[Shannon Ricles] All right. Well, hi everyone.
Thank you so much for joining us today
for our webinar, We Rescued the Monitor.
And we are glad you are here with John Broadwater.
I'm Shannon Ricles,
the education and outreach coordinator
for Monitor and Mallows Bay National Marine Sanctuaries.
And I will be your host today.
And joining us is Mark Losavio.
He is the media and outreach coordinator
for Monitor and Mallows Bay.
This webinar is brought to you by NOAA's
Monitor National Marine Sanctuary,
in collaboration with the North Carolina
Office of State Archeology.
Partnering since 1975,
NOAA and the State of North Carolina
work to research, honor, and protect
the hallmarks in North Carolinas,
underwater cultural research,
I mean heritage, which is shipwrecks.
These shipwrecks hold information
about the ever-changing technologies
and cultural and physical landscapes.
They serve as uniquely accessible underwater museums
and memorials for generations of mariners
who lived, died, worked and fought off our shores.
This is one of the many webinars
that we'll be hosting in the coming months
for this Submerged North Carolina webinar series
in collaboration with
the North Carolina office of State Archeology.
One of 15 National Marine Sanctuaries
and two Marine National Monuments
in the National Marine Sanctuary System.
Now this system encompasses more than 620,000 square miles
of marine and Great Lakes waters from Washington State
to the Florida Keys and from Lake Ontario to American Samoa.
Now, during the presentation,
all attendees will be in listen only mode.
You're welcome to type questions for the presenter
into the question box at the bottom of the control panel
on the right hand side of your screen.
This is the same area that you can let us know
about any technical issues you may be having
and we'll try to help you just as soon as we can.
We'll be Monitoring incoming questions
and we'll be feeding them to John at the end,
but go ahead and feel free to type them in.
as you think of them.
Now, we are recording the session
and we'll share the recording with registered participants
via the webinar archive page.
And a URL for this webpage will be provided
at the end of the presentation.
So today, we welcome Dr. John Broadwater,
who is the President and Founder of Spritsail Enterprises,
and he was the former Manager
of Monitor National Marine Sanctuary from 1992 to 2005.
So John, I'm gonna change screens and give it to you.
And it is all yours. You got it?
[John Broadwater] I think I've got it.
Let me see here.
Can you see my screen?
Shannon: Not yet, John.
John: All right, let's see.
Hang on.
Shannon: There we go. Perfect.
John: Got it now?
Shannon: Yes.
John: Okay.
Well thank you, Shannon and welcome everyone.
Thanks for tuning in today.
I wanted talk to you about how we rescued Monitor.
It was primarily a NOAA-led team
but we had really important partners
at The Mariners Museum and Park and especially the US Navy
who did all the heavy lifting, quite literally.
So, I'm gonna start with
just a real quick rundown on how we got
to the point where Monitor sank.
But I think most of you know,
the history well enough that I don't need
to spend a lot of time on it.
And I wanna save all my time for talking
about all the recovery expeditions.
So as you probably know,
this escalation of naval power
sort of started with the conversion of the Union ship,
USS Merrimack to CSS Virginia.
And that was really a result of necessity.
The South had very little capability for ship building
and they had very few ships when the Civil War began.
And so in 1861, they raised the old damaged hull
and burned out hull of the Merrimack
and saved enough of the lower hull
to convert it to this armored casemate warship
that was unlike anything that had been seen before.
It didn't have the usual wooden sides and sail and masts
that were typical of warships of the day.
But the North was concerned enough about this,
that they formed an Ironclad Board in the Navy Department
and looked for proposals for someone to build a ship,
to combat this new southern menace.
And through a long process that I wish
I had time to talk more about,
the Swedish-American inventor, John Erickson,
received a contract for this really radical vessel.
A lot of the admirals on the board
were not happy with this decision
because here's a ship so different from anything
that they considered to be a powerful warship,
which was something that had huge wooden sides
and bristled with 90 to 100 guns.
And here's this little vessel that when fully loaded,
only has a foot and a half of freeboard.
In other words, everything else is submerged.
And this little tiny revolving turret in the center
that had only two guns.
And so, they didn't think this could stand up
against the ships of the day.
And as I say, it was very controversial,
but nevertheless Erickson promised
that he could deliver this in 90 days
to meet the schedule anticipated for the Virginia.
And so, he got the contract.
And he never made the deadline but he came very close.
A little over a hundred days, he delivered this ship.
And while they were trying to still do sea trials
and get the Monitor ready,
the Virginia was the first one to take action.
On March 8th, 1862, she steamed out into Hampton Roads
and literally laid waste to the Union fleet there.
She sank the Cumberland first as shown here,
and then the Congress and a number of auxiliary vessels
before the tide fell so far
that she had to go back and take shelter
in deeper water waiting for the next day
to come to finish off the fleet.
