[Shannon Ricles] Hi everyone! Welcome to "Hidden Beneath the Waves - Exploring North
Carolina's Underwater Cultural Heritage." We're very glad to have you today.
I am Shannon Ricles, and I will be your host today. I'm the Education and Outreach
Coordinator for Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. And we are also joined today with our newest team
member for Monitor, and his name is Mark Losavio, and he is the Media and Outreach
Coordinator for Monitor. And we welcome you today and hope that you will enjoy our webinar.
So this webinar is brought to you by NOAA's Monitor National Marine Sanctuary in collaboration
with the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology. I'm having a little trouble with
my slides being a little slow so my apologies. Monitor is just one of 14 national marine
sanctuaries and two national marine monuments in the national marine sanctuary system. The
system encompasses more than six hundred thousand square miles of marine and great lakes water from
Washington State to the Florida Keys and from Lake Huron to American Samoa. During the presentation
all attendees will be in listen only mode. You are welcome to type questions for the presenters into
the question box at the bottom of the control panel on the right-hand side of your screen.
Now this is the same area you can let us know about any technical issues you may be
having that we can help you with. And we'll be monitoring incoming questions and any technical
issues and will respond just as soon as we can. We are recording this session, and we will share
the recording with registered participants via the webinar archive page, and a URL will
be provided at the end of this presentation for where you can access that recording.
Today we welcome our presenters. From the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology, we have
Chris Southerly, the Deputy State Archaeologist for Underwater. And joining us from Monitor
National Marine Sanctuary is Tane Casserley, the Resource Protection and Permit Coordinator.
Now this is the first presentation in a new series titled "Submerged NC."
The series is a collaboration between NOAA Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and the North Carolina
Office of State Archaeology. Partnering since 1975, NOAA and the state of North Carolina work
to research honor and protect the hallmarks of North Carolina's underwater cultural heritage,
which are shipwrecks. From violent storms and dangerous shoals to world wars, the waters off
North Carolina have claimed thousands of ships and lives over hundreds of years. These shipwrecks
hold information about the ever-changing technologies and cultural and physical landscapes.
They serve as a uniquely accessible underwater museum and a memorial to generations of mariners
who lived, died, worked, and fought off our shores. So sit back and learn how the discovery of
the USS Monitor in 1973 and its designation as our nation's first national marine sanctuary brought
NOAA and the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology together. Hear how these agencies have
worked together for over 45 years to celebrate North Carolina's underwater cultural heritage
and as they tell the stories of the Monitor and many other shipwrecks that lie near it.
Okay Chris, you are on.
[Chris Southerly]
All right. Thanks Shannon. I think everybody should be seeing my screen now.
Good afternoon, evening, morning to everyone, wherever you're watching from.
To start off our Submerged North Carolina series, I'm going to provide a kind of a
whirlwind history and overview of almost 60 years of underwater archaeology in North Carolina.
I'm going to focus on the state's inland waters' cultural resources and management
and let Tane talk about the Monitor and some of our offshore resources and research.
Slides are a bit slow this morning.
All right there we go, and it's catching up.
Okay. North Carolina has a vast network of more than 37 000 miles of navigable lakes, rivers,
sounds, and inlets with access to the Atlantic Ocean that form the second largest estuary system
in the United States. Almost 10 percent of the state is covered in water. North Carolina has
more water than the entire state of Connecticut has dry land. These waters have served the
peoples of North Carolina for thousands of years. Initial settlements happened along the shorelines
with public and private landings all along the rivers' creeks and sounds. In modern terms,
you can think of the rivers like an interstate or major highway, with landings being exit ramps
giving access to a town or leading to a road to go further into the countryside. From the beginning,
even into the early 20th century, water was the preferred means of travel and transportation.
In colonial times, a trip from New Bern to Edenton by land, roughly 90 miles, could take four to five
days using questionable roads, and still having to make three river crossings. By comparison New Bern
to Edenton by water, about 180 miles, twice the distance, could take only two to three days,
barring bad weather in the sounds. This extensive utilization of water has resulted in an abundance
of submerged resources in North Carolina waters, representing a diverse underwater heritage.
Now the Underwater Archaeology Branch (UAB) is part of the Office of State Archaeology within the
Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. OSA was officially created by the North Carolina
General Assembly in 1973. However, the underwater branch had its beginning a decade before that.
Underwater archaeology in North Carolina began with one staff member in a small preservation lab
and has since grown to eight permanent staff, with numerous temporary staff,
interns and volunteers at two separate
locations. So what's the story behind this? In March 1962, Navy divers, on a holiday trip from
Maryland, chartered a local boat to dive on a Civil War wreck, local lore identified it as
the blockade runner Modern Greece. The divers found the wreck exposed by storm and recovered
a variety of Civil War vintage artifacts. Based on this information, the North Carolina Department of
Archives in History at the time and the governor's office requested assistance from the Navy and
Coast Guard in the recovery of artifacts. In the summers of 1962 and 63, Navy divers recovered
over 10 000 artifacts from the shipwreck. This recovery was more salvage than archaeology,
with no detailed mapping and no real provenience for the artifacts. What
would be inconceivable today, seemed perfectly reasonable then from an underwater environment.
After all George Bass, nominally the the 'father of underwater archaeology' in a lot of ways,
was still a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, having recently only done the
first true archaeology underwater in 1960, on the Cape Caledonia shipwreck in the Mediterranean.
So in 1963, the Fort Fisher Preservation Lab was established to manage the artifacts recovered
from Modern Greece, and Leslie Bright became the sole permanent staff member until 1972.
