[Shannon Ricles] All right.
Well, hi, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining us today for our webinar,
The Search for the USS Monitor.
We welcome John Broadwater
as we celebrate the 50th anniversary
of the discovery of the Monitor in 1973.
I'm Shannon Ricles,
the education and outreach coordinator
for Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
and Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary,
and I'm gonna be one of your hosts today.
[Mark Losavio] I'm Mark Losavio,
the media and outreach coordinator for Monitor
and Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary,
and I'll be your co-host for today.
-: And this is Jessie Frayser, the newest member of our team.
And now Jessie is the education
and outreach support specialist for Monitor.
And she just joined us last week,
so I welcome her to our webinar series.
Now, this webinar is brought to you
by NOAA's Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
in collaboration with the North Carolina
Office of State Archaeology.
-: Partnering since 1975,
NOAA and the State of North Carolina
worked to research, honor, and protect the hallmarks of
North Carolina's underwater cultural heritage, shipwrecks.
These shipwrecks hold the information
by 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 of our shores.
This will be one of many webinars
that we'll be hosting in the coming months and years
for the Submerged NC Webinar series
in collaboration with the North Carolina
Office of State Archaeology.
-: Now, Monitor is just one of 15 national marine sanctuaries
and two marine national monuments
in the National Marine Sanctuary system.
The system encompasses more than 620,000 square miles
of marine in Great Lakes waters from Washington State
to the Florida Keys and from Lake Huron to America Samoa.
Now during the presentation,
all attendees will be in listen only mode.
You are 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.
And this is the same area,
you can let us know about any technical issues
you might be having that we can help you with.
We'll be monitoring the incoming questions
and technical issues,
and we'll 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 for this page will be provided
at the end of the presentation as well.
-: So without further ado,
it is my absolute honor to welcome the former superintendent
of Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, Dr. John Broadwater.
Take it away, and I will hand you control.
[John Broadwater] Okay.
Well, hello, everyone.
Glad to have you all joining us.
Let me see if I can get us onto my screen.
Shannon: All right,
we're seeing the slideshow presentation,
but not in slideshow mode.
[John] Okay, we'll come up with that.
[Shannon] There you go now.
[John] There you go.
[Shannon] Perfect. [John] Okay, we're up.
Okay, well, again, hello
and thanks for your interest in the Monitor.
I think this is a big job to try to squeeze into a webinar,
but let's give it a try.
I just wanted to warn you
that some of this material comes from my book
and is pretty well-researched and validated,
but some is coming from a dim memory
of what happened 50 years ago,
so take that into account.
Also, I just wanna apologize,
trying to squeeze all this information in.
I'm sure there are gonna be facts
and people that don't get the recognition they deserve,
and for that I apologize, but I'm gonna do my best.
So I think probably most everybody tuned in
has a pretty good idea of the significance of the Monitor,
and why this is important,
but I'll just give you a quick rundown.
Monitor came so significant
because our story begins early in the American Civil War
because of a threat from the Confederate Navy.
They were in the process of taking an old steamship,
warship, US warship that had been scuttled
and converting it to an ironclad monster
called the CSS Virginia.
And this is a depiction of her being converted in a dry dock
in Portsmouth, Virginia at the Norfolk Naval Yard.
And she put quite a fear in some of the people up north
because it was being billed as an ironclad vessel
that could turn away cannonballs and steam on into anything.
And so the Navy decided they needed to do something
to combat this new threat.
And the Navy's answer was the USS Monitor.
And the Monitor wasn't just any old proposal for a warship.
In fact, she was so different.
That's part of the reason that we're all here,
that the Monitor was so significant.
So why do we care so much about the Monitor?
Well, lots of reasons but among the most important,
Monitor's design was unique in almost every way.
She was the prototype for all modern battleships to follow.
Her hull was iron
rather than the conventional wood of the day.
Her hull was armored to a point three feet below the
waterline, so made it very difficult for enemy shot
to find her or find a weak spot.
She had no mast or sails, and this was really unique.
Up to that point,
all warships had their primary mode of power,
even if they had steam auxiliary,
the primary power was sails.
And that put you at the mercy of the weather
when you went into an action.
Monitor was steam-powered only.
And her steam engine was a special type
that the inventor John Ericsson,
who invented the Monitor and the engine,
it could be placed below the waterline
where it was protected from enemy fire.
She had an advanced screw propeller,
which was also below the waterline and protected,
unlike a lot of the paddle wheel steamers of the day.