So here, in just one day, the whole warfare system,
Naval warfare system was upset
by this new Confederate rebel monster as it was called.
But in a series of events that could only be dreamed up
by a fiction writer, that night,
while the Congress was still burning on shore,
Monitor, navigated into Hampton Roads
and pulled up alongside the Minnesota
and reported that she was here to do
what she could to help defend the fleet.
And everybody was pretty dubious 'cause here was this thing.
Nobody had ever seen it before.
And here's this thing that looked like
a barge with a water tank on it, as it was described.
But in any case, the following morning,
it was a beautiful Sunday morning.
People were coming down from church
in their finery to look into this huge arena
of Hampton Roads where this battle was to take place.
And sure enough, the Virginia came out
hoping to finish off the Minnesota and the other ships.
And this little cheese box on a raft
sailed into its path, the battle ensued.
It was like two heavyweights,
slugging it out. For four hours
they battled each other.
And even though there's a lot of controversy
about who won, who lost,
the bottom line here is that neither could sink the other.
And so this was the message
that was transmitted around the world
that the day of the wooden worship had ended
and it was now gonna be steam and iron that ruled the waves.
So this battle was an amazing event.
It was witnessed by a lot of people
and ships from foreign lands.
But it was not to have such a great ending
for either one of these two ships.
Within two months,
the Confederates had to destroy the Virginia
because they had lost their home port.
They had no place to go.
Virginia drew too much water to make it up to Richmond,
to help defend the capital.
She wasn't considered seaworthy enough
to go out into open ocean.
So really, she had no place to go
and the crew had to abandon her.
The Monitor hung around all summer
in the sweltering Virginia heat on the James River.
But in December, she was ordered to head south under tow
by a paddle wheel steamer to reinforce the Confederate
or the Union blockade of Confederate ports there.
But on New Year's Eve of 1862,
the Monitor was caught in
one of the all too well known Hatteras gales.
And she took on so much water that she sank out there
and way offshore in a position that was unknown at the time.
And as paymaster William Keeler stated,
"What the fire of the enemy failed to do,
the elements have accomplished.
The Monitor is no more."
And so fortunately, the boat crews from the Rhode Island,
the tow ship, managed to pull off all
but 16 of Monitor's crew.
But 16 perished that night on New Year's Eve.
People looked for the Monitor for years without success
until finally in August of 1973,
a team from Duke University Marine Lab,
operating with information
collected by Retired Captain Ernest Peterkin
of the Naval Research Lab,
explored a rectangle where Peterkin
thought the Monitor should lie.
And sure enough, they discovered the Monitor
near the top of this circle.
But it wasn't really known to be the Monitor for sure
at the time. There was a big question about it
because the technology of the day for remote sensing,
they lowered a camera, still and video cameras down
and they had sonar,
but all of these produced images that were not conclusive.
Plus everybody was looking to find a
flat surface with the turret on top.
And only later did they realize that the Monitor
had turned over as she sank and the turret was underneath.
But the decision was finally resolved the following April
when the Alcoa Seaprobe,
which was a vessel unique in its own right,
was used to lower an instrument pod with cameras,
take pictures and identify the Monitor
by producing a photomosaic.
Now, a lot of us know about photomosaics in today's world.
It's all a digital thing.
It's really neat that almost does its own work.
And you get a mosaic by pushing some buttons.
Back then, we were actually taking 35 millimeter negatives
and processing them into positives,
cutting them out and pasting them on a large table
to produce this mosaic.
But crude though it was, it was convincing enough.
It was easy for people to see the double-ended shape
of the Monitor's hull and the turret sticking out underneath
where the little arrow is, kind of at your lower left.
Well, so now what to do?
The Monitor is 16 miles off shore.
It's in international waters.
They're no laws to protect shipwrecks out there.
But yet it's in 235 feet of water, which is deep,
but recent advances in diving technology
has made it possible for scuba divers
using technical techniques to get out
to depths of the Monitor.
And so, there was a big concern
that the Monitor was gonna be damaged and looted.
And it took a lot of investigating,
but something really amazing happened,
something that Shannon will probably talk a lot about later.
and that is in that year,
the National Marine Sanctuary Act was created,
creating a program that could protect areas
of significant national interest.
And there was nothing in there that limited them
to a three mile territorial sea.
And so, in January 30th, 1975,
the Monitor became the first National Marine Sanctuary.
And as Shannon said at the beginning,
the program has grown tremendously.
And we're now up to 15 sanctuaries
and two national monuments.
And I can't resist the temptation here,
to just stop real quick and say,
congratulations to NOAA and the Sanctuary program,
this October, they will celebrate 50 years
of protecting our important marine resources.
So guys, I'm proud to have been a part of it.
This is a picture that was taken this summer
on a NOAA expedition showing
how beautiful it is to dive on the Monitor.