Now the publicity surrounding the Modern Greece recovery prompted people's interest in salvaging
historic shipwrecks. In 1965, a group named Flying W Enterprises began diving operations on Modern
Greece and other known Civil War shipwrecks with the intention to recover artifacts for profit.
The Department of Archives in History filed a complaint against Flying W, which led to
criminal charges, restraining order, and court proceedings that lasted over a year and a half
before ultimately the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in favor of the department.
In 1967, as a direct result of the court proceedings,
North Carolina legislators introduced and passed the bill, clearly establishing state jurisdiction
and ownership of artifacts abandoned and unclaimed for more than 10 years in public waters.
With the law to protect the submerged resources. but no means to conduct its own research,
the state began issuing special annual permits and short-term sports and hobby permits to individuals
and groups often allowing them to keep a percentage of the recovered artifacts for
their work. Again, this would not be acceptable nor done by today's standards, but the work of
Underwater Archaeological Associates Incorporated on the blockade runner Ella, between 1970 and '73,
did produce the first true site map of an underwater North Carolina shipwreck.
By 1971, the state finally allocated funds to support the 1967 legislation.
And Gordon Watts was hired as the first underwater archaeologist for North Carolina, working for
the Fort Fisher Preservation Lab with Leslie Bright. Still lacking funding and equipment for
department projects, Watts pursued affiliations with various North Carolina universities.
While working in collaboration with Duke University, as part of a 1973
geological survey project in the Cape Hatteras vicinity,
22 shipwrecks were located. One of which was tentatively identified as the USS Monitor.
This discovery and subsequent work brought North Carolina's underwater archaeology program
international attention. Despite being outside the state's three nautical mile jurisdiction,
North Carolina took the lead in managing the shipwreck for a decade between 1974 and '84.
I'm not going to say anything else about the Monitor. We'll leave that for Tane to delve into
in the next section of the webinar, so stand by for the Monitor. Now in addition to the deep water
work with Duke University and NOAA, UAB engaged with other universities for student education
and underwater archaeology. Between 1974 and '77, UAB worked with students and staff at UNCW,
visiting Civil War shipwrecks in eastern and southeastern North Carolina.
This collaboration culminated in 1977, with the recovery of four Civil War cannons,
with their gun carriages from the Roanoke River adjacent to the Fort
Branch Earthworks near Hamilton, North Carolina.
Between '79 and '82, UAB worked with students and staff at East Carolina University
exploring North Carolina's colonial ports of Bath, Edenton, New Bern, and Beaufort,
through remote sensing and diver investigations.
In part, because of the successful collaboration on these field projects,
especially Edenton Harbor and the documentation of the Johns Island shipwreck in 1980,
Gordon Watts resigned as the State Underwater Archaeologist in 1981, going to East Carolina
University to help Dr. Bill Still found what would become the maritime studies program.
Since that time, UAB has continued to work with graduate students from the ECU Maritime Studies
Program, supporting their research as much as possible. If you've looked at the speaker bios
for today, you may have noticed that Tane and I are both graduates of the ECU Maritime Program.
About the same time that Gordon Watts was leaving, UAB transitioned from
conducting individual projects to more resource management responsibilities for the department,
primarily because of new federal environmental protection and historical preservation laws.
For UAB environmental review and compliance had been working closely with many different
federal and state agencies. In 1982, the need for maintenance, stretching of the channel,
and Lockwood's Valley inlet, required close coordination between UAB and the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers for the investigation of several known shipwrecks prior to dredging.
On the left here, you can see the approximate locations of the Bendigo, USS Iron Age,
and Elizabeth within the inlet. And to the right, you can see a hopper dredge from the Corps of
Engineers in the inlet working near the wreck of the Bendigo, which is sticking up out of the sand.
Full investigations were conducted by a professional archaeological consulting firm
and consisted of remote sensing diver reconnaissance and minimal disturbance
archaeology. Here you can see in one of the divers' sketch of the stern and
some machinery from the Iron Age that's exposed above the bottom in the inlet.
Now some of the limited recovery in these photos, you can see a lantern recovered from the Iron Age
on the left, as it looked when it first came up, and then on the right, after conservation.
UAB continues to work closely with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality
in their coastal management division and many other regulatory partners to this day.
Now based on the investigations in Lockwoods Folly Inlet for the Civil War period wrecks
there, and expanding on the '70s, 1970s work done with UNCW, UAB began conducting additional survey
and research on the Civil War shipwrecks off Fort Fisher. This resulted in the creation of the
Civil War, Cape Fear Civil War Shipwreck District, consisting of 21 historically significant vessels.
This was the first maritime historic district to be listed
on the National Register and that was in December of 1985.
Also, during the early '80s, UAB conducted the Wilmington Waterfront Survey.
This survey documented 46 abandoned vessels, including the river steamers Waccamaw and
H.D. Wright, across the river from downtown Wilmington, along what is known as Eagles
Island. Thirty-seven of the 46 wrecks identified were added as
contributing elements to the Wilmington National Register Historic District.
Much as the Civil War Shipwreck District was created. So far we've been looking mostly at
south, along the southeastern coast of North Carolina. And kind of the home base for UAB and
within easy working range. So let's expand out a bit to look at the entire coast of North Carolina.
There are three major capes along our coast, each with shallow shoals that extend miles into the
ocean. Combined with the cooler Labrador Current from the north meeting the warmer Gulf Stream
from the south near Cape Hatteras, our coast has very dynamic and unpredictable weather conditions.
This has caused North Carolina to become known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
By the early 1980s, UAB had developed a beached shipwreck tagging program to inventory and
track ship timbers, hull fragments, and in some cases, even entire ships
that could be found washing up on our beaches, being buried or exposed,
and migrating up and down the shoreline, once they had come aground.
