George Geer would soon learn was that in some ways life aboard the Monitor was like that of no other navy ship. On a standard vessel, the various military strata each found their quarters in a traditional location, with status usually increasing toward the stern: the captain's cabin and stateroom were always located aft, with the other commissioned officers' staterooms just forward, on either side of the wardroom. Steerage officers, including the relatively new naval class of engineers, would be quartered ahead of the wardroom, and the warrant officers -- boatswain, gunner, master at arms, and quartermasters -- might have their own segregated location as well, if the ship were large enough. Forwardmost on the old ships lay the berth deck, beneath the forecastle, where the common sailors, petty officers, and on steamers the firemen would sling their hammocks.

On the Monitor, this social architecture was reversed. Lieutenant Worden's rooms were tucked far forward, in the bow of the ship ahead of the wardroom, where he and the ironclad's nine other commissioned officers took their meals. Directly aft of Worden's stateroom and cabin, on either side of the wardroom, slept the executive officer, Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, and the ship's acting assistant paymaster, William Frederick Keeler. The surgeon's cabin lay aft of Keeler's, on the other side of a blind door. Most of the rest of the commissioned officers crowded into six little staterooms to port and starboard. Assistant engineers, steerage officers, and warrant officers were out of luck: the little Monitor offered no other housing save the berth deck, which stretched aft of the staterooms to a point beneath the turret. This open space, measuring about sixteen by twenty-five feet, was home to forty-nine men. In theory, the setup was livable because two watches alternated duty and only about two dozen crew would sleep there at any given moment. Behind the berth deck, the Monitor was all boilers and engines.

Gideon Welles, Mr. Lincoln's secretary of the navy, itched to see the Monitor at Hampton Roads, Virginia -- an itch fed by reports that at the Norfolk Navy Yard Confederate shipbuilders were nearing completion of their own ironclad. Using the hull and engines of the former United States frigate Merrimack, they had built a floating battery of ten guns, protected by sloping walls of oak and iron. On February 20, Welles decided to scratch his itch. He ordered Worden to submit a list of the Monitor's crew and head for Hampton Roads, adding that Worden could expect at least one other ship to accompany her to Virginia. After six days of preparations, on the evening of February 26, 1862, the last of the ammunition went into the Monitor's shot lockers and magazine.

The next morning, under the pelting snow and wind of a northeaster, the strange little craft steamed out of the navy yard into the East River. Almost immediately, the helmsman found the Monitor's wheel stiff -- in fact, so unworkable that he couldn't get adequate leverage on the rudder. Like a waterborne Ping-Pong ball, the Monitor began to careen madly from one side of the river to the other. Worden ordered her back to the dock, taking a towline from one of his escort vessels to avoid smashing about in the crowded navy yard.

For two days John Ericsson puzzled over this problem. The quartermaster, who had struggled with the helm, suggested that perhaps a bigger wheel would allow better purchase on the cables that turned the rudder. Instead, Ericsson enhanced the leverage of the cables by extending the reach of the tiller head arms, a solution that turned out to work reasonably well. On March 1 Worden advised Welles that Ericsson expected to finish his modifications the next day, and planned a test run for March 3. But when the moment came, the March sky opened up with a deluge so fierce Worden returned the Monitor to the navy yard yet again. Only three days later, when the skies lightened, would the "cheesebox on a raft" go to sea at last.

* * *

Meanwhile, Fireman George Geer had been working so diligently preparing the ship's engines, coaling the bunkers, and storing ammunition and supplies that he had been unable to write his wife a farewell letter. Now, out in the river, the little ship lay barely a mile from his home on Pitt Street. Gazing shoreward, he knew he would have no chance to cover that mile before they left for wherever they were bound. If he did not know his destination, he at least knew that it would take the Monitor out where heavy seas could surge across its flat deck and threaten every aperture, and even a landlubber like himself might have deduced that this was the most dangerous thing the ironclad could do. While mechanics grappled with the steering apparatus, Geer seated himself before an overturned bucket and began the first of scores of letters that Martha Geer would receive and carefully preserve during the course of the war.