When loaded, less than two feet of her hull was exposed.
And very uniquely the officers and crew
all lived below the water line,
it was almost like living in a submarine
and very, very different from anything in the past.
Her pilot house was a small box forward
to the right on the slide, and it was heavily armored.
But her most unique feature was the turret
that sat right in the center of the ship.
It was a cylinder 23 feet in diameter
that could be rotated around the central pivot,
allowing the guns to be aimed in any direction
regardless of the heading of the ship.
The typical warships of the day
had to turn the entire ship to point the guns.
And so you can see,
this was among many, many unique features.
And the idea of the revolving gun turret
is still used on warships that you see today,
so a lot of reasons to care about the Monitor.
And part of what made her famous
was the battle between the Virginia and the Monitor
in Hampton Roads on March 9th, 1862.
They battled for about four hours off and on
and tried every angle.
They tried shooting.
They tried ramming
and neither could completely overpower the other one.
And so it essentially ended in a draw,
but it changed the face of warfare forever.
The sound of cannonballs bouncing harmlessly off armor
on the other ship was the death nail
for the wooden warship of the day,
and neither ship fared too well for the rest of the year.
Union troops came back into the Hampton Roads area
and took over most of the areas
where the Virginia could have docked.
So she ended up being a ship without a port.
She drew too much water to get up to Richmond.
She was not really considered seaworthy enough to go to sea.
And so on May 10th,
just two months after the battle with the Monitor,
the crew had to set her a fire and scuttle her
near the mouth of the Elizabeth River.
The Monitor did a little better.
She had a really hot summer in the James River
patrolling for the Union Navy.
You can imagine the heat got so intense below deck,
you had a metal ship and the heat
and humidity of Virginia summer
and that made for a pretty miserable cruise.
But toward the end of the year,
the Monitor got orders to move down
to Beaufort, North Carolina
to help reinforce the union blockade
of some of the southern ports.
Since she was so low in the water,
her seaworthiness was always in question.
And so it was considered important that she have a tow ship.
And so she set off undertow
by the side wheeler, USS Rhode Island.
But unfortunately,
she got caught, as so many ships have over the years,
with a sudden gale off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
One of the tow lines parted
and sent Monitors sideways to the seas.
A whole series of rescue attempts
and recovery attempts followed.
Most of the crew was taken off by the brave men
who launched boats from the Rhode Island
in these rough seas.
But in the end,
Monitors succumbed and sank on New Year's Eve of 1862.
As Paymaster William Keeler wrote to his wife,
"What the fire of the enemy failed to do,
the elements have accomplished."
And so sadly the Monitor was gone,
but there were a number of searches.
But the first question that always comes up is,
why didn't the Navy salvage the Monitor
if it was so important?
Well, first of all, there's no accurate position fix.
They'd been in the storm for several days,
so they didn't know exactly where the ship was at the time.
And second of all,
they knew that it drifted in the currents
before it actually finally sank.
And so a good position was not available.
But really the ultimate thing was the water was too deep.
It was estimated to be around 300 feet deep,
so far too deep for a salvage attempt.
So the Monitor was lost, the war continued,
more Monitors were built, the war ended.
And most everybody had forgotten about the Monitor
except for just retelling the story periodically,
but there was never a total loss of interest
and number of early searches took place
before the actual discovery.
First was the US Navy as far as we know.
In May 1950,
they announced that they were gonna search for the Monitor
using the underwater object locator, Mark IV,
we don't know exactly what that is,
not a lot of information is available,
but presumably some sort of sonar instrument.
And they found several targets and one was very promising.
They thought it looked like the right size and shape.
But unfortunately, we haven't found any other information
about the UOL search and the results.
And one of the most interesting
and one of the most famous searches
up until recent years was Bob Marx,
Robert Marx's expedition, the Search at Hatteras.
He claims to have found the Monitor
near Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in 1955,
and I thought the story was worth a little bit more detail.
He was a marine corporal
stationed at Camp Lejeune in the '50s,
and he developed a passion for finding the Monitor.
And he's described his quest in quite a bit of detail
in his book, "Always Another Adventure",
which he published in 1967.
In 1954,
Marx convinced a number of his fellow Marines
to make weekend trips out to Hatteras,
which wasn't too far away,
where lots of reports suggested the Monitor lay
in shallow water not far from Cape Hatteras Lighthouse,
but they swam around out there
in a number of places and found nothing.