You can see all the fish and the colorful corals
and all of that growing on the hull.
But if you look closely,
you can also see that the hull is very badly damaged.
And that was of immediate concern
when NOAA took over responsibility
for managing and protecting the site.
Here's a couple of views from the side.
They were taken during that time period.
And you can see that a lot of the hull plating
has already dropped off the lower hull
and the stanchions have bent,
allowing the hull, lower hull
with the engine and everything attached
to collapse down onto the hull
and start to compress things, damage things.
And once the hull opened up like that,
it allowed the strong currents
from the Gulf Stream to wash in
and the salt water corrosion and the forces of the currents
were really taking their toll on the wreck.
The lower picture, you can see that Monitor's hull
is propped up on the turret,
which means that a lot of the hull is not supported.
And some of the plating was coming off the hull
and the hull structure was being weakened.
We watched the deterioration over the years
from the discovery all the way up to the 1990s.
And it was apparent that there had been
a tremendous increase of rate of deterioration.
And that Monitor was reaching a really crisis stage.
It was at a point where it could begin to have critical,
catastrophic collapses of the different hull components.
And we were worried that really,
nothing recognizable would be left.
The turret itself you'd think
was strong enough to withstand any of the forces of nature,
but it was actually laminated.
And it was armored but it was eight layers
of one inch iron bolted together.
And we could see that the bolts
were starting to deteriorate,
and we were afraid that even the turret itself
couldn't stand the forces of having the hull lying on top.
So, what to do?
NOAA realized that there was a problem,
but that the first goal would be to make sure
everyone else agreed that there was a problem.
And so, we had to define the threat to the Monitor
and prove that that threat was actually imminent
and then to propose a viable solution.
So, we developed a long-range preservation plan
called "Charting a New Course for the Monitor."
And of our major conclusions, these are the important ones.
If left on the sea floor,
Monitor will disintegrate at an increasingly rapid rate.
Complete recovery of the hull contents is not viable.
This one hurt.
Everyone wanted to recover the Monitor intact,
in its entirety and treat everything.
But a number of our engineering studies showed that
there just wasn't enough money available
even on our wildest streams to do that kind of a recovery.
And so instead, we proposed that we do hull stabilization,
followed by selective recovery of the key components,
And that it needed to start soon
if anything important was to be saved.
So this was our challenge, to try to, first of all,
convince everyone that this was important enough to pursue.
And then to try to gather up the resources
to actually do it.
Our preservation strategy consisted of six phases
of onsite work, both archeology and engineering.
And the foremost important ones were these.
First of all, to recover the skeg and propeller there
on the very end of the hull on the left hand side there,
because they were hanging out in space
and not really well supported.
And so, they were producing real stresses on the hull
and needed to come out first.
The other good thing was that,
that was a fairly light thing, the propeller,
compared to the other components.
And so, it would be a good way for us to prove
that we were capable of actually doing these lifts.
And second, we needed to support the hull
before doing anything else.
And so, we needed to come up with a way
to fill that void underneath the hull.
Then three, Monitor's steam engine was another one
of John Erickson's patented devices.
It was a special, low-profile steam engine
that made it possible to put all the machinery
below the deck space where it could be protected.
And so, we wanted to recover the steam engine intact.
And then finally, the big enchilada was the turret.
Everyone thought that the turret
with the first such turret, first such gun enclosure,
and it's still used as you can see
by looking at modern warships.
It was the prototype for all Naval gunnery for the future.
So, we wanted to recover the turret
and make sure we could recover it intact.
So that was a big tall order.
So, we started out with the propeller recovery.
And fortunately here,
our partnership with the Navy came in to being.
We had already developed a partnership
with the Monitor, with The Mariners' Museum
for a Monitor partnership for accepting the objects
that we recovered and eventually placing them on exhibit.
But the Navy was able to allocate their training budget
in 1998 to recovering the propeller
as a training operation to test
their new flyaway deep diving dive system.
So, that was how this all came together.
And so in June of '98,
the propeller and 11 feet of the shaft were recovered.
There's a whole story behind this.
It was not by any means, a simple job
but the Navy pulled it off in fine style.
And this allowed us to go back
and assess our capabilities for the next phases.
There's the propeller after conservation.
You can see it at The Mariners' Museum and Park.
So the next step was to stabilize the hull
before we did any more damage,
or try to remove any more components.
And we did that in the year 2000.
And the method chosen for stabilizing the hull,
filling that void underneath, was to actually
place these huge reinforced bags underneath the hull
called grout bags.
And they were filled from the surface
with a cement like mixture called grout.
And the grout eventually hardened up.
And so, with enough of the grout bags laid along the hull,
we now had a supporting structure that would allow us
to do the recoveries that we planned to do
without worrying about the hull collapsing
while we were doing all our work.
Another clever thing that looks simple enough,
but doing that off Cape Hatteras with all the rough seas we
had and in 235 feet of water, not simple.