U.S.S. Monitor February [March] 2, 1862

Dear Wife

At last I have a fiew moments to write to you but I have so much to say and so many questions to ask I hardly know where to commence. I will commence by telling you what I am writing on. I have for my desk a water pail turned up side down so you see we have not all the improvements of the age. I do not think I have gained any in flesh, but our living is holeson [wholesome] and will keep me from getting the gout. Matty when I come home I will be able to apreciate your cooking if I neaver did before.

I suppose you saw by the Papers that we started and had to come back. The Ship would not stear. She went first into the Ships on the N.Y. side and then over slam in to the Brooklyn dock, but all the trouble was our stearing wheel was to small. We will have a larger one done to day and shall go to sea again in the morning.

When I go on deck to day and look over towards home it makes the tears start to think I am so near you and cannot be with you. Oh, how I would like to see all of you.

Our ship is so much more comfortable than the old North Carolina but we are not in order yet and have to work most of the time. As soon as we are in shape I will have only eight hours of work out of twenty-four, so you see I will not have to work hard. The pay master or Purser says he will make out that alotment and send it from Fortress Monroe so it will be in New York before the money is due me.

I tride very hard to get on shore to day but could not. I think if I did not owe the Government anything I mint [might] get ashore but until I am out of their debt I may as well give up getting off.

...It is so cold we most freese nights and I am most frose writing this Lettor. I will be glad when we get where it is warmer. Tell me in your Lettor if Rachel is with you much and give my love to her. Also to Wm. Henry, Kate, and Jonny [members of Geer's extended family]. Kiss both the Babys about 24 times apiec for me and dont let them get sick and as for you I have got no love for you, you have it all. Now I am to cold to write more. This from your

Affectionate husband,

Geo. S. Geer

In Virginia, military officials were receiving ominous reports that the Merrimack -- rechristened the CSS Virginia -- was complete and ready to attack Newport News. Secretary Welles decided that the Monitor should turn northwest once she reached the Chesapeake Bay, and come up to Washington. This detour would give politicians and others a closer look at the ironclad -- and, possibly, she would be available to help protect the capital if the need arose. On March 6, Welles telegraphed the commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard with instructions for Worden, but his telegram did not reach New York until that evening. By then the Monitor was gone.

Lieutenant Worden dismissed the harbor pilot after the little Monitor passed the bar, at 4:00 P.M. that Thursday. The sun still shone brightly. The Monitor could not seem to reach its promised headway of eight knots, though, and in order to make the best speed under fair skies Worden took a line from the tugboat Seth Low. As Welles had promised, two little screw steamers, the Currituck and the Sachem, ran alongside. Each of them mounted only four thirty-two-pounder carronades and a single twenty-pounder rifle. The ironclad they escorted might have sent either of them to the bottom with a single shot. The unavoidable inference was that they were intended to serve not as protection, but as rescue vessels. More than a few people believed that the improbable Monitor would never be a dependable craft at sea.

The first test of her seaworthiness arrived with the following dawn. As the wind picked up, the seas began to stir. Low waves washed over the deck, filtering into openings and leaking under the turret. Water gushed onto the lower deck, soaking every compartment before the pumps expelled it. Water poured down the temporary blower pipes, the mouths of which opened only six feet off the deck; the drive belts that turned these ventilators dragged once they were soaked, and at last they snapped, shutting off the outside air. As men dropped from the fumes, Chief Engineer Alban Stimers and First Assistant Engineer Isaac Newton led the rest of their department into the engine compartment and set to work. One by one the firemen too became dizzy or fainted. They staggered or were dragged to fresh air at the top of the turret. Stimers struggled on, persuading the blowers to run haphazardly, though the air was still stale and the boiler fires didn't have enough draft. Without efficient boilers, the pressure for the auxiliary pump engines dropped. Toward midnight, water started gaining on the pumps, and as the seas rose the blower pipes were in danger again. It must have been easy, in that moment, to foresee an early end to the Monitor, but as the morning arrived the wind began to subside. Every man aboard was drenched, none had slept for fifty-three hours, but the Monitor was still there.