But there was enough interest there at Camp Lejeune
that the officers in charge gave the team
some extra time and leave to continue their search
during the rest of '54 and into '55.
At some point, Marx met a local Hatteras journalist,
Ben Dixon MacNeill,
who convinced him that he was on the right track
that the Monitor lay close to Hatteras Light,
but that it was more than a mile from the current shoreline
and that he had seen the Monitor
on a couple of occasions from a small airplane.
And so they conducted a number of searches
from a small plane.
But one of the interesting things to note on
this photograph is look where MacNeill is pointing.
Here's Cape Hatteras and the shoals,
and here's the lighthouse,
and the area that looks like it's marked
where they wanted to look for the Monitor,
but actually he's got an arrow pointing out here,
but this is darn close to where the Monitor
was actually found.
So what's the real story on this?
We're not absolutely sure, but in any case,
they did do some searching
and then Marx enlisted another person with an airplane
to do some more looking.
And he reports in his book that he actually discovered
the Monitor on June 12th during an aerial survey
near Hatteras Lighthouse.
And here's exactly how he reports the find,
"At exactly 11:15 AM, I saw the Monitor for the first time.
There was no mistaking her.
The dark oval outline of her hull,
the circular gun turret amidships,
and the smaller square pilothouse in her bow
were all clearly visible."
And this is really remarkable.
Since we now know the Monitor lies 16 miles
southeast of Marx's location.
Who knows?
A number of us have confirmed
that there were no other Monitor type vessels
that sank anywhere near North Carolina.
So it was such a unique hull shape
that leaves questions unanswered.
Well, again,
Marx reported this discovery to Camp Lejeune
and that excited everybody,
and he got even more freedom to pursue the identity.
And Marx is quite a talker.
He convinced LIFE Magazine to send a journalist
and photographer to the expedition.
And for you younger folks,
LIFE Magazine was the magazine back then.
And so this was quite a deal.
And so the rest of this part of the story comes from,
mostly from the account by life journalist, Clay Blair Jr.,
and his book, "Diving for Pleasure and Treasure",
which was published in 1960.
Again, Marx being a good talker,
he found a local coast and geodetic survey vessel
in the area, the Stirni, and convinced the captain
to assist them in this search.
So some of their crew went diving for the Monitor
and the Stirni being a survey vessel
was able to use its equipment and personnel
to come up with a very precise location
of where Marx's claims that on one of his dives,
he actually touched the Monitor's gun turret
and there was no question the gun ports were there.
And so they got good coordinates on this
that proved important in future years.
And by the way,
no one in Marx's book or Blair's book
made the claim that anyone else saw the turret.
No one saw or touched the turret
except Marx according to these accounts.
Blair's book is pretty interesting.
He's a journalist.
So he describes things in a quite enjoyable fashion
and had some very interesting photos.
And one of my favorites being the hero pose
with Bob Marx standing vigilantly on the rigging
and looking out at what's being accomplished on the survey.
Well, after a second failed attempt,
again involving life and the Marines,
in August,
the team finally concluded that Marx
had indeed seen the turret.
He described it in such detail,
and he had seen it from the air again in such detail,
but before they could verify the discovery,
a storm had shifted the sands and covered the wreck.
Might sound implausible,
but actually storms do shift the sands
around quite dramatically in the Hatteras area.
So this was a fairly plausible explanation of what happened.
And a lot of you know that Marx
later became a world famous adventurer and treasure hunter,
but he never returned to look for the Monitor.
But his and Blair's books convinced a lot of researchers
that the Monitor probably was there awaiting discovery.
And this caused the launch of a number of surveys.
The most amazing series of things happened in the year 1973.
And by this time, I was involved.
For no apparent reason,
at least seven different groups converged on Hatteras
to search for the Monitor.
And most of us were searching in the Marx area.
In May, several midshipmen from the US Naval Academy
dove around Hatteras as recreational dives,
but they got fascinated by the Monitor.
They were bitten by the bug,
and they were inspired to develop
an academy independence research project
called Project Cheesebox.
The Monitor was called the little cheesebox on a raft.
The project was incredible.
The midshipman did an amazing amount of research.
They involved naval academy faculty,
they involved other naval units who got involved.
And a huge report was edited by Edward Miller,
who was one of the participants and leaders.
Well, then in July and August,
a marine contracting company that I co-founded,
Marine Archaeological Research Services
teamed up with two avocational archaeology groups,
Underwater Archaeological Associates
and the USS Monitor Foundation
to search the Marx location again,
still convinced it could be there.