So how many shipwrecks are out there? On the left, you can see how many shipwrecks were lost
by region based on historical documentation. On the right, you can see the number of
beach wreck remains that have been identified over the years. Currently, there are just
over 90 identified sites in the program that are still actively being tracked along our beaches,
that show up and disappear depending on the season and the storm activity.
I don't want you to think that it's just historic shipwrecks that underwater archaeology deals with.
In 1985 and '86, it appeared in extreme low water during a drought, 19 prehistoric dugout
canoes were identified and documented at Lake Phelps in eastern North Carolina. Radiocarbon
dating of the canoes indicates Native American activity from the late Archaic Period, around
2400 BC, through the late Woodland Period, which ends with European contact. Terrestrial sites and
artifacts were also found in association along the shores of the lake with these dugout canoes.
Moving forward in time, in the early 1990s, UAB collaborated again with the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers to complete a comprehensive assessment of submerged cultural resources
in the Cape Fear River, associated with the planned widening and deepening of the shipping
channel in the river. Twelve high priority areas for maritime activity were established
with a remote sensing survey and archaeological diver investigations being conducted at each area.
More than 150 dives were made on 102 identified anomalies, resulting in 33 shipwrecks being
identified. Several wrecks proved to be historically significant, including the Civil
War ironclads North Carolina and Raleigh, the blockade runner Kate, and an early 20th century
schooner barge the Belfast. Now given that we're doing this via webinar, and everybody's remote and
we're currently in a pandemic, I thought it'd be interesting to make special mention of the Kate,
which was formerly the the vessel Carolina, before she became a blockade runner,
as this vessel was responsible for bringing yellow fever to Wilmington in 1862.
All right. Things were going smoothly in the '90s with UAB focusing on resource management
collaboration with ECU Maritime Studies graduate students on projects, conducting public education
and outreach, when we end up getting waylaid by pirates, on November 22 1996. The wreck of
Queen Anne's Revenge, flagship of Blackbeard the pirate, was discovered in Beaufort Inlet by
Intersal Incorporated, a company conducting work under search and survey permit from our office.
Now, since its discovery in 1996, extensive work has been done on the project
beginning with initial exploration and interdisciplinary site assessments.
Other work includes intensive remote sensing, stratified sampling, systematic archaeological
excavation, documentation, and recovery, large artifact recovery, and public education outreach.
To date, 5,300 scientific working dives have been made on this site. Now of particular significance
for the project, and the state as a whole, is kind of highlighted there in 2003. It is the
establishment of a fully equipped conservation lab to manage artifacts coming from the site.
The QAR lab has become an internationally recognized facility, staffed by a diverse team
of professional conservators. And is where much of our efforts with the project have been focused
since 2015, to address the thousands of artifacts hidden in the already recovered concretions.
Now, as the focus of QAR began to shift from field work more to conservation in the lab,
UAB turned its resources to more familiar waters with various other projects.
This began in 2012, with the recognition of the 150th anniversary of the sinking of the
Modern Greece and the 50th anniversary of underwater archaeology in North Carolina.
Now, one of the first new projects that UAB delved into was the National Park Service
American Battlefield Protection Program Grant that was designed to collect consistent up-to-date
remote sensing data for the Civil War shipwrecks in the Cape Fear region, to do a condition
assessment, and to allow for better long-term resource management. Work from this grant
project positively identified the wreck of the blockade runner Agnes Fry off of Oak Island Beach.
Almost completely buried, and virtually unseen, and unidentifiable by UAB divers,
in 1984, it was found to be fully exposed when surveying in 2016. Subsequent field work
on this site through a North Carolina Sea Grant allowed for closer inspection, and demonstrated
the effectiveness of modern sector scanning sonar technology for accurate site wrecks, for accurate
site documentation in zero visibility. This is right near an outflow from one of the plants
along the Brunswick County coast. And visibility rarely exceeds about six inches on this site.
Working through another North Carolina Sea Grant, UAB officially designated the
blockade runner Condor as the state's second heritage dive site in 2018. It had been over
25 years since the USS Huron was designated as the first historic shipwreck preserve
and heritage dive site in the state. And UAB does have plans for more designations in the future.
In recent years, the increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms,
and coastal flooding events as well, seem to have caused previously unknown dugout canoes
to become exposed or be dislodged from the banks or bottoms where they were embedded.
On the left, you see a small 12 and a half foot canoe recovered in 2018 from South River,
about 15 miles east of Fayetteville, North Carolina. This canoe carbon dated to about
650 years old, has completed conservation, and has been on temporary display at both the Kahari
Travel Center and the Dunn Area History Museum, before coming back to UAB for further analysis.
On the right, you see a much larger 23 and a half foot canoe that washed into the shallows of Lake
Waccamaw, North Carolina. Recovered in 2019, this canoe carbon dated to about 950 years old,
is currently undergoing conservation at UAB. Once conservation is completed, there are plans for its
display and interpretation at UNC Pembroke's Museum of the Southeastern American Indian.
UAB is also working to update and modernize our beach
wreck tagging program. New tags to take advantage of mobile digital technology can facilitate public
engagement, and also, encourage citizen scientists, helping to document and monitor beach wrecks
and the disarticulated ship fragments that are along our coast. We're currently collaborating
with NC State University, Cape Lookout National Seashores, neighboring state archaeology programs,
and the Florida Public Archaeology Network to move this project forward.
Now North Carolina has over 5,200 historically documented shipwreck losses in our waters.
And over 1,000 underwater archaeological sites currently recorded
from the past roughly 58 years of work. Now all the work that
UAB and the Office of State Archaeology has accomplished over these last six decades,
and future work, benefits from close collaboration and cooperation with with our partners.
