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Celebrity Warship Gets a Hall of Fame to Call Its Own
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: March 10, 2007
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — As sacred relics go, it doesn’t seem too inspiring. In appearance, Nathaniel Hawthorne said, it “looked like a gigantic rat-trap.” In life, it had little more than a single day of major achievement, and in that it was less than triumphant. In death, it was even less grand, sinking into the Atlantic during a storm, not even a year after it first lumbered onto the scene.
So why, after 145 years, $15 million in oceanic explorations and more than a decade of dives and excavation, is the Civil War battleship the Monitor being given a second life at a cost of $30 million, with its artifacts, history and accounts of its career displayed in a 63,500-square-foot space? That’s precisely what is happening at the U.S.S. Monitor Center, which opened March 9 at the Mariners’ Museum here.
Something seems off kilter about the entire scale: why this kind of attention and expense? It is much easier to see why the Mariners’ Museum itself was interested. Rich in land (a 550-acre park) and endowment ($110 million) and founded in 1930 by Archer M. Huntington (of the railroad Huntingtons) to explore what he called the “culture of the sea,” this museum features a collection of about 150 boats, a major research library, world-class navigation equipment and exhibitions about the history of navigation. But it has been drawing only about 60,000 visitors a year in a region where American history is a major tourist attraction, shipbuilding a local industry and the United States Navy a nearby presence.
Now that may change with the opening of its U.S.S. Monitor Center, in conjunction with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (The government owns the wreck and oversaw its excavation.) While the scale and attention can be a little disorienting to a visitor without sea legs, by the time you have passed through the well-annotated, smartly presented exhibits, watched the widescreen re-creations of historic battles and read something about what this ship meant to its contemporaries and devotees, the Monitor starts to loom large.
The center’s galleries are meant, in current museum style, to be evocative re-creations of times and places — turning points of experience. (The exhibits were overseen by the museum’s chief curator, Anna Gibson Holloway, and designed by DMCD Inc.) The history begins on a gun deck of a 1798 warship, where the vulnerabilities of the age of sail could be sensed in the evolution of ever more powerful guns. The early 19th century sounded the death knell for that age; the Civil War allowed it a final breath; the Monitor and the Confederate ironclad Virginia buried it.
Then comes a room evoking the Gosport Navy Yard in Virginia in 1862: the Union had tried to destroy the yard and remove its warships, but only half-managed to burn the Merrimack and leave it in the mud. Lacking the North’s industrial facilities but not ingenuity, the Confederates took the burned hull of the Merrimack, built on it and layered on four inches of iron, renamed it the Virginia and, with this strange contraption, emulated the armored ships that were transforming European navies. A 50-foot-long replica of the Virginia’s bow here is a monstrosity that understandably inspired fear and bewilderment among those used to wooden vessels with billowing sails.
Then a visitor enters the board room of 1862, where Navy officials discussed what kind of armored warship the Union could hastily construct. A Confederate ironclad ship, it was justifiably feared, could wipe out the entire Union Navy. A brilliant Swedish engineer, John Ericsson, had fruitlessly peddled an ironclad design to Napoleon III, but the urgency of war now won him American approval. Abraham Lincoln saw Ericsson’s model and famously declared: “All I have to say is what the girl said when she stuck her foot into the stocking. It strikes me there’s something in it.”
The catch: Ericsson was given 100 days.
One hundred days! This was to be a revolutionary vessel in which the crew and engine were to be entirely housed below the water line. If naval weaponry had traditionally been aimed at targets by turning the ship, here a gun turret would rotate on enormous gears, allowing shots in almost any direction. Everything about the Monitor was experimental, but there was no time for experiments. It was built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with numerous contractors bringing the ship in on time.
This technological marvel then took on mythic dimensions. On March 8, 1862, the Virginia had steamed into Hampton Roads, not far from its birthplace, and almost effortlessly destroyed two Union ships, the Cumberland and the Congress, mauling them with its iron ram. With 121 men dead on the first and 240 on the second, it was the worst naval defeat for the United States until Pearl Harbor. What would come next? The Confederacy’s triumphal river journey to Washington? The Union Navy had become obsolete — until the next day, when the Monitor met the Virginia in battle.
In the museum a 13-minute wide-screen show, intriguingly composed of animated paintings and maps and aided by lighting and sound effects, recounts the great battle that followed, as these behemoths tested out their gear, each side claiming victory.
This battle is in every elementary-school textbook. About 20,000 people stood on the banks, watching. The clash — chronicled by letters of participants and witnesses — apparently ended in a draw. But the age of sail definitively lost. The Times of London declared that the British Royal Navy had 149 first-class warships before the battle, but “we now have two.” Jules Verne, inspired by the Monitor, wrote “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” published in 1870.