Navy did a great job.
Now we're getting into the big stuff.
The engine weighed about 35 tons
and it was inside the hull.
Even though that hull had deteriorated in that area,
there was still a hull structure
to be dealt with to get to the engine.
So again, here's a look at it.
Those three vertical beams towards the stern,
that's the engine room.
You can see those beams are no longer connected to anything.
So, the hull is collapsed
and the engine has dropped
on to the rest of the hull structure.
We did a lot of work to estimate the weights.
All these computer aided drawings helped us estimate weights
and centers of gravity and all of that.
Plus we had help from various groups of private divers,
technical divers, who had permits to dive on the Monitor.
And they were able to even get inside and get pictures
like the one in the upper right.
Particularly helpful was the Cambrian Foundation.
So this was how we got ourselves organized to do the work.
But then question is, here it is.
Here's the engine down here.
How do you raise a 35 ton steam engine?
Well, I can't remember who actually came up
with the design that we used.
But I come from the Hills of Kentucky and the way I saw it,
the plan that was derived looked very much
like the way hillbillies take a engine
out of their pickup truck.
So the Kentucky redneck model, as I call it,
look something like this,
you get the kids swing set,
I don't know how you explain that to the kids,
but you reinforce it a little bit.
You drag it over to your vehicle
and you put a chain fall on there
and you slide the chain fall back and forth
across the top of the A-frame, the swing set.
And you hook the engine up and you raise it.
Well, guess what?
That's what we came up with for the Monitor,
the engine recovery structure.
See the similarity?
But it consisted of a huge bridge structure,
a spreader bar that could slide back and forth
across the bridge.
And then the engine lifting frame,
which could be lowered down from the spreader
until it was perfectly aligned
over the Monitor's engine room
and then the engine could be rigged.
A lot of weight? Yeah.
It was about three times as heavy as the engine itself.
But cause of the constant movement of the surface,
there was no way to lower a cable down
and hook directly up to the engine.
So, this was the best solution we could come up with.
It sure works for trucks back in the hills.
Well, we did all this and it worked remarkably well,
but only because of a lot of behind the scenes work.
We had people working on the funding,
trying to get special appropriations
for the Navy to do this recovery.
And we also worked on the dive system.
At that point, the Navy divers were going down on stages
like you see in that center picture.
Two divers at a time, lowered down right through
all these strong currents in the Gulf Stream.
And they had to fight their way pulling against the current
all the way over to the wreck, only to have
maybe 15 to 20 minutes of actual work time on the bottom
before they had to come back up
and spend several hours in the decompression process
before they could even relax and get ready for another dive.
So this was slow and arduous.
And it just wasn't gonna get the job done.
We did calculations.
It would not give us the time we needed.
So, through a whole series of negotiations and arguments,
the Navy was able to get approval the first time
to use a commercial saturation system,
to be used by the Navy in an operational environment.
What is saturation? And why was it important?
With saturation diving,
the divers go into a pressure chamber,
like the one on the lower left.
They're sealed up in there.
And they actually stay at the pressure
equivalent to the bottom for up to a week or two at a time.
And that way, when they actually go outside
to dive on the Monitor and do work,
they're already at the same pressure.
And when they finished and they can stay out
for hours at a time literally,
they go back in and they're still at pressure.
They go back to the chamber.
They have a meal,
they have a night's sleep,
and then they're ready for the rotation the next day.
That gave us so much extra time.
You can see the statistics there on the bottom.
We basically work 24/7.
And the Navy divers that year logged
666 hours of bottom time,
70% of which was by the saturation divers.
So, they were critical.
And that's not to say
the surface supplied divers weren't important.
They were critical, also.
They did a lot of work all through.
So, with the teams all working together,
things really came together better than we'd hoped.
Not to be outdone.
I helped organize a NOAA sponsored team.
We got approval for the first time for NOAA divers
to get technical dive certification
and to make untethered dives.
The Navy thought we were a little crazy,
which I can't really say is not true,
but it worked out well.
We had great mobility
and we could get around to places quickly.
And we were able to make measurements,
keep an eye on the Navy divers
and report back to the top side team.
So, that was another first for diving offshore.
Well, this all worked.
July 16th, 2001, the entire engine recovery structure
was brought to the surface by a huge crane barge
and set onto a barge next to it.
And this was over a hundred ton lift counting the frame.
It was all barged back to The Mariners' Museum,
taken to a pre-prepared tank and lowered in,
in a tank right next to the propeller tank.
And all of this was available
for the public to come and see, which is what museums do.
And the reason we wanted to have the museum for a partner.
Okay. We've moved up from a few tons to 35 tons.
And now, we're talking about a turret.
We don't know what it weighs
because it's filled up with silt over the years.
We think the guns are still inside.
We've actually confirmed that.