This includes federal, state, and local governments, regulatory agencies, the Native
American community, public and private entities, universities, researchers, and individuals.
We all have a shared underwater cultural heritage in connection to the past
that's worth studying and preserving. And on that note, I'm going to turn things over to Tane
with NOAA's Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, one of UAB's oldest partners,
to talk about the Monitor, some of our deep water cultural heritage,
and plans for continued collaboration between our agencies. So Tane, I will kick it over to you.
[Tane Casserley] Outstanding. Thank you Chris. Is everybody, are you able to see my
screen Chris? Everything looking good? [Chris Southerly] Yep, everything looks good on
my end. [Tane Casserley] Cool. Well thank you Chris so much for that overview. And
as Chris said, you know, everything we do is built on partnerships. We can't do it without
partners. This is a team approach. So working with museums like The Mariners' Museum and Park.
that you'll hear about soon, at academia like East Carolina University, federal institutions,
offices like the National Park Service, and first and foremost, our longest and strongest
partnership is with the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology. I'm Tane Casserley with
the Monitor National Sanctuary. Shannon gave you a great overview of the sanctuary system and just to
orientate you to where the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary lies, take a look at this map on the
screen on the left-hand side, you can see we're about six and a half miles southeast of the cape
of Cape Hatteras, off the coast of North Carolina. We are a 1-mile diameter sanctuary. The shipwreck
lies in 230 feet of water offshore. It's a really dynamic environment. So you can see it's actually
the Labrador Current comes racing down from the north, those green colder waters colliding
with the Gulf Stream, those clear warmer waters that comes up, and they actually mix right over
the site of the shipwreck. So it makes it really dynamic. It's a challenge to work on, but it also
brings a diversity to marine life, bringing those temperate, those tropical species together. So it's
just an incredible site. There's so much, so many stories to tell there. And just to give you some
context here, when we talk about Monitor, we need to go back to the 1860s, you know, because Monitor
is one of the most influential naval ships in the United States, if not the world. And I want to set
the stage to talk about that history and why that ship is so important and the partnerships we have
through it. So it all began in April 1861, when Virginia seceded from the Union. The U.S. naval
forces abandoned the Gosport Navy Yard, which is a very large U.S. Navy yard in Portsmouth,
Virginia. So when the south was coming up to take it over, of course the Union didn't
want to give them any sort of advantage, so they burned the warehouses. They burned the supplies
that they couldn't take with them. They burned the ammunition, and they burned and sunk the remaining
ships they couldn't move out of the area. One of those was the steam frigate USS Merrimack.
Now here, we can see the Merrimack, the top image of it as a steamer, wooden steamer. So
that was burnt down to the water line and then raised to what you can see here on the bottom,
and rebuilt into the CSS Virginia. So a radically different vessel. The South didn't
have the infrastructure to build new wooden ships to compete with the Union infrastructure and its
manufacturing. So they had to think outside the box. So they tried this new technology. These
new concepts of iron clads where everything is contained within this armored iron casemate,
that goes all the way around the vessel protecting it. You'll notice it has sloping sides like
sonar deflecting vessels today, that didn't deflect radar or sonar of course, because it
wasn't invented, but it deflected cannonballs. So very similar usage. The South made no secret
that they were building the ship. They wanted to intimidate the Union military. They wanted to
intimidate the populace because they put it out there, we're going to build this ship,
this monster. It's going to go out and nothing can stop it. It can sail off up the Potomac River and
perhaps even shell the capital. So the Union knew they had to do something to combat this.
So Abraham Lincoln and Gideon Wells, the Secretary of the Navy, put out a contract for
designs to counter this Confederate threat. And the man that won was a Swedish American inventor,
John Ericsson. So this is a brilliant engineer. He'd worked with the U.S. Navy before with varying
levels of success. But you know, he's done things, like he designed the modern propeller,
and all sorts of things, so just a brilliant man. So he comes up with this brand new concept.
The Union iron clad USS Monitor, the strange looking vessel.
And you can see here, like nothing like this has ever been seen before. So it's very low to
the water line. Not a lot to hit with your cannonballs. Indeed about nine to 11 inches
is all the hull of the vessel that was above the water. Everything else is below the water line. So
psychologically too, for the the sailors, just something new to wrap their head around. Because
they're used to running around open decks or going up in mass and putting down sails. And now
they're essentially inside an iron coffin, where they couldn't see the surface. So not only was it
a radical naval engineering design, It's also sort of a social psychological mindset too that you had
to get used to. So just incredible. But what makes this ship so special is that rotating gun turret.
Because in the past, you had to turn the entire vessel to come up and and fire at another ship.
Now with the Monitor, the ship could stay in its same orientation, and you could just
move that turret. So indeed this is the great, great grandfather of all modern naval guns,
and the USS Monitor. So when we put these two vessels side-by-side, in the background there
looking like a crocodile is the CSS Virginia, and closer to us there is the USS Monitor. Again,
not a lot to hit on these vessels purposely made to deflect or avoid cannon balls. But this is
the first time these two types of vessels are actually going to go head-to-head and battle,
So that occurs on March 8th and 9th of 1862, at the Battle of Hampton Roads. And on March 8th,
which is the maiden voyage of the CSS Virginia, this is the first time the ship ever went
out into the waterways, it goes out and attacks the entire Union fleet in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
It sinks four vessels, captures a transport, and damages four other warships, and kills over
241 Union sailors and wounds another hundred. And in comparison, they had only two dead and
about a dozen wounded. So already, we're seeing how this technology is outpacing the wooden warships.
So just an incredible onslaught. And this is the worst defeat for the US Navy before Pearl Harbor.