* * *

While the men on the Monitor struggled to keep her afloat, the crew of the Virginia were preparing for a fight with the Union fleet in Hampton Roads. Captain Franklin Buchanan, commander of the Confederacy's squadron on the James River, boarded the Virginia himself at the old Gosport Navy Yard. Late on the morning of March 8, as the Monitor made her way down the coast off Cape Charles, Buchanan started up the Elizabeth River past Norfolk. Two one-gun steamers, the Beaufort and Raleigh, accompanied him. They passed friendly batteries at Craney Island and Sewell's Point, where the Virginia veered toward Newport News Point.

An assortment of United States ships lay between Newport News and Old Point Comfort, where Fort Monroe stood vigilant. Collectively they carried 291 guns to the Virginia's ten, but Buchanan maneuvered the Virginia as if she were impervious. For all intents and purposes, she was. When the fifty-gun frigate Congress opened fire with a broadside, clearing smoke revealed the Virginia unscathed. She responded with a four-gun volley that blasted through the Congress's timbers like they were matchsticks. Using her ram and guns, the Virginia next sank the Union sloop of war Cumberland, sending to their deaths a hundred luckless men.

And so the battle went. Returning to the wounded Congress, which her skipper had run aground in an attempt to avoid total destruction, Buchanan used the armament of his iron-sheathed ship to pound her into submission.

Other big Federal ships that came to help, mostly under the motive power of tugs, fared little better. The Minnesota grounded in the tidally shallow north channel of the James River. Likewise striking low water, the St. Lawrence grounded short of the Minnesota, and the Roanoke couldn't even reach that far. Only the dropping tide prevented the Virginia from coming up to finish the Minnesota, and her gunners threw shells at the hapless Union frigate for over an hour, from a distance of over a mile. It had been a fair day's work, and the Confederates expected to come back in the morning to finish up.

* * *

All that could save the Union fleet, it seemed, was the Monitor, which at that moment lay off Cape Henry, twenty miles away. Hearing the echo of gunfire, Worden deduced that the Virginia had made her appearance. He set the crew to trimming the Monitor for battle, disassembling the temporary blower pipes and removing the almost useless caulking under the turret. The men labored as well as they could, but no one had slept for two and a half days and most of the crew -- except George Geer and some others -- were seasick. By the time the ship was ready to fight and had covered the last ten miles to Fort Monroe, it was 9:00 P.M. Hampton Roads at last lay quiet, but six miles to the west the burning hulk of the Congress illuminated the night sky.

If Federal officers had imagined the Monitor as their salvation, many of them winced when they saw what it actually looked like. The black hull was barely more than half the length of the Confederate leviathan, and it sat so low that only the squat turret seemed to rise above the water. Monitor carried one sixth as many men as the Virginia and only two guns to the ten of her opponent. In an era when the number of guns implied the strength of a vessel, the Monitor's brace of Dahlgrens hardly inspired confidence. (No one on that side of the bay yet knew that two of the Virginia's guns had been disabled by the dying Cumberland.) Though the other grounded Union ships had broken free, the hapless Minnesota remained stuck. Worden dropped anchor not far away around 1:00 A.M., in time for the crew to witness the death of the Congress in a spectacular explosion.

"A volcano seemed to open instantaneously," recalled Paymaster Keeler in a letter to his wife. "Pieces of burning timbers, exploding shells, huge fragments of the wreck, grenades & rockets filled the air & fell sparkling & hissing in all directions." Although the Monitor lay a couple of miles distant from the Congress, Keeler noted that the blast even seemed to lift the ironclad out of the water.

* * *

Worden couldn't be certain of the Virginia's draft, about twice his own, and once again he kept both watches awake all night as they lay waiting for the rising tide. When the sun came up on March 9, George Geer had not closed his eyes in seventy-two hours.

Geer had taken his morning watch in the engine room when, about 8:00 A.M., a lookout sighted the Virginia moving away from Sewell's Point. As expected, she turned for the Minnesota. Worden called up the anchor and sent the crew to quarters -- posts that sailors of a later day would call battle stations.

Aboard Virginia, Lieutenant Catesby Jones had taken over from Captain Buchanan, who had been wounded in the previous day's battle. Concentrating on the marooned Minnesota, Jones ignored the Monitor until its black pillbox turret revolved and sent an eleven-inch solid shot his way. Realizing that the bizarre little object was an enemy vessel, Jones turned his guns on her. The world's first fight between ironclad warships was under way.