Our members provided almost everything there.
They provided boats and dive gear.
And the head of our group, Charlie Perry,
was a pretty amazing talker.
He was able to convince companies
to loan us state-of-the-art survey equipment.
We had a client associate side scanning sonar
and two precision magnetometers for locating metal objects.
And since I had an electronic background,
I was sort of the obvious one to try to run the sonar.
And so Marty Klein,
who is the inventor of the first commercial side scan sonar,
was generous enough to invite me up to his factory
in New Hampshire for a very busy week of training.
And I'm grateful to Marty to this day
for all his support getting me ready to operate
this sonar independently.
Well, we searched a nine square mile area,
huge area centered on the Marx coordinates,
but we didn't find the Monitor.
In fact, we didn't find any wreckage of any size
either with the sonar or the magnetometers.
No large object, no other type of vessel,
nothing that would indicate that any large vessel,
much less the Monitor had ever sunk in this general area.
So between surveys,
we tried to console ourselves by having a little fun.
Here, we hung Marty Klein's sonar tow fish
on the rack that's used to usually hang your billfish
that you just caught out in the Hatteras waters.
And that's one of my favorite photos to remember the day.
That's me in the center.
But the year continues,
we were out on our boat in July
and a low flying plane caught our attention,
this huge aircraft flying at a very low altitude
shot over us.
And several of us knew that it was a P-3 Orion,
which was the Navy's premier submarine hunting aircraft
at the time.
Well, turned out it was from Squadron VXN-8
and was actually out there to look for the Monitor
in support of Project Cheesebox at the academy.
We were saying,
"Boy, now that's what we need to find the Monitor."
Well, that's what it was there for.
And on this, in a subsequent search,
they recorded a number of metallic objects.
And one, I believe probably was the Monitor.
They had no way of verifying any of the targets at the time,
but they reported one being of the proper orientation
and size metallic content to be the Monitor.
And so that's something
that I'm not sure if anybody has positively confirmed.
Then later in August, a former Naval Academy graduate,
Roland Wommack firmly believed
the Navy had discovered the Monitor back in 1950
with their underwater object locator.
So he announced plans to search that location,
which he thought was in about 300 feet of water,
way southeast of Hatteras really close,
much closer to where the Monitor actually turned out to be.
His team even included a diver
who was willing to descend to the 300 foot depth
to personally identify the Monitor.
But they had weather and equipment problems
that delayed their survey,
which was probably a good thing for the diver's safety.
And by the time they got geared up for a second survey,
the Monitor had actually been found.
And so that brings us to the Eastward Expedition,
it took place from August 17th to the 31st.
This was the expedition that discovered several wrecks,
and eventually, they were able to prove
that one was indeed the Monitor.
So this was an expedition
launched by the Duke University Marine Laboratory
in cooperation with a couple of other agencies,
particularly the state
of North Carolina's Underwater Archaeology program.
They conducted this aboard the R/V Eastward,
which had funding from the National Science Foundation.
The principal investigators were John Newton on the left
who headed up this operation.
Harold Doc Edgerton, who invented...
He was involved in the invention of the side scan sonar
and also invented the electronic strobe.
Then, geologist Robert Sheridan,
and finally the young Gordon Watts,
who had just recently become
North Carolina's first underwater archaeologist,
and so he was aboard as the official archaeologist
of the project.
The full list of co-discoverers is way beyond this group,
but the heart of the team shown in this picture
was clockwise from the left is Gordon.
And then behind Gordon, John Harris,
who operated the television system, which was important,
Robert Sheridan, the geologist,
and then John Newton and his daughter Cathryn,
who just was a freshman at Duke University
and was able to fill an empty slot.
And then Doc Edgerton who brought his sonar along.
Behind the scenes,
I just wanted to mention that during the early planning,
Ernest Peterkin, a retired Navy captain
from the Naval Research Center,
took the log book from the Rhode Island, the tow ship,
and plotted a course down the coast
and then made some assumptions
about where the Monitor might have actually sunk.
And this was part of the data
that was available to the Eastward team.
But expedition archaeologist, Gordon Watts,
prepared his own projected survey area,
taking the Rhode Island's log book into account as well,
making corrections for course, wind, seas, drift, weather,
all those factors that can affect the location of a vessel.