That very, that very night Monitor arrives into Hampton Roads to the burning ships. So it gets
its orders, and it says the orders are to stand by the USS Minnesota, which is run aground, protect
that ship at all costs. The next morning, on March 9th, out comes the CSS Virginia to finish off the
remaining vessels. And there's the Monitor. And the two square off. So the battle runs for about
four hours. Each one testing the other, firing at point blank range. Trying to ram one another. In
fact, at one point the CSS Virginia actually hits the Monitor. But the battle ends in a stalemate.
Both sides believe they won the battle, both sides did win, and both sides essentially
lost in certain ways. But what it really sounded was this is the end of wooden warships and the
beginning of modern naval warfare. And that's why this story is so important.
The Monitor had a few other small actions that it participated in the Hampton Roads area
and James River in Virginia, but it really wasn't ever to be able to draw out the Virginia again.
The Virginia tries to draw out the Monitor. It doesn't want to go out because these two vessels
are just too valuable. So eventually, December 29th of 1862, the Monitor is ordered south,
undertow by the USS Rhode Island, that you can see in the background of this painting,
and it's a side paddle wheeler. And it was being towed south to Beaufort, North Carolina, to help
in blockading duties. It leaves in fair seas, following wind. Quite calm, but as the days go on,
they run into a storm. And it gets more and more powerful. And they're doing everything they can
to kind of beat through this storm, but there's not a lot they can do. And the Cape Hatteras is
known for these tremendous storms, and these folks were square in the middle of one. So eventually,
after battling for nearly a day and a half, on December 31st 1862, near midnight, the Monitor
finally has to give up the ship. It raises its red signal lantern, that you can see in the image here
on top of the turret, indicating that they need to abandon ship. And the USS Rhode Island sent
a series of their longboats out to help remove that crew. It's just an incredible heroic effort.
They got nearly an entire crew out, except for 16 brave men, who unfortunately died during the
sinking event. And from that point on the Monitor is lost to the sands of time for nearly 100 years,
110 years in fact. Until August 1973, when a multidisciplinary team made up of folks from
Duke University Marine Lab, led by John G. Newton, as well as the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, National Geographic, and the North Carolina Department of Cultural
Resources. And they went out to do a geological study of the continental shelf and a search for
the USS Monitor using the last known positions from the USS Rhode Island.
So the expedition went on for several days, until
as always happens on the very last day of the planned expedition, on August 27th,
after already looking at 21 other targets that they believed were not the Monitor,
they found what's called a long amorphous echo. And you could see that image here on the left-hand
side of the screen. It's the first real good view of what they believe could be the Monitor.
Now a challenge that they had was they had a series of drop cameras,
still cameras and television cameras. So on August 28th the 30th, they put down this television
camera you can see here. Unfortunately, the still camera got snagged and was inoperable. So now all
they have is this. So now if you're looking at this and trying to figure out what you're seeing,
imagine the folks back in the early 70s trying to figure this out. And they just couldn't make heads
or tails of it. So after months of looking at the data, and it was Gordon Watts really, who Chris
mentioned earlier from the Department of Cultural Resources from North Carolina. He posed the
question to John Broadwater, another archaeologist on the project, and he said, John what happens
if we think of the ship might be upside down? What happens if the turret is actually underneath the
vessel? And once they were re-looking at the data with that mindset, they thought,
oh my lord, we think we might have actually found this. So after looking at the data again,
on March 8th in 1974, the official announcement was made from the Duke University team, they indeed
discovered the USS Monitor. And just to show you some of the challenges, and remember this is very
fuzzy data they're looking at, they really had to rethink it. And then really look at these images
from drawings. So you can see how things line up here. Where we look at the still image here, to
the drawing, okay and that appears to be part of the armor belt of the Monitor. And then this piece
looks like a support structure that was underneath the turret, because remember the turret is upside
down just like the rest of the vessel is. And then now what appears to be the turret walls.
So from looking at this data, they can indeed say, yes, we have found the Monitor. But now we need to
go back and document it properly. So that same team went out in 1974, with the Alcoa Seaprobe.
Now this is a very special vessel, very strange looking, and you can see it here.
This happened in the first week of April in 1974, and this is a team with the U.S. Navy,
the National Geographic Society again, Duke University, again North Carolina, and MIT.
So if the vessel looks strange to you, might something that see in the Cold War,
it's because it is. It did have archaeological purposes, but we need to remember at the height of
the Cold War, the Russians were losing submarines. So the U.S. wanted to be able to go out and find
a way to document those lost subs on the bottom, to try to discover the technologies they use. So
that's primarily what the ship is used for. But because the Monitor was so famous at the ties of
the Navy, they also were able to use it for the project. So you can see in the drawing, there's
a moon pool underneath through the hull of the vessel that drops this sled, this red sled you can
see an image of it here. It's filled with still cameras, color cameras, video cameras, sonars, all
sorts of technologies. And the idea is to scan whatever you're looking at on the bottom in order
to create a larger mosaic picture of it. And they were able to accomplish that in partnership with
the U.S. Navy's Intelligence Support Center produced this bottom mosaic you can see here,
this very famous mosaic, taken from all that data from the Alcoa Seaprobe. And working with the
archaeologists, they were able to produce this site plan you see on top, which is just incredible.
And of course, this was made very famous in 1975, when it was highlighted in National Geographic.
So things began moving very quickly with the Monitor. She was actually laying, the vessel
was laying out in what was known as the high seas. It doesn't have any protections being close
to the coast of the United States, because a lot of the state waters only went out three miles. So
the question was how do we protect this incredibly important site for the future? Luckily enough,
the Marine Sanctuaries Act was just recently passed. It was really created to protect
natural resources, biological resources, but there was a caveat there for historical and cultural
resources. And that's how the Monitor actually became our very first national marine sanctuary.