So the two big Dahlgren cannons are inside the turret.
We don't know how much the silt weighs.
We can estimate that. We had engineers doing that.
But how do you recover this gun turret without damaging it?
As I mentioned before, it's actually a laminated structure.
And we were afraid if the bolts had been weakened so much
that if we put stresses on one side or the other side,
that the whole thing might just delaminate into a pile.
And instead of having the Monitors turret,
we'd have a turret kit with some assembly required.
So again, we did our homework.
There are a few photographs that show the turret,
their drawings that Ericsson did.
And we did our usual computer drawings
and estimated tons and so forth.
But the biggest problem was okay, so you got all this done.
First of all, how do you get at it?
We knew we had to remove part of the armor belt.
But then we had to have some way of lifting the turret
without putting all these side stresses on it.
And I could tell you,
we spent months going over various proposals.
Each one didn't pass the test until finally,
an engineer at Phoenix International,
the Navy's salvage contractor, came up with something
we all felt like we'd finally come upon the right plan.
Here's looking down on the site.
You can see how the damaged armor belt
is still lying across the top of the turret.
That had to be removed.
And again, we had our three teams,
saturation, surface supplied
and the NOAA free diving technical team.
We went back out to the site. Here was our objective.
And the first problem,
the project was extended effort to remove the armor belt
from over top of the turret.
As badly damaged as it was, it still put up quite a fight.
After, well over a century,
I can only imagine how well it turned away cannon balls.
So, that was successfully completed.
And there's the turret without anything overhead.
We found out sure enough,
it was full of silt right up to the very top.
And so the Navy divers
got to become archeologists for a while.
They conducted excavation under the direction
of our archeology team up on the barge.
And we were able to keep track of how much silt was removed.
Our Phoenix engineer, Jim Kelly, was sitting at a laptop,
constantly changing those numbers
and constantly shaking his head and saying,
"Still too heavy.
Still too heavy. The crane can't lift it."
So, we had to excavate down further and further,
further than we wanted to but we had no choice.
We had to go with the engineers.
What did we come up with for the recovery device?
Well, here it is, the spider and the platform.
The spider is a huge steel eight-legged device
where the legs can be pushed out about 15 degrees,
like an open fist.
You spread your fingers, you lower this thing down,
you place it over the turret,
and then you close these fingers,
you close these eight legs up
underneath the lip of the turret.
and that grasps it steadily.
And then, because the turret's upside down,
the top of the turret isn't well secured.
And so, we didn't wanna dump everything out of the turret.
So, the spider would be picked, moved just a few feet over
to where the platform would be lying on the bottom.
And once the turret was aligned,
it would be lowered onto the platform.
The platform and spider would be secured together.
And here is what the lift would look like.
The turret suspended nice and safely
inside this lifting structure.
All looks good on paper but what a job this was.
What a task we had before us.
So, here's a frame grab of video.
We constantly watched with a remotely piloted vehicle
and another video camera and the saturation divers,
all watching as this spider came down,
was aligned over the turret.
We picked the calmest day we could pick.
There's still a little bit of surface motion,
but just able to ease this spider structure
over the turret, lower it down.
And after a few obstructions were cleared at the bottom,
Navy divers used hydraulic rams
to push each leg in sequence
up underneath the lift of the turret and secure it.
And on lift day,
again, we picked as calm of a day as we could,
but we were running out of options.
The money was just about gone.
We had a storm predicted to hit us
within the next 24 to 48 hours.
We had to be ready and everybody was ready.
The initial lift took place.
The spider was connected to the platform,
And on August 5th, late in the afternoon,
the turret broke the surface.
Everything worked just like it should.
There was a huge yell that went up from the barge
and from the boats carrying visitors
and VIPs and press people.
And it was a day that none of us
who were there will ever forget.
And there's Monitor's turret,
safely secured and brought on board
and then back to the museum again.
And this time it was brought by barge
and offloaded in a very clever method,
right on the beach at the museum grounds.
And trucked back to a waiting tank
where it was closed up, filled up with water.
And after a considerable period of time,
we were able to get inside and continue the excavation
as terrestrial archeologists might do.
And here's what it looked like.
A bit muddy, but what fun it was
to get in there and actually get a chance
to do our own excavation inside Monitor's turret.
And before long, The Mariners Museum
had built the Monitor Center,
a whole separate wing to house the Monitor artifacts,
tell the Monitor story.
And a full scale replica had been contributed
by the apprentice shop at Newport News Shipbuilding
just down the road from the museum.
So, you can go there now.
You can see the whole story
and see as the artifacts come out of treatment.
They go on exhibit in the museum.
It's the way archeology needs to be done.
If we recover things from archeological sites
and never share them with the public,
then we really haven't done our job.
So, our partnership with the museum has now
come into the forefront for conservation and exhibition.
