USS Monitor
USS
Why it matters
John Ericsson designed the Monitor in about 100 days and Continental Iron Works in Brooklyn built her in roughly the same. She looked like nothing anyone had ever seen. A flat iron raft with a revolving turret on top, sitting so low in the water she was nearly submerged. Navy men called her "a tin can on a shingle" and "Ericsson's folly." She was the future of naval warfare.
On March 8, 1862, the CSS Virginia steamed into Hampton Roads and destroyed two wooden Union warships, killing over 240 men. The USS Cumberland went down fighting. The Congress burned. The rest of the Union fleet was helpless. If Virginia came back the next morning, she'd destroy the grounded USS Minnesota and potentially break the Union blockade of the entire Confederacy.
Monitor arrived that night, towed from New York, barely making it through rough seas that nearly sank her. The next morning, March 9, the two ironclads fought for about four hours at close range. Neither could penetrate the other's armor. Virginia's shots bounced off Monitor's turret. Monitor's 11-inch Dahlgrens dented but didn't break Virginia's casemate. It ended in a tactical draw.
But the strategic impact was total. Every wooden navy in the world was obsolete. Britain and France, both building wooden ships of the line, stopped and pivoted to ironclad construction. The engagement at Hampton Roads didn't just change the Civil War. It changed every navy on earth in a single morning.
Monitor herself lasted less than a year. She sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras on New Year's Eve 1862. Sixteen of her crew went down with her. The ship that made every other warship obsolete couldn't survive moderate seas. Ericsson's flat-deck design, revolutionary in combat, was fatally unsuited to open ocean.
What it was like
Living inside Monitor was like living inside a sealed iron box that happened to float. The crew quarters were below the waterline with no natural light and no natural ventilation. The forced-air system was powered by a blower connected to the engine, and when it broke down the air went foul within minutes. Temperatures below decks ranged from stifling to freezing depending on the season and whether the boilers were running.
During the battle at Hampton Roads, the turret crew worked in near-total darkness broken by muzzle flash. The two Dahlgren guns each weighed about 8 tons and had to be loaded, run out, aimed, and fired by hand in a space roughly 20 feet in diameter. The turret's rotation mechanism was hand-cranked and frequently jammed. When Virginia's shots hit the turret, the concussion knocked men off their feet and temporarily deafened everyone inside. Lieutenant Worden, commanding from the pilothouse, was blinded when a shell exploded against the viewing slit, driving iron fragments into his eyes.
The ship rolled horribly in any kind of sea. On the tow from New York to Hampton Roads, waves broke over the deck and poured down the blower intakes and around the turret base. The engine room flooded repeatedly. Men worked the bilge pumps by hand for hours. Several crew members nearly suffocated from carbon monoxide backed up from the boiler room.
The crew
Turret Gun Crew
Eight to ten men per gun, loading and firing 166-pound solid shot in a sealed iron cylinder 20 feet across. The turret was hand-cranked to rotate and frequently stuck. Visibility was limited to narrow sight holes. Each firing filled the space with acrid powder smoke that had nowhere to go.
Engineer
Chief Engineer Isaac Newton and his crew kept the single vibrating-lever engine and two boilers running in a space with no ventilation except the mechanical blower. During the tow to Hampton Roads, the engine room flooded through the hull's numerous deck openings and the engineers worked in water up to their knees while keeping the plant running.
Helmsman/Pilothouse Crew
The pilothouse was a small iron box on the forward deck with narrow slits for visibility. It was completely separate from the turret, so communication during battle was by voice relay or messenger. When a shell hit the pilothouse during the engagement, iron splinters from the viewing slit wounded Captain Worden and command transferred to the turret.
Patina notes
Monitor sank stern-first in a gale off Cape Hatteras on December 31, 1862. She lies upside down in about 240 feet of water, with the turret displaced and resting beneath the inverted hull.
The iron has been submerged in saltwater for over 160 years. The hull plates are heavily corroded and encrusted with marine growth. When NOAA divers first surveyed the site in the 1970s, the structure was still recognizable but fragile.
The armor belt was intact. The engine was identifiable. But the wreck is deteriorating and sections of the hull have collapsed. Sand burial has actually helped preserve some portions by limiting oxygen exposure.
Preservation reality
The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, established in 1975, was the first national marine sanctuary in the United States. NOAA recovered the turret, engine, propeller, anchor, and numerous artifacts between 1998 and 2002. The turret recovery in 2002 was a major engineering operation. It came up with the remains of two crew members still inside. They were identified using DNA in 2024 as Fireman Robert Williams and Landsman William Bryan.
The turret and most major artifacts are at The Mariners' Museum and Park in Newport News, Virginia, where they're undergoing conservation treatment that will take decades. The turret sits in a 90,000-gallon conservation tank. The museum's USS Monitor Center is the definitive collection. It's one of the most important naval artifact preservation projects in the country.