The governor actually, James Holshouser, petitioned NOAA asking specifically,
please protect this vessel. Please put it underneath the Marine Sanctuary Program. And
so we were lucky enough, on January 30th of 1975, and the 113th anniversary of the Monitor's launch,
the USS Monitor became our nation's first national marine sanctuary.
You know, we're also very lucky that we were able to pull in all the newest technologies of the day
back in the 1970s. They were doing some really exciting work back then under the sea. And one of
this was working with submersible submarines. And they did lockout dives from them, which means they
would have the people, pilots in the front, like you can see in some of these images here on the left,
people piloting the sub. But in the back of the sub would be a separate section
where two people were, two divers essentially. One diver would go out,
like you can see here. This is actually Dr. Gordon Watts, again who we've mentioned several times,
doing archaeological work on the site. And he would have somebody in the sub sort of passing out
his air line to him. And they would go out for a certain amount of time, do the work,
and then come back. So just incredible stuff. We can see some of the early work
that happened there. Here's a beautiful drawing of again Gordon Watts doing some work on the turret
from the submarine. Remember that red signal lantern was the last thing that history saw back
in the 1860s before the ship went down. That's the very first artifact that was recovered.
You can see the image here. That happened in 1977, using that Johnson Sea Link submersible.
We recovered the anchor of the vessel in a partnership with East Carolina University in 1983.
And then we need to think about how are we going to caretake all of these materials.
So in '87, we actually worked with The Mariners' Museum and Park,
and they were selected as our principal repository for all of our materials and artifacts.
So looking at the Monitor, and recognizing that it is an iron hulled vessel and salt water,
which corrodes very quickly, the decision is made that we need to save parts of this vessel.
We need to save those iconic parts for the sake of history. To share them with the American
people. And the first and foremost in that is going to be the recovery of that gun turret.
That first gun turret in the history of the world. So in order to do that,
there's a massive engineering undertaking. So we also decided to recover the propeller and shaft,
which was done in 1998. Decided to recover the engine, which is also a John Ericsson invention,
and that occurred in 2001. And then in 2002, we went after the turret.
This is the first real prize here that we're going after.
So this is a great animation that shows how we did that. So this happened over 45 days,
working on a 300-foot barge with the Navy Salvage Divers. And they use surface supply diving and
also decompression diving techniques as well, saturation diving techniques.
So essentially, we had to remove those pieces of the hull and the armor belt.
We excavated around the turret, dropped down the spider structure, gently picked up the turret.
Because we need to remember, it's upside down, so it still had its contents in there. Made it to
a secure base, and then bring the whole thing up. So with a total weight of over 230 tons,
on August 5th of 2002, the Monitor's turret broke the surface again.
So oftentimes, we look at these works that we do offshore and this history,
and we think, oh my lord, well you guys were out there, you brought it up,
and you're done, right? That is not the truth. That's only ten percent of the project,
90 percent of the project is done on land. So we're again, we're very fortunate to work with
the world's, I think the world's best metals expert for deep-water archaeology and conservation
and the USS Monitor Center at The Mariners' Museum and Park in Newport News, Virginia.
We brought the turret there, and you can see this is a great example of some of the work we did. So
there's an animation of the interior of the turret. You can see the two guns there.
We actually had to excavate a large portion of the turret that was still filled with sediment,
artifacts, and actually two sailors as well, that we worked with the military
and the U.S. Navy to very carefully document and remove.
As I mentioned those two sailors, you know, this is, we need to remember this is also a human story,
right? It's, you know, we talked about the naval engineering in the history,
but you know these were human lives that lived, fought, and died aboard this vessel, and we honor
and recognize that. So here's some of those special finds that we found inside the turret.
A gold ring, one of those men were wearing, U.S. Navy buttons,
a boot, even a piece of line, and these bottles, all tell a story.
You know we can't forget about the engine, you know, that's another huge component that needs
to be very carefully de-concreted, which means you take off this sort of this crusty outer
structure until you get to the metal. Then you can actually do the conservation work. Take it apart,
conserve it, and put it back together again. So just it's a phenomenal ongoing project.
And as we scroll through quickly, you can see some of the fantastic progress
The Mariners' Museum's conservation staff made. So it's really just beautiful. And now it's ready
for disassembly. So again, even as we work on the turret and these other things, there's these other
ongoing archaeological components that need to be dealt with and honored. And of course,
the turret. So after completely excavating it, now we could take it down to the bare metal,
scan it, map it, and start the conservation work. And again trying to pull in partners, using the
latest technology, here's some photogrammetry that we've done in the interior. You know, it's just
oftentimes can do a much better job than the human hand can by using this high technology.
Again working with other groups to do laser scanning,
and always sort of updating the conservation efforts and techniques brought. So this is the
older electrolytic reduction system, which is the system used to pull the salts out of
out of the metals. And the installation of the new system. It's all computerized. So
again everything's state-of-the-art to treat this artifact with respect.
And again, we can't forget those two sailors. It's very important that they be honored
and remembered. So working with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of the Navy,
we had the honor of burying these two sailors in Arlington National Cemetery on March 8th of 2013,
151 years after the Battle Hampton Roads. It was a very moving event. The eulogy was overseen by the
Secretary of the Navy and over 10 000 people attended, so it's just incredible.
In the Monitor shipwreck site today, still a very vibrant site, there's still tons of history to
dive into there. It's exciting. We, you still have the whole forward portion of the wreck where all
the men lived and worked. So this site still has stories to tell, and we're excited to do that.