And since so much of the information relied
on dead reckoning after they couldn't take
visual fixes anymore,
that expanded the search area to a rectangle
about seven and a half, 16 and a half nautical miles,
which Gordon plotted on a NOAA navigation chart.
And Watt's predicted that the Monitor should lie
somewhere within that area.
And spoiler alert, his prediction was correct.
The first detection was on August 27th,
the day we considered the Monitor was discovered.
And oddly enough,
with all this fancy electronic gear on board,
gear designed for surveys,
the first real indication of Monitor's location
was a black squiggle mark on the ship's fathometer,
which is a device that's on most ships
to record the vessel's depth.
But Fred Kelly, the electronic chief,
walked by and just happened to notice this squiggle,
and said, "Hey, you know, we ought to check that out."
So Eastward turned and put their sonars overboard
and made some squiggly images
that were a little bit more definitive
and decided that this site
definitely looked like a promising one.
And so they spent much more time there
for the next day or two.
Eastward survey equipment might be kind of laughable
by today's standards,
but at the time, it was pretty much what was available.
And so they surveyed the site under difficult conditions.
The equipment had limitations
and Hatteras is never an easy place to work
with the seas and currents
that are usual conditions out there.
But they lowered, just like you see in this diagram,
they lowered still and video cameras on cables
and began trying to make passes over the site,
attempting to try to figure out where those instruments were
in relation to the Monitor and in relation to the Eastward,
and to try to keep the cameras just above the wreck.
But they couldn't stop, they had to stay underway.
So it was just a series of passes
sort of at random and using their best skills.
And so some of the passes showed nothing.
Others showed some pretty fuzzy video imagery,
and unfortunately, the still camera,
which might have come up with some better quality imagery,
was snagged on the rack and lost.
And so they were pretty limited in the data they had
at the end of the expedition.
Well, Gordon Watts made copies of all this,
and he spent the winter months of '73
reviewing all this fuzzy video
and trying to make sketches of what he was seeing
and comparing his sketches to the drawings
and blueprints of the Monitor.
And at this point,
I was very pleased to get a chance
to have just a tiny touch.
I wasn't on the cruise,
but I got my little taste of the expedition
when Gordon invited me over to his house in December
to go over his research.
Well, at first,
I couldn't make much sense of the imagery
and even of the sketches he was showing me,
but then he pulled out another stack,
which was his most recent work,
and he laid all these out and said,
"Now John, take another look at the video,
but assume this time that the Monitor is lying upside down
and the turret has fallen off and the Monitor
has landed on the turret
with the turret just partly visible."
It was amazing.
Everything then clicked into place.
And it was obvious, you can see Gordon's sketches here,
especially the one on the left
that shows how he thought the Monitor was lying
with the turret sticking out.
And that proved to be very, very accurate.
And the two of us were so convinced
that we just didn't think there was any doubt.
So Gordon notified John Newton
that they had indeed found the Monitor.
And shortly after, Newton made the public announcement.
However, when Newton and Watts presented the findings,
they were dismayed to find out
that there were lots of skeptics.
People still wouldn't believe that it was the Monitor.
But eventually, they convinced enough key people
that the Navy became more involved, more interested,
and they decided to give a test of one of the research ships
that they had for evaluation and to conduct
a more precise survey at the site.
And that vessel was the R/V Alcoa Seaprobe,
a ship that was truly unique
and almost as unique as the Monitor itself.
Fitted out as a modified drill ship,
the Seaprobe could lower an array of instruments
on the end of a six inch drill string, drill pipe,
lower it to the bottom and fairly deep depths
and even lift heavy objects if needed.
She also had this amazing set of cycloidal propellers
which could maintain a computer system
that could allow the ship to maintain a fixed position
over an object on the bottom.
This was critical.
This expedition took place the first week in April.
They lowered down this huge two ton instrument pod
fitted out with lights and video and still cameras.
And they were able to slowly make passes
back and forth across the Monitor,
taking pictures all the time
and get 100% coverage of the site.
Then even more interesting
was the way we had to do the processing.
We literally...
I was called on board at that time
because I'd had darkroom experience.
We took these rolls of 35 millimeter film,
the size the colored slides are made from
and processed them in the dark room
They were all black and white.
And so we had hundreds of these
little black and white images of the Monitor site,
and we contact printed them onto paper.
So we'd have prints rather than the transparency film.
And then we had to take scissors,
cut out these little images
and take magic invisible tape
and try to paste them onto a blueprint of the Monitor
and see if we could pull this jigsaw puzzle together
and confirm that it really was the Monitor.