Just gonna go quickly through
with the little time we have left
some of the work that's now going on at the museum,
conserving these huge,
over a hundred tons of iron from the Monitor.
I think actually over 200 tons
total iron delivered to the museum.
Here's the engine undergoing initial deconcretion.
It was covered with this huge
corrosion product called concretion.
That's been slowly removed.
We had a little bit of information
from other Monitor engines to help us along with that.
It had to go into a tank
where this process called electrolysis
is used to use electricity to help pull out
the chloride ions that are gonna be
the potential problem for longterm preservation.
And here's a whole sequence of pictures of the turret
as the deconcretion and conservation progressed.
And it's just amazing now,
how much more it looks like an engine,
but the work is still a long way from finished.
Look at that? Really impressive.
It's still upside down too, so is the turret.
More work to be done.
Then, the turret was also being treated at the same time.
You can see heavy concretion on everything there too,
on the guns, the gun carriages
and other components found inside.
And you can see now that that work is progressing
and it's starting to look just like the turret.
You can see some of the dents that the Virginia's guns
left their mark on the turret by.
Again, this work is all still ongoing.
And then, one of the things we discovered
not long before the turret was lifted,
was that two of the Monitors crewman
had been trapped inside the turret
and were found just at the very bottom of the excavation.
And we immediately shifted gears.
The Navy divers, treated these human remains
with respect and dignity as they were trained to do.
These, these two men were immediately dubbed our crewmen,
our partners in the Navy.
And so, it was quite an impressive scene to see
how much respect these Navy divers showed.
And when they got back to the museum,
the same thing was done.
We had specialists from the JPAC Lab out in Hawaii
that handles human remains from all military sites.
They came and helped remove the remains,
took them back to their forensics lab.
And not only cleaned the bones up and analyzed them,
but were able to get DNA samples.
We also found a number of personal possessions
associated with the crew inside,
comb, buttons, shoes, boots,
a coat, an officer's coat.
And one of the crewmen still had this wedding ring
on his finger, which was a very poignant find for us.
The forensics gave us DNA but through a process
that's become familiar to most of us now
through CSI type programs on TV,
we wanted to do facial reconstructions.
And a lab in Louisiana produced these wonderful recreations
of what these men probably looked like.
So, you're staring into the eyes of two crewmen
who were not able to escape
from the Monitor on that night in December of 1862.
We have not been able to identify them by name,
but they were given their final resting place
at a formal ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery.
And there they will rest.
There's still some hope that someday,
we'll be able to add names to their unmarked graves.
But this, this again was a very moving ceremony
and a wonderful way to sort of,
culminate the recovery operations
and acknowledge the crew who lost their lives that night.
Greenville Weeks, Monitor's surgeon,
said of this a hull event,
"Their names are for history.
And so long as we remain a people,
so long will the work of the Monitor be remembered
and her story told to our children's children.
The little cheese box on a raft has made herself a name,
which will not soon be forgotten by the American people."
And thanks to our partners, to NOAA, to the museum.
I think you can see that we're making sure
that they won't be forgotten.
You can read more about this.
I had to get in a shameless plug at the end.
You can read more about the Monitor
and the effort to recover these components in my book.
And thank you very much for your attendance today.
And we have a big event coming up
at the museum this weekend on Saturday.
We'll have the 20th anniversary
of the recovery of Monitor's turret.
And hope we'll see you there.
Thank you.
Shannon: All right. Thank you, John.
Let me take the screen back from you now.
And right.
So, if you have any questions
that you haven't had a chance yet
to write them into the chat box, please do so.
Also, if you haven't downloaded John's bio in the chat box,
you might want to do that now.
And in that bio, you're gonna find some more information
about John and the links that might be of interest to you.
So, we welcome you to check out the, the Q and A box,
but also to let us know what you might want
to have him answer today.
All right, Mark, do you have a question
that you can start off with as I try to figure out
where my chat box is at?
Mark: Yes.
I'm actually quite interested in this myself,
but you made a lot of mention of the conditions
like the currents and the weather during the mission.
Can you give us a little more of a sense of just how bad,
how strong were the currents on like,
a normal day on those dives?
John: Oh, well, if you've ever read anything
about the conditions at Hatteras,
as you may know, just geology wise,
it protrudes out from the coast
further than any other point.
And so for centuries, ships have had to give a wide birth
to that part of North Carolina's coast.
But one of the problems there is that
the cold Labrador Current flows down from the north
and meets right at Hatteras
meets the Gulf Stream coming north.
And the Gulf Stream is warm.
And the two currents meet and swirl.
And depending on conditions,
one might be stronger than the other.
So, the current interface moves north,
it moves south, inshore, offshore.
And it creates all these different
and very difficult to predict weather patterns.
And very often, that turbulence of the two currents meeting
creates storm conditions that can come up very suddenly
as they did on the night the Monitor sank.