And so as we look at the Monitor, 16 and a half miles offshore of Cape Hatteras,
now with sort of taking a step back, we're able to look at the other histories that are out
there. Nearly 500 years of history, including the Civil War and two World Wars, most predominantly
World War II's Battle the Atlantic. This is where the war came home to the
United States. And it's an important story that we want to start telling.
So it all needs to go back to understand how the war came to North Carolina.
To December 7th in 1941, when the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii at 7 55 a.m. on December 7th, you know, ushering us in to this worldwide conflict.
Now even though that Germany and Japan were allies,
they weren't always necessarily coordinating on when things were going to happen. So
everyone knew at one point we would be at war against the two of them. But
Germany is somewhat caught unaware. So it actually took a few days later for them to
declare war on the United States. And of course, in turn we declare war on them. And then literally
a month later, they're at our shores. So this is a great map to help give context for why
Germany was sending the U-boats to the coasts of the United States and North Carolina is because we
were in a world-wide war. The U.S. had the ability to fight, as well as we did, because we had the
raw materials, we had the means of manufacturing those materials into goods - ammunition, tanks,
hospital supplies, everything we needed to fight a war, and the means to ship it
with our vessels in the Merchant Marine. So Germany knew, to be able to stop those supplies
reaching Europe, so they could be used against them, they needed to stop the flow of materials
back here in the United States. And that's why they sent their U-boats against us.
So as I mentioned, literally one month after declaring war,
the first wave of five U-boats is hitting our shores. An operation called Operation Drumbeat.
So the Germans knew exactly where to hit us. So if you look at this map of the continental shelf
and the East Coast of the United States, and North Carolina specifically, you'll see how close those
Outer Banks come to that continental shelf. So the Germans knew that they could come close into
the coast there, hide in that deeper water off the shelf, that cold deep water, and hide from sonar
and to being found by our forces. And then they could pop into the shallow waters,
attack the merchant vessels going up and down the coast. before they would get to ports,
like New York or even further north like Halifax, for the big trip over to Europe.
But if they could stop the flow before they even reached those ports, they would
reflect harm and stop those materials from moving. So they also knew the shipping lanes,
which haven't changed in, you know, 100 and 200 years. They have exactly the same ones.
So they knew exactly where to stage their forces to attack us. And if we overlay
the known World War II shipwrecks, the discovered World War II shipwrecks, we see they lay right
in those shipping lanes. So they knew right where to hit us. They were very smart about it.
So during World War II, a total of 90 vessels were lost over North Carolina
alone - 78 merchant ships, eight allied naval ships, and four German U-boats. And again,
point your attention to that 78 merchant ships, how hard they hit us.
So of the 1,657 total World War II casualties off the coast of North Carolina, over 1,200 of
those were merchant mariners. Historians have called this American second Pearl Harbor.
Except the difference here is that the enemy wasn't attacking another naval force. The Germans
weren't attacking trained warriors and squaring off against battleships or aircraft carriers.
They were attacking merchant ships with civilian volunteer crews. The U.S. Merchant Marine provided
the bulk of these sailors, and many of these shipwrecks off North Carolina are graves for
these brave men. And during World War II, one in 26 merchant mariners died in the line of duty,
suffering a greater percentage of war-related deaths than any other U.S. uniformed service.
Now North Carolina may have been where the Germans hit us the hardest of the U.S. mainland, but also
where we started pushing back. And I think at the start of the war where President Roosevelt said,
"History has recorded who fired the first shot. In the long run, however, all that will matter
is who fired the last shot." In North Carolina is where that road began for the Atlantic war.
This is where we had the first victories against the Germans. So I like to think of
the coastal defense the East Coast of the United States, almost like the eagle's foot here with
its three talons. So those three talons are the U.S. Navy, the United States Coast Guard,
and the U.S. Army Air Force. So the first success that we had was the USS Roper,
a naval destroyer that sinks the U-85 off North Carolina. This is the first U-boat sunk for the
U.S. Navy off the U.S. East Coast. And here's actually the remains of some of those sailors
being buried in the Hampton National Cemetery at night. The second success was on May 9th,1942,
when the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Icarus sinks the U-352 off North Carolina, becoming the first
U-boat sunk by the U.S. Coast Guard off the U.S. East Coast. Again here's some of the survivors of
the U-352 being interrogated by naval and coast guard personnel in Charleston, South Carolina.
And then thirdly, we have July 7th, 1942, when an B29 Hudson airplane sinks the U-701 off North
Carolina, becoming the first U-boat sunk by the U.S. Army Air Force. And this is actually
Lieutenant Harry Kane, Jr. pointing to where he sunk the vessel, this U-boat, excuse me, off
the coast of North Carolina. And thankfully, by May of 1943, U-boats were no longer a major threat
to Allied convoys. They're now being escorted. They've got much better protections. There's
updated tactics, and we're really starting to change the tide against the Germans at this point.
And I truly believe that these successes that we first had off the coast of North Carolina,
pushing those U-boats back from our shores and all the way across the Atlantic, made D-Day possible,
and the Allied invasion of Europe possible on June 6th, 1944. And if we hadn't had those first
successes when we did in 1942, we would never have had the freedom to move the amount of material necessary
for one of the largest amphibious assaults in history and ending the war nearly a year later.
So like Gettysburg and Antietam battlefields, we truly have a battlefield sitting off the coast
of North Carolina. And this naval battlefield is where World War II came home to America.
These shipwrecks are grave sites. They're memorials to our heroes,
and they're fragile reminders of our past.
I'd like to invite everybody who's joined us today on this webinar,
to join an expedition that we're launching this May. This late May to June,
working with a group called the Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration,
who are the world's experts in ROV technology, remote operating vehicle, and telepresence.