Fireman Geer was sweating out his watch in the engine room when the battle began, shifting later to the shot room, where his job was to help keep the gunners in the turret supplied with ammunition. As the guns reverberated, he pondered the fate of his family -- Martha, whom he often called Mattie, and his two sons, one still a babe in arms -- if he were to go down with the ship.

"I often thought of you and the little darlings when the fight was going on and what should become of you should I be killed," he would write later. Events would enable him to add the cocky coda: "...but I should have no more such fears as our ship resisted everything they could fire at her as though they were spit balls."

* * *

As the battle unfolded, the gunners were learning their trade as they practiced it, for they had never previously loaded or fired the guns they now worked. After each round, the turret had to be revolved away for reloading. The heavy port covers were difficult to close and open, and closing them shut out all light, but with only one real opponent it was safe enough just to spin the ports away from the Virginia's fire. The control wheel for the pony engines that operated the turret, soaked during the trip down, had rusted, and Acting Master Louis N. Stodder lacked the strength to turn it. Chief Engineer Stimers, however, had spent most of his adult life turning wrenches, and he now managed to break the rust free. Stimers, who had come along as a nominal inspector of the new ship, had once served as an engineer on the very Merrimack from which the Virginia had been reconstructed. He was proving an invaluable passenger, but after a time even he found it difficult to stop the turret in time for an aimed shot.

Improvising, Lieutenant Greene, who commanded in the turret, decided to fire as the guns swept by their target. Jostling in the cramped space, eight men worked each piece. Worden and a volunteer pilot from another ship occupied the pilothouse, with the quartermaster at the helm. A speaking tube connected the two locations, but when the turret was set free a runner had to carry orders and information down from the turret, through the berth deck and wardroom, and up to the pilothouse. As the Monitor and Virginia vied for victory, Paymaster Keeler was the usual go-between.

The first shot to hit the turret made a depression several inches deep. Stimers quickly gauged, then assuaged fears: denting, he asserted, was the most the enemy could do to them. The gun crews went to work with a will, stripping off their shirts in the growing heat of combat.

For an hour and a half it was all sweat and sulfur in the turret. Gunpowder residue coated the bare-chested gunners to their waists. In the whirling casemate, no one could see the results of their toil; the job grew dangerously monotonous. At 10:00 A.M. a shot struck the turret near its engine lever. Leaning against the wall where the blow struck, Stimers, Stodder, and a seaman were knocked to the floor. Stimers quickly recovered his feet, but the other two men had to be carried below, where the surgeon administered a few shots of the sailor's cure-all.

The Virginia tried to ram, despite the fact most of her ram had gone down with the Cumberland. That deficiency, the Monitor's armor, and Worden's quick thinking prevented real damage. Seeing the attack coming, Worden gave Keeler a message for the turret commander: when the two ships collided, Greene was to let fly with both barrels. Then, just before the Virginia hit, Worden directed his helmsman to veer off, to reduce the force of the blow. At the instant of impact, Greene fired and struck the enemy's forward casemate with a solid shot.

Greene himself fired every gun, lest a careless hand blow the Monitor's own pilothouse off the deck. Heads were pounding inside the turret from the roar of the guns, but after several hours the turret shot racks lay empty. The turret had to stop turning while the powder division carried up fresh ammunition through a pair of scuttle holes in the turret floor and the deck, so Worden ordered the ship out of action. Now George Geer and his mates went to work, hoisting the ponderous balls up to the gunners. It was easy enough to hand up bags of gunpowder, but the projectiles were another matter. Knowing that each shot weighed 180 pounds, Worden ordered Mr. Keeler to open the spirit locker and dole out a bit of stimulation for everyone.

So long did the Monitor's operators linger that the Confederates imagined they had put their peculiar opponent out of action. But the Monitor turned back for more, and soon the two lay only yards apart again, exchanging volleys that would have destroyed any other vessel afloat, anywhere in the world. Seven shots rang off the Monitor's turret to no visible effect, and several ricocheted off the deck or the slim slice of freeboard. The only vulnerable spot on John Ericsson's little invention was the pilothouse, sitting so small and so far forward. It had been built to take abuse, framed of iron beams a foot thick. One shot bounded harmlessly off, but as Worden brought the ship in close, the Virginia aimed a shell at the pilothouse. It exploded in front of the viewing slot in the same moment as Worden peered out, smashing one of the iron beams and prying the slot open. Blinded, Worden fell back and ordered the quartermaster to sheer off.