As a drama, the encounter could not have been more skillfully plotted: the Union disaster, the last-minute rescue, the celebration. There were Monitor playing cards, hats, scrimshaw and sheet music.
And there were also complaints, because what was ending was not just the technology of sail. The seaman’s center of gravity had changed — which may be why the vessel’s living quarters below the water, reproduced here, were given unusual attention. An entire culture had evolved around sailing and naval warfare, complete with manners and strategies, uniforms and training. Now the action was below the water line. And in combat, there was no more hand-to-hand confrontation or urgent need to know the ropes. This wasn’t really life at sea; it was life in the engine room.
“All the pomp and splendor of naval warfare are gone by,” Hawthorne mournfully wrote. “Henceforth there must come up a race of enginemen and smoke-blackened commoners who will hammer away at their enemies under the direction of a single pair of eyes.”
In his recent book “Ironclad,” Paul Clancy points out that Melville wrote poems about the Monitor, referring to the turret as the seaman’s “welded tomb,” and noting that warriors
Are now but operatives; War’s made
Less grand than Peace.
After their major battle, the deaths of the Virginia and the Monitor seemed to prove Melville’s point. Within days the Virginia, cornered, was run aground and set on fire by the Confederates: a suicide avoiding capture. By the next winter, the Monitor too, in less than glorious circumstances, came to its accidental death in a storm. The Union produced another generation of ironclads, but the Civil War stumbled along its bloody course, undeterred.
A good portion of the museum is devoted to the recent rescue of the Monitor from the sea floor, itself done at great risk. There is a full-size reproduction of the rusted, lichen-encrusted gun turret, just as it was found sunk off the coast of Cape Hatteras, N.C. Outside the museum’s glass wall, a full-scale exterior deck of the Monitor is recreated; inside a replica of the turret’s mechanism is also reproduced. It will take 15 years to rehabilitate the original turret in tanks filled with 90,000 gallons of water.
So what are these relics, then, that so attract a visitor’s gaze? Here, not far from where the Monitor fought its main battle, the rusted machinery, silver forks, glass bottles, the human-size propeller and interlocking turret gears all seem to offer testimony to a moment when the world changed, when, as with the Civil War itself, something had come to an end, and something else — which could either turn out horrifying or magnificent — had not yet begun.
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: March 10, 2007
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — As sacred relics go, it doesn’t seem too inspiring. In appearance, Nathaniel Hawthorne said, it “looked like a gigantic rat-trap.” In life, it had little more than a single day of major achievement, and in that it was less than triumphant. In death, it was even less grand, sinking into the Atlantic during a storm, not even a year after it first lumbered onto the scene.
So why, after 145 years, $15 million in oceanic explorations and more than a decade of dives and excavation, is the Civil War battleship the Monitor being given a second life at a cost of $30 million, with its artifacts, history and accounts of its career displayed in a 63,500-square-foot space? That’s precisely what is happening at the U.S.S. Monitor Center, which opened March 9 at the Mariners’ Museum here.
Something seems off kilter about the entire scale: why this kind of attention and expense? It is much easier to see why the Mariners’ Museum itself was interested. Rich in land (a 550-acre park) and endowment ($110 million) and founded in 1930 by Archer M. Huntington (of the railroad Huntingtons) to explore what he called the “culture of the sea,” this museum features a collection of about 150 boats, a major research library, world-class navigation equipment and exhibitions about the history of navigation. But it has been drawing only about 60,000 visitors a year in a region where American history is a major tourist attraction, shipbuilding a local industry and the United States Navy a nearby presence.
Now that may change with the opening of its U.S.S. Monitor Center, in conjunction with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (The government owns the wreck and oversaw its excavation.) While the scale and attention can be a little disorienting to a visitor without sea legs, by the time you have passed through the well-annotated, smartly presented exhibits, watched the widescreen re-creations of historic battles and read something about what this ship meant to its contemporaries and devotees, the Monitor starts to loom large.
The center’s galleries are meant, in current museum style, to be evocative re-creations of times and places — turning points of experience. (The exhibits were overseen by the museum’s chief curator, Anna Gibson Holloway, and designed by DMCD Inc.) The history begins on a gun deck of a 1798 warship, where the vulnerabilities of the age of sail could be sensed in the evolution of ever more powerful guns. The early 19th century sounded the death knell for that age; the Civil War allowed it a final breath; the Monitor and the Confederate ironclad Virginia buried it.