So we plan to go out and share these shipwrecks with you live, in real time, during these dates. We're
going to go to the USS Monitor, sites from the World War I and World War II. We're hoping to join
several partners, museums across the country to bring these to you live. And please join
us at allwrecks.org to learn more about how you can be part of this really exciting expedition.
And as we look back at all these histories we've talked about, documenting these sites,
you know, unearthing the archival materials, physically going there to look at them, you know,
and working hand-in-hand with our partners, the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology.
We have to never forget these are grave sites. We're honoring these heroes,
and we honor all those that lived, died, and fought on the high seas.
And if you'd like to learn more about the work that we do working with the
North Carolina Office of State Archaeology and honoring this battlefield, please come to our
website at monitor.noaa.gov. And with that I will pass it over to Shannon.
[Shannon Ricles] Thank you Tane. Well, we just have a few minutes left, but we do have
a couple of questions that we will get to. First off one of the questions that came in is,
so this says that they want to know if the Monitor is still, if private citizens can still dive on
the Monitor. They said they used to not be able to. They were involved in a lawsuit that opened
access to the monitor for qualified divers, so they're just wondering if you can still dive on
Monitor. [Tane Casserley] Absolutely. It is, we have a permitting system that is available
to anyone. There is no cost to it whatsoever. We have a very short form that we have you fill out,
and I'm actually the permit coordinator. I walk you through the process. But
it is there for you to enjoy. It is a public access for you, and we will do anything we
can to get you out to enjoy that site. So absolutely. [Shannon Ricles] Okay, and
one for you Chris. Somebody asked - the dugout canoes are these usually made of the same wood
or of different species? And do you know what species of wood they were made from?
[Chris Southerly] There are a couple different ones. A lot of them are made from the local
pine, longleaf pine. We have seen cypress canoes as well. So it varies somewhat,
but ultimately, you're looking for the the type of tree, you want something,
you know, long and straight obviously. And the pines fit well with that,
as well as some of the cypress. So it varies somewhat. The two I believe, the the two that
you saw in the pictures with the presentation, were both pine. [Shannon Ricles] Okay thank you.
And Tane, one more for you. Somebody wants to know how much did all that recovery cost? Do we
have an actual figure for all of that? I know that might be a little difficult to calculate.
[Tane Casserley] You know, it is difficult to calculate. I can't give you an exact number now,
because what happened was a lot of the bulk of this work was done by the U.S. Navy.
The Navy Salvage and Diving Units across the country, actually have a need to practice,
you know, this is the foremost team that goes out for any kind of plane wreck recoveries.
So you might see them on the news if a plane goes down anywhere in the world.
It's usually the U.S. Navy that goes out to help recover the remains of that vessel. And
we were able to work with the Navy. Saying hey, instead of like setting up a mock shipwreck,
how about if we have you train out on the Monitor? So a lot of those costs were already
used existing funding. I would say probably for the the NOAA expenses,
there was staff time and probably, you know, over the multiple years that we did this, you know,
back from the 1970s, maybe $400,000, $500,00 to $600,000. But again, a lot of this comes through
through grants working with partners, sort of in-kind contributions. But it does bring up a
good point that, you know, a lot of the stuff has a cost. And it's upon us to to manage it properly,
make sure we do the right thing for the American people. [Shannon Ricles] Okay, well thank you.
Well, we just have two minutes left so if you have any other questions, I didn't get to all of them,
and my apologies for that, but if you would like to ask Chris or Tane your question,
you can see their email addresses there on the screen. Feel free to email them directly. And also
to learn more about their work that they do, you can visit the websites that are also listed there.
Now once this webinar is captioned, a video recording of this presentation will be made
available on the webinar archives page. And that's the URL listed there at the bottom. That's a long
URL, but trust me, we're also going to be sending you a link to the recording in a follow-up email.
So you don't have to copy it down right now. But just know that it will be there.
And be sure, and it will also be on our monitor.noaa.gov website under the
archive webinar. So you'll be able to find it in two places. Now the next webinar is,
for this webinar series, is actually going to be the Submerged North Carolina,
it's going to be Exploring USS Monitor - America's Most Historic Ironclad. It's going to actually
be a teacher workshop, and it's going to be on Thursday, March the 4th at 4:00 p.m. A little bit
of a different time so more teachers can register for it and perhaps attend. But during the webinar,
educators will learn how to access free resources, such as activities, videos, and a curriculum guide
that discovers and explores the Civil War and our nation's most famous ironclad.
And then we have other upcoming webinars in our series. We have one coming up on March 16th
with Dr. Avery Paxton. And on March 23rd with Kim Kenyon, and then April 20th is going to be a beach
tagging program with Stephen Atkinson. And April 22nd will be another teacher workshop on marine
debris with Jenna Hartley. So we hope that you'll register for that. If you want more information,
you can contact me through my email or you can visit the sanctuaries website webinar page.
And be sure to check out the National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series, because tomorrow
Dr. Adrienne Correa, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice University for
'Gulf Coast Reefs', will be presenting a presentation on Weathering the Storm.
And there you will discover what scientists are learning about extreme storms, such as hurricanes
and how they impact coral reefs off the Texas Gulf Coast. And lastly, if you are an educator
or you are an formal or informal educator, we would really like for you to take a few minutes,
that there's going to be a survey that's going to pop up at the end of this when you
close out the webinar. We would love for you to just spend a few minutes to take this very short
survey, as it's going to really help us help you in the long run. And I think that is it.
So once again, we want to thank Tane and Chris for a really great presentation. Lots of great
information today being shared. And we thank you for taking time out of your day today to join us.
Have a wonderful day and this concludes the presentation and ends the broadcast.