But believe it or not, crude though it was,
we produced this very impressive and convincing,
what we think it's impressive and convincing photo mosaic.
And I think you can see the similarity in the shape
with the tracing,
that's the line drawing tracing below the mosaic.
And maybe this'll help,
I'll kind of superimpose the tracing over the hull.
So at this point, it was hard for anybody to deny
that the Monitor had been found.
Her hull shape was totally unique.
There were no other vessels afloat
other than other Monitors that had this hull shape
and that round object protruding out from the side,
all the measurements fit.
We were able to actually get dimensions
and all the measurements fit the shape
and size of the Monitor and the size of the turret.
So at this point, they could say absolutely.
So April 1974 was when everyone was convinced
and excited that no doubt the Monitor has been discovered.
Well, that sort of shifted us into another mode.
Now, the Monitor's out there.
We know it's the Monitor.
It's partly damaged by the years of corrosion and collapse,
but still largely intact.
What can we do to protect it?
What were the problems?
Well, the Monitor lies outside US territorial waters.
So our laws don't apply.
In fact, the three mile limit was the territorial limit.
Back then, Monitor were 16 miles offshore.
The water depth is 240 feet,
which is well within the capabilities
of an advanced group of technical divers
who had already begun collecting artifacts
from deep water wrecks,
and Monitor was surely to be on their list.
And finally, the Navy didn't own the ship anymore.
In 1953,
they had stricken the Monitor from the Navy list,
and so they could no longer say, "It's our ship, stay away."
So what to do?
Well, Monitor was very fortunate at this time
because other things were happening in parallel.
In 1973, the Omnibus Ocean Bill passed,
and it created a new program
or it made for the creation of a new program
called the National Marine Sanctuary Program.
And by 1975, that program had begun.
And on January 30th of that year,
the Monitor was designated
the nation's First National Marine Sanctuary.
And now, it had the benefit of federal interest
and federal protection and management support.
And at this point, I've just gotta stop and say,
"Congratulations to the sanctuary program."
I worked there for years.
I love the program and what they've accomplished.
And a 50-year anniversary is only the beginning.
As you heard Shannon say in the beginning,
the program has grown.
Now it protects over 620,000 square miles of marine,
Great Lakes waters in 15 sanctuaries
and two huge national monument areas.
And so it's underwater national parks
but all administered by NOAA.
And there's the little Monitor on the east coast of the US.
One of the smaller sanctuaries,
it's the second smallest.
And it's only a mile in diameter,
but that was enough to protect the wreck.
Well, so that sanctuary designation
really helped get things moving.
The first scientific dives were organized by NOAA,
the North Carolina Division of Archives and History,
and a new partner,
the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution
at Fort Pierce, Florida.
They were equipped to do deep ocean submersible work.
They had human occupied submersibles
that could actually lock divers out.
And this you see a pilot compartment up here
that stayed at one atmosphere.
Back here, two divers could fit
into a very small compartment and leave the submarine
and conduct work and come back into the sub
for a return to the surface.
And the center object was the first object recovered
from the Monitor, the first object seen.
And it was the last thing seen the night the Monitor sank,
it's the red lens signal lantern
that indicated that the Monitor was in distress.
So that was quite an accomplishment.
Here's a couple of pictures, the recovery effort.
This, now, we've moved into 1979,
the first underwater archaeological expedition,
same sponsors.
And this time the archaeologists got a chance to dive,
the previous work had been done
by Harbor Branch commercial divers.
This time it was Gordon Watts who led the team
and his assistant Richard Lawrence.
And because I'd been working with Gordon
and because I had a lot of personal
deep water diving experience,
I was invited to be the third diver.
And so we got special training,
we went out to the Monitor.
We used the submarines again
and just like archaeologists on land,
we set up a grid, and we excavated up in the area
that proved to be the officer's quarters,
recovered a number of artifacts
and recorded a lot of measurements and other data.
And what we've found was the Monitor's hull
looked pretty good,
but we could see signs of severe deterioration.
The hull was beginning to rust and corrode,
especially at the points of attachment
where the rivets and bolts were.
And it looked like that it was going to collapse
at some point in a catastrophic manner.
But we needed more data on top of this,
so more work continued.
In 1973 or 1983,
a group of us went back out to the Monitor
and recovered the Monitor's anchor.
This was for a good reason.
We needed something...