Then comes a room evoking the Gosport Navy Yard in Virginia in 1862: the Union had tried to destroy the yard and remove its warships, but only half-managed to burn the Merrimack and leave it in the mud. Lacking the North’s industrial facilities but not ingenuity, the Confederates took the burned hull of the Merrimack, built on it and layered on four inches of iron, renamed it the Virginia and, with this strange contraption, emulated the armored ships that were transforming European navies. A 50-foot-long replica of the Virginia’s bow here is a monstrosity that understandably inspired fear and bewilderment among those used to wooden vessels with billowing sails.
Then a visitor enters the board room of 1862, where Navy officials discussed what kind of armored warship the Union could hastily construct. A Confederate ironclad ship, it was justifiably feared, could wipe out the entire Union Navy. A brilliant Swedish engineer, John Ericsson, had fruitlessly peddled an ironclad design to Napoleon III, but the urgency of war now won him American approval. Abraham Lincoln saw Ericsson’s model and famously declared: “All I have to say is what the girl said when she stuck her foot into the stocking. It strikes me there’s something in it.”
The catch: Ericsson was given 100 days.
One hundred days! This was to be a revolutionary vessel in which the crew and engine were to be entirely housed below the water line. If naval weaponry had traditionally been aimed at targets by turning the ship, here a gun turret would rotate on enormous gears, allowing shots in almost any direction. Everything about the Monitor was experimental, but there was no time for experiments. It was built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with numerous contractors bringing the ship in on time.
This technological marvel then took on mythic dimensions. On March 8, 1862, the Virginia had steamed into Hampton Roads, not far from its birthplace, and almost effortlessly destroyed two Union ships, the Cumberland and the Congress, mauling them with its iron ram. With 121 men dead on the first and 240 on the second, it was the worst naval defeat for the United States until Pearl Harbor. What would come next? The Confederacy’s triumphal river journey to Washington? The Union Navy had become obsolete — until the next day, when the Monitor met the Virginia in battle.
In the museum a 13-minute wide-screen show, intriguingly composed of animated paintings and maps and aided by lighting and sound effects, recounts the great battle that followed, as these behemoths tested out their gear, each side claiming victory.
This battle is in every elementary-school textbook. About 20,000 people stood on the banks, watching. The clash — chronicled by letters of participants and witnesses — apparently ended in a draw. But the age of sail definitively lost. The Times of London declared that the British Royal Navy had 149 first-class warships before the battle, but “we now have two.” Jules Verne, inspired by the Monitor, wrote “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” published in 1870.
As a drama, the encounter could not have been more skillfully plotted: the Union disaster, the last-minute rescue, the celebration. There were Monitor playing cards, hats, scrimshaw and sheet music.
And there were also complaints, because what was ending was not just the technology of sail. The seaman’s center of gravity had changed — which may be why the vessel’s living quarters below the water, reproduced here, were given unusual attention. An entire culture had evolved around sailing and naval warfare, complete with manners and strategies, uniforms and training. Now the action was below the water line. And in combat, there was no more hand-to-hand confrontation or urgent need to know the ropes. This wasn’t really life at sea; it was life in the engine room.
“All the pomp and splendor of naval warfare are gone by,” Hawthorne mournfully wrote. “Henceforth there must come up a race of enginemen and smoke-blackened commoners who will hammer away at their enemies under the direction of a single pair of eyes.”
In his recent book “Ironclad,” Paul Clancy points out that Melville wrote poems about the Monitor, referring to the turret as the seaman’s “welded tomb,” and noting that warriors
Are now but operatives; War’s made
Less grand than Peace.
After their major battle, the deaths of the Virginia and the Monitor seemed to prove Melville’s point. Within days the Virginia, cornered, was run aground and set on fire by the Confederates: a suicide avoiding capture. By the next winter, the Monitor too, in less than glorious circumstances, came to its accidental death in a storm. The Union produced another generation of ironclads, but the Civil War stumbled along its bloody course, undeterred.
A good portion of the museum is devoted to the recent rescue of the Monitor from the sea floor, itself done at great risk. There is a full-size reproduction of the rusted, lichen-encrusted gun turret, just as it was found sunk off the coast of Cape Hatteras, N.C. Outside the museum’s glass wall, a full-scale exterior deck of the Monitor is recreated; inside a replica of the turret’s mechanism is also reproduced. It will take 15 years to rehabilitate the original turret in tanks filled with 90,000 gallons of water.
So what are these relics, then, that so attract a visitor’s gaze? Here, not far from where the Monitor fought its main battle, the rusted machinery, silver forks, glass bottles, the human-size propeller and interlocking turret gears all seem to offer testimony to a moment when the world changed, when, as with the Civil War itself, something had come to an end, and something else — which could either turn out horrifying or magnificent — had not yet begun.
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