Keeler helped Worden to the foot of the ladder and sent for the executive officer. Greene rushed forward from the turret, leaving Stimers to command the guns. Then, before taking command of his first ship, Greene guided Worden to the couch in the captain's cabin, where Surgeon Daniel C. Logue began plucking slivers of iron and paint from the swollen, blackened eyes.

As Greene took his place in the battered pilothouse, he scanned the water. The Virginia had started toward the Elizabeth River, and Greene assumed it had taken flight. In fact, Lieutenant Jones had made the same assumption about his Union adversary as he watched her sheer away when Worden was wounded. He counted this as the second time he had silenced the smaller ship's guns, and headed back to Norfolk with the other Confederate ships following in his wake. Greene, having satisfied the Monitor's original instructions to protect the Minnesota, dropped anchor. It was just past noon, and the crew ran up on deck for a long-awaited glimpse of the sun and some fresh air. None of them had been outside for a solid twelve hours, and the engineer department -- including George Geer -- had been locked up below, sweltering in the boiler room and in the storage compartments, since the previous afternoon.

Stimers, the visiting engineer and inspector, recorded his observations in a notebook. He counted seven big dents in the turret, none of which cracked any of the eight layers of one-inch iron. Yet the solid iron beam that protected the pilothouse, measuring a foot by nine inches, was broken nearly in two by the sixty-eight-pound rifle shell that had wounded Lieutenant Worden. In all, Stimers tallied twenty-one dents from Confederate fire, with no real damage except to the pilothouse.

From the deck of the Minnesota, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox had watched the battle. Now he ordered a boat to take him to the Monitor, where he would graciously thank the men for their efforts.

"Considering that the officers, crew, and engineers had a horrible passage," Fox would later write a U.S. senator, "arrived at 10 P.M., and handled an untried experiment without previous drill, and went into action at 8 A.M. the next day, their conduct is beyond praise."

One of those officers left the Monitor that afternoon, never to return. At the request of the assistant secretary, Lieutenant Worden was carried up from his cabin and placed on a tug. His crewmen, who had known him less than a month, stood by to cheer him madly as he passed them. From the tugboat, Worden boarded a steamer for Washington, where, slowly, his eyesight would return. Then, hours after their breakfast had been interrupted by the call to stand to quarters, the Monitor crew sat down to dinner.

Though pushed to the limits of human endurance, the men still had to finish their day's work. As they toiled, they enjoyed the illusion that they had driven the Virginia away. Yet they were too exhausted to understand the historic implications of their clash in shallow water. Their duel that Sunday had foretold the end of the wooden warships that surrounded them. Meanwhile, the Monitor sailors neither noticed nor cared that they had helped to open a new naval era.

Soon naval and army officers crawled all over the ship in dark blue and bright braid, marveling at its machinery and commending the crew. As he wrote to his wife, his eyes drooping with fatigue, Geer cheated future historians by advising her to seek details of the battle from the newspapers.

U.S. Monitor, Fortress Monroe March 10, 1862

Dr Wife

...I shall write you very little about our Fight as you will see it all in the Papers. I was on duty in the fire room when the action commenced but was relieved and went to my station hoisting up shot and shell to the Tower Guns....Our Ship is crowded with Generals and Officers of all grades both army and Navy. They are wild with joy and say if any of us come to the Fort we can have all we want free, as we have saved 100s of lives and millions of property to the Government.

...I have enough to tell you to make twenty Lettors but cannot think of anything. I am clear of my Coald and feel well with the exception of want of sleep. I must close at once as there is a man for the lettors.

Your Husband
George

George Geer had more than half his life remaining, but he had already taken part in the most momentous event he would ever see. For the rest of his days, he would be known as one of the few who had been inside the Monitor during its brief and early moment of glory.

Copyright © 2000 by The Mariners' Museum

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684869977
• ISBN 13: 9780684869971
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: William Marvel