Where to see one
- • The Mariners' Museum and Park, Newport News, Virginia
- • Monitor National Marine Sanctuary (dive accessible by permit)
Preservation organizations
- • NOAA Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
- • The Mariners' Museum and Park
Sources
- NOAA Monitor National Marine Sanctuary (2026-03-05)
- The Mariners' Museum - USS Monitor Center (2026-03-05)
- Naval History and Heritage Command - USS Monitor (2026-03-05)
Related vessels
Carroll A. Deering
On January 31, 1921, the Carroll A. Deering ran aground on Diamond Shoals off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, with all sails set. The Coast Guard reached her four days later. The lifeboats were gone. The crew's personal belongings were gone. But dinner was being prepared in the galley, the tables were set, and the ship's cats were still aboard. Eleven men had vanished from a brand-new, well-found schooner in one of the most heavily trafficked shipping lanes on the East Coast. No bodies were ever recovered. No lifeboat was ever found. The investigation pulled in five government agencies, and the deeper they dug, the stranger it got. The ship's logs were missing. The steering gear had been deliberately smashed. Navigation equipment was gone. Two anchors had been dropped, with their chains hanging over the bow in a way that suggested the ship had been anchored and then cut loose. Someone had wrecked the ship's ability to navigate and steer, then left. On January 29, two days before the grounding, a lightship keeper at Cape Lookout reported that a crewman on the Deering had hailed him through a megaphone, saying the ship had lost her anchors. The man on the megaphone was not an officer. That detail haunted investigators. Theories ranged from mutiny to rum-running pirates to Soviet agents. The Deering's first mate, Charles McLellan, had openly clashed with the original captain (who fell ill and was replaced before the final voyage). The replacement captain, W.B. Wormell, was 66 years old and may not have had full control of his crew. At least nine other vessels disappeared in the same area around the same time, leading some to call it an early "Bermuda Triangle" cluster. The FBI, the State Department, and the Department of Commerce all investigated. None of them solved it. The case files were sealed, then lost, then partially recovered decades later. Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, personally oversaw the investigation and came away frustrated. Whatever happened aboard the Carroll A. Deering, eleven men took the answer with them.
CSS Virginia
The CSS Virginia was born from desperation and scrap metal. When Union forces abandoned the Norfolk Navy Yard in April 1861, they burned the steam frigate USS Merrimack to the waterline and sank her. The Confederacy raised the hull, found the engines salvageable (barely), and built an armored casemate on top. Four inches of iron plate bolted over 24 inches of oak and pine, sloped at 36 degrees to deflect shot. She looked like a barn roof floating on a raft. She was the most dangerous warship in the Western Hemisphere. On March 8, 1862, Virginia steamed into Hampton Roads and attacked the Union blockading squadron. She rammed and sank the USS Cumberland, a 24-gun sloop that went down with 121 of her crew still fighting. Her guns couldn't hurt Virginia. The frigate USS Congress surrendered after Virginia's shells set her ablaze. Another 120 men died. The wooden warships USS Minnesota, USS Roanoke, and USS St. Lawrence all ran aground trying to escape. If Virginia had returned the next morning unopposed, she could have broken the Union blockade. But Monitor was waiting. The four-hour engagement the next day proved that the age of wooden warships was finished. Virginia landed dozens of hits on Monitor without breaking through. Monitor's Dahlgrens cracked Virginia's armor in places but couldn't penetrate. Virginia tried to ram but Monitor was too nimble. It was the first battle between ironclad warships, and it ended with both sides claiming victory and neither ship sunk. Virginia fought in the area for two more months but never left the Roads. Her 21-foot draft meant she could only navigate deep channels, and her engines, already condemned before the war started, could barely push her at walking speed. When Union forces advanced on Norfolk in May 1862, the crew tried to lighten her enough to escape upriver. They couldn't. On May 11, her crew set her afire and she exploded when the flames reached the magazine. Nothing of the ship survived.
Endurance
Endurance never reached Antarctica. That's the first thing to understand. Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was supposed to cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, roughly 1,800 miles over the pole. They didn't make it to shore. Endurance entered the Weddell Sea pack ice in December 1914 and became trapped on January 19, 1915. For ten months the crew lived aboard while the ice slowly crushed the ship around them. Frank Hurley's photographs show the hull buckling, the deck timbers splintering, the masts leaning at impossible angles. On October 27, 1915, Shackleton ordered the crew onto the ice. Endurance sank on November 21. What followed is the greatest survival story in the history of exploration. Twenty-eight men camped on drifting ice floes for five months, eating seals and penguins, watching the floe they lived on crack and shrink. When the ice broke up in April 1916, they launched three salvaged lifeboats and sailed through open Antarctic seas to Elephant Island, a desolate rock at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. It was the first time they'd stood on solid ground in 497 days. Shackleton then took five men in the 22-foot James Caird and sailed 800 miles across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia Island. The Drake Passage is the most violent stretch of open water on earth. The boat was open. They navigated by dead reckoning and occasional sun sights through storm clouds. They made landfall on the wrong side of the island and Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean then crossed South Georgia's unmapped mountain range on foot to reach the whaling station at Stromness. Not a single man died. All 28 survived. The Trans-Antarctic Expedition was a complete failure by its stated objective and an absolute triumph of leadership. Shackleton brought everybody home. The wreck was found in March 2022 by the Endurance22 expedition at a depth of 10,000 feet in the Weddell Sea. The ship is upright, intact, with the name "ENDURANCE" still clearly visible on the stern. The cold, low-oxygen water preserved her like no one expected.