We needed a large iron object
that could be put through testing
and conservation procedures that would give us an idea
of how badly the Monitor was deteriorated
and what might be accomplished in the future.
And I always put this little line drawing in
with this diver walking out to the Monitor
because that's me.
I got to go out first
and attach a lifting cable to the anchor
and then other divers went out and finished the recovery.
And so that was '83.
In 1992, the anchor had been conserved.
We had a lot more data collected.
And in April of that year,
I became the new superintendent of the sanctuary.
And I was told to review all this past documentation
and all the reports and to make recommendations to NOAA
on what should be done, could the Monitor be recovered?
Could it be preserved and put on permanent display?
And so that was quite a task.
The deterioration we knew was accelerating,
and so we didn't know how much time we had left.
One of the things that we did
was to produce a plan, a long range preservation plan.
We concluded that it was left on the sea floor.
It was gonna continue to disintegrate at a rapid rate,
complete recovery of the hull and contents wasn't viable,
and this was a tough pill to swallow,
but there just wasn't the money or the technology
to do a complete recovery.
So we recommended a hull stabilization
and selective recovery of the objects
that we thought were most important.
This was the general plan; to recover the skeg and
propeller, to support underneath the hull to keep it from
collapsing, recover the engine,
which was also unique and worthy of maintaining.
And finally, the big project was to lift the turret
a hundred tons plus with the guns still inside.
It was really a team effort.
NOAA and NOAA divers were involved.
The Office of Sanctuaries came to our aid
with a lot of management support and funding.
Congressional support was critical.
They made appropriations that made the whole thing possible.
And we also by this time had a museum partner,
the Mariners' Museum in Newport News
that would receive all these objects.
And my key team, I'm not gonna be able to mention everybody,
but my key team that I couldn't have done without
are on the left Jeff Johnston,
who was my historian and model maker
and knowledge of Monitor supreme.
Tane Casserly with NOAA in the center
who's still with the program
and headed up our NOAA dive team.
And so we moved into 1998,
where we recovered the propeller.
In 2001, we recovered the engine about 35 tons.
And then amazingly on August 5th, 2002,
the Monitor's turret came up intact
with the guns still inside,
two crewman who had been trapped inside,
and a number of other important artifacts.
And this was the beginning of...
This was the end of the field work essentially.
And now, it was up to the Mariners' Museum.
The museum really came to the front.
They built a separate wing, the USS Monitor Center.
And this was a huge facility that incorporated
a conservation lab in addition to the main galleries
and the side galleries to interpret the wreck.
The museum was designed...
The center was designed to eventually display
everything we'd recovered,
but the heart of it has been the conservation laboratory.
This is the world's largest metals conservation project.
It involves more than 200 tons of Monitor iron.
The first was doing a lot of documentation
and an additional excavation,
and then it's gone into the conservation phase.
And that's sort of where we are right now.
I'd like to just finish with Grenville Weeks' comment.
He was the surgeon for the Monitor, and he wrote,
"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 cheesebox on a raft' has made herself a name,
which will not soon be forgotten by the American people."
And we now know it's not just America,
but the whole world remembers the Monitor,
and hopefully with the work with NOAA and our partners
and especially the Mariners' Museum and Park,
that story will always be available.
Thank you very much.
I know this is a compressed story,
but you can find more work,
more results in my book and other books.
And certainly, the story is being told beautifully
at the Mariners' Museum and Park.
Thank you very much.
[Shannon] Yeah, thank you, John.
I'm gonna take the screen back from you.
So at this time, we do invite some questions and answers.
Hopefully, John can give the answers.
So if you've not entered any questions
into the question box yet, this is the time to do it.
Also, if you've not downloaded John's bio in the chat box,
you might want to do that as well.
In the bio,
you're gonna find more information about John
and some links that might be of interest to you.
Okay, well, we're gonna start out.
Mark, do you have a question that you would like
to start with for John?
[Mark] Yes, I actually thought of this question
at the very, very beginning of your presentation,
and I'm not even sure if you have an answer,
but I was really curious,
you were talking about why the Navy didn't try
to salvage the wreck at the time of its sinking in 1862,
and you mentioned that it was too deep.
And today, we have a lot of really great tools
and technology at our disposal
to determine the depth of the ocean.
How would they measure that back in the late 1800s?
[John] Well, they had actually had fairly good
nautical charts by then.
Matthew Fontaine Maury,
who well-known to the Mariners' Museum,
was one of the people who was involved
in offshore survey and recording depths.