And in talking to the various Navy personnel
out at the Monitor site over the years,
I've had more than one of them tell me,
"John, it's no different now,
we still give Hatteras a wide birth."
So even with our modern ships and modern technology,
there's still a lot of respect
for the dangers posed by this area.
Shannon: That is so true.
Okay.
Another question that we had come in, John, it said,
"How long did it take for the Navy divers
to learn how to communicate using helium mixed gas
as their voices were very much changed?"
John: Yes, that's an interesting thing.
I'm not sure you can say that it's been resolved even now.
One thing we found out on our first NOAA dives
to the site in 1979,
this was a civilian archeologist,
Gordon Watts, myself, and Richard Lawrence,
trying all this new technology for the first time.
And we had helium atmosphere just like the Navy divers used.
And it jacks your voice up of couple of octaves.
And you sound like Donald Duck
trying to communicate down there.
And not only is it humorous on the one hand,
but it's problematic on the other hand
because it distorts your voice enough
that sometimes you can't be understood.
So, we have to learn to speak very slowly and deliberately.
Some people have deeper voices and better enunciation,
and they're more readily understood.
I'll never forget, we had Gordon Watts
who was the chief archeologist out there
on those early expeditions.
And Gordon is a good old Southern boy from North Carolina.
And none of us could understand him.
And one of the people from the Harbor Branch Foundation
who was in charge of the Harbor Branch submarine operations
that allowed us to get out to the site,
he said, "You know, Gordon, we've got helium unscramblers
that are electronic devices that convert your voice
back to a normal range so we can understand you.
But none of them have been programmed
for North Carolina accent."
So, even today that's turned out to be a bit of a problem
although most of the Navy divers have had enough practice
that first of all, they're very good at enunciating.
And the top side folks are very good
at understanding what they're saying.
Shannon: Okay.
Mark, do you have another question?
Mark: Yeah. This is a good question.
What is your favorite memory from diving on the Monitor?
John: Oh boy, there's so many.
I guess I'd have to say number one
is the day the turret came up.
But as far as my dives on the Monitor,
it would have to be my very first dive.
As I mentioned, we went out before the Navy was involved,
we went out with Harbor Branch and it was 1979.
Excuse me.
And our goal was to place some reference markers
near the side of the hull so we could start to make
archeological measurements and map the site.
And so my first dive, I was supposed to leave the submarine,
which was a four person submarine and walk a short distance
to where the first big marker was to be put in,
which was a big piece of two inch plastic pipe, PVC pipe.
And we'd done rehearsals
and we'd gone through the procedures quite a bit.
And so I got out and I was really nervous,
my first dive on the Monitor
and wanted to do everything right.
So I start walking in the direction they directed me
and I found the pipe and I started to jet it.
We used a stream of water to jet it into the bottom.
So I'm jetting the pipe down.
And I look back to where the submarine was sitting.
And I couldn't see it.
It was just barely a faint glow in the distance.
And I looked back in front of me
and there was this dark shape.
And it, I realized, wow, this is the Monitor's turret.
And I didn't confess this for a long time afterwards,
but I left the jetting operation
and took the two or three steps
over to the Monitor's turret.
And just with great reverence,
I reached out and I laid my hands on the turret
and let my imagination just range back
to the Battle at Hampton Roads
and to the night of the sinking.
And it's just, even now,
it still just makes my hair stand up.
So that has to be number one.
Shannon: Very cool.
Well John, a little bit more
about the conservation techniques.
Do you know what the conservation techniques
were used for the propeller and was it made out of bronze?
John: The propeller was actually a single casting of iron.
And engineers have now analyzed the propeller
and said that it's one of the most exact castings.
They couldn't believe how precise it was.
They said that for modern ships today,
you don't need to meet standards that precise.
So kudos to the engineers of the 19th Century.
But yes, for all iron objects,
this corrosion product that I mentioned earlier,
forms on the outside,
but it actually penetrates into the iron as well.
And castings like the Monitor's propellor
can have damage that goes quite deep.
And as the chlorides in the salt water seep into the iron,
you would think iron is impermeable,
but at a molecular level, it's not at all.
These ions get inside and they have to be brought out
because if they're allowed to dry out,
they can crystallize and create internal pressures
that literally will damage the surface of the metal
or even caused the blades to fall off the propeller.
It's tremendous forces.
And so, there's a process called electrolysis
where you create a voltage potential
between electrodes and anodes
and the turret itself, or the iron object,
in this case the propeller,
and it tends to create a differential
that will draw the chloride ions out of the metal.
It takes a long time
and it has to be done with a lot of precision
otherwise you do more damage than you prevent.
And so, that was the method used,
and it's the same method now being used
on the other components, the guns
and the engine, the turret.
Shannon: Okay. And Mark, do you have another question?
Mark: Yes.
And I just wanna remind everybody, if you are interested
in more of the conservation aspect of the artifacts,
we do have an archived webinar with Will Hoffman,
the Director of Conservation at The Mariners Museum.
He's kind of like the end all be all
for all things conservation.
So, definitely go check that out.
But this question is kind of on the flip side of things.
What is the environmental or ecological impact
of Monitor being on the bottom of the ocean?
John: Ah, yes, that's something
that we have talked about over the years.
And NOAA's recent expedition looked into that question.
They were out there in July, and we had biologists
and ecologists and a number of scientists who joined
by long range through telecommunications.
And the conclusion is that these iron object shipwrecks
human made objects lying on the seabed,
aren't as destructive as we thought,
at least not in most cases.
And the environment is actually different.
There are different species within the micro environment
of a shipwreck site as you would find out
on the plains of the seabed.
The sea floor out in that area is very flat.
It's like a desert.
And so, you can sort of think of shipwrecks
that lie off the coast as being a little oasis.
And I was very interested in hearing
the ecologists and biologists talking about
the differences in the environment
and what they observed in different species
and different populations of different moving
and stationary living a organisms.
And so, it looks like shipwrecks actually
are fitting into the environment, which is a good thing.
Cultural resources sometimes don't get,
I don't think the acknowledgement
that they deserve, their importance.
But now that we have good evidence
that the natural resources and the cultural resources
are sort of inextricably combined,
I think that that might help us
do a more proper job of doing more comprehensive management.
Shannon: Okay.
And I think this is gonna be the last question,
because we're just about out of time.
They said they've heard stories about the Monitor
and that it was depth charged during World War II
because sonar read it as a possible German submarine.
Could you tell from the damage to the hull,
if this was actually the case?
John: I wish I could answer that one.
We don't have any definitive proof one way or the other.
But I think quite a few of us believe
that's very likely the case.
The Monitor's hull show signs of collapse from above
as if a force did press down
and caused that bending of the supports
and crushing the lower hull down onto the deck.
So, I'd say there's a really good chance.
That was a standard procedure during the war.
And very likely the Monitor was a big enough target.
That was what happened.
Shannon: Okay.
And if we did not get to your questions,
or if you have additional ones,
you can always send them to John personally.
And his email address is there listed on the screen.
And we are also going to send these follow up questions
to John so that he can at least see what everybody asked.
And if you live in the local area
or want to come for a visit,
be sure to join us on August the 6th
at The Mariners Museum and Park, in Newport News, Virginia,
for a fun-filled day.
There's gonna be activities for the entire family.
You can go on a special scavenger hunt,
conduct an archeological dig using a replica cannon
or you can become immersed on the USS Monitor wreck site
as you view the newest
3D virtual reality video of the Monitor.
And you can meet John at 11:00 am in person,
as he talks about the race to save the Monitor.
And at 1:00 pm, you can learn more
about the conservation of the turret
and the other artifacts that are going on
with Will Hoffman, who is the Director
of Conservation and Chief Conservator.
And he's gonna talk about
the last two decades of conservation.
So, come out on Saturday and join us
if you're in the local area.
We'd love to see you.
Now, a video recording of this presentation
will be available on the sanctuary's webinar archive page.
That's found at that URL listed at the top of the page.
In addition, the webinar will be
archived on Monitor's website.
You'll just click on the multimedia section
in the toolbar section to access the webinar box.
You'll also find any future webinars
that we're gonna be doing in that same section.
And don't worry, all of this information
will be sent to you in a follow up email
once the recording is ready to view.
And just as a point of to let you know,
that recording usually takes about a week
before it's up online because we have to caption it
and then the web team has to get it up.
So in about a week, it should be ready
and we'll send you an email out
so that you can share it with others too,
to view the recording, or if you had anybody miss it,
they can come and watch it.
And on July 21st,
Office of National Marine Sanctuaries' webinar series
will host Sarah Hutton,
Conservation and Climate Program Coordinator
with the Greater Farallones Association,
as she discusses the latest science on well carbon
and the critical efforts underway
to rebuild well stocks by reducing impacts
such as collisions with ships.
You'll learn how recent engagement
with school children on the subject of climate change
made a big splash resulting in a renewed commitment
from the largest container shipping line
to continue to go slow for Wells,
demonstrating the important role
that the community engagement plays in ocean protection.
And of course, we always invite you
to follow us on social media.
And lastly, as you exit the webinar,
there is a short survey for formal and informal educators.
If you are an educator,
please, NOAA would really appreciate it,
if you would take a minute or two to complete the survey.
Your answers will help NOAA
develop future webinars to meet your needs.
Your participation is voluntary
and your answers will be completely anonymous.
But once again, we want to thank John,
for a great presentation.
Thank you, John.
And thank you all for joining us,
taking the time out of your day today.
I hope everybody has a wonderful day.
And this concludes the presentation.
Bye, everyone.