And back in those days,
the bottom contours depth and makeup
were all important for coastal navigation.
And so they had a fairly good idea
of what the depth would've been.
But I think even if it had been in shallower water,
it's just so tough to work at Hatteras.
I doubt that an effort
would've been made to do salvage work.
[Shannon] Okay, a second question that came in, John,
are there any parts of the Monitor
that you wish you could have brought up?
[John] Oh, so many, so many. (chuckles)
One of the unique things about the Monitor
that I didn't mention is that unlike most warships
where the crew tended to live forward
in the focusal area, forward of the mast was used,
and the officers lived in the stern.
The Monitor had all its machinery,
took up the stern parts.
And so officers and crew
and most of the storage and supplies
were all forward to the midships bulkhead
forward to the turret.
And we did not spend much time up there.
We concentrated on the machinery.
And so except for the work that we did in 1979,
where we worked in the officer's quarters,
almost nothing has been recovered from that area.
And you can imagine the stories to be told,
the things we'll find.
Even the few things we did find,
we found a medicine bottle that somebody had carved
with a knife on the corner, something like cider.
So they'd been reusing the bottle
for something that was prohibited on board,
but so many stories.
Yeah, so I really hope someday work will...
It's easier to work at those depths now,
and I'm hoping somebody will go back
and tell us some of those great stories
that are yet to be told.
[Shannon] All right, Mark,
is there another question you would like to have asked?
[Mark] Yes, I'm actually getting a rather cryptic question
in the chat here.
I'm wondering if you can tell me more
about Sam the grouper.
[John] Ah, Sam.
Well, when we were out there in 1979,
as I mentioned,
we were able to leave the submarine and make dives.
We'd go out one at a time
and do whatever our assignment was,
make measurements, photographs and all.
And right away, this giant Nassau grouper adopted us.
He obviously lived at the site.
As NOAA has pointed out
in some of their videos and other work,
these shipwrecks that lie out on the coastal plain,
it's mostly no features out there.
And so shipwrecks are oasis for marine life.
And so this group apparently had adopted the Monitor,
and he was incredibly curious and unafraid,
and he would come around and follow us around
like a puppy dog and actually became a nuisance
because we'd be filming,
and he'd swim right in front of the camera
and spoil the scene when we were filming inside
and around the wreck.
Well, my buddy, we always had a dive buddy in the submarine
and when I was out diving, my buddy was...
His nickname was Mikey,
and I'm blanking on his last name, I'm sorry.
But Mikey was an incredible free diver.
So without any scuba gear at all,
Mike swam out of the submarine,
unzipped the top of his wetsuit
and pulled out of a hotdog wiener.
And Sam nearly ate his arm.
By the way, Sam was five feet long.
We actually were able to measure him
against the side of the submarine.
This is hundreds of pounds of fish.
He nearly ate Mike's handoff with this hot dog.
Well, this made Sam an even closer friend,
and he even stuck his face up into the submarine
where the divers come in and out looking for hot dogs.
So Sam was with us, and I made the very last dive,
which was just a cleanup dive,
and it was to go collect our grid, our excavation grid,
and some other tools that we'd left behind.
And so I was collecting all that,
and all of a sudden, I feel this bump from the back,
and I look around and Sam has swam up right beside me,
and I was able to actually put my arm around him
and pat him on the side.
And it was like he was saying,
"Are you guys leaving?
I'm really gonna miss you guys."
So our experience with Sam
just really brightened up the whole expedition.
[Shannon] All right, well, that's a really great story.
I think we have time for one more question, John.
how many dives did you make to the Monitor,
and what is your favorite artifact recovered?
[John] Oh, boy.
You know, Gordon and I both talked about that,
and we've lost count,
but I think it was about a dozen dives for each of us,
which it may have been more for Gordon.
He was out quite a bit.
That doesn't sound like a lot,
but with all the bad weather we had out there,
and also we rotated our dives with the Harbor Branch divers,
who did also a lion share of the work too.
So I think about a dozen dives each.
My favorite artifact,
that's a good question.
I think maybe it might be the jar of pickle relish.
We found this jar and it had stuff inside
that looked just like pickle relish.
And so they sent it off to a lab,
and all of a sudden, they got this frantic phone call
from the laboratory down at the North Carolina office.
And they were saying, "Oh, my God!
What have you done with that?
Whatever you've done, don't let anyone touch it.
Don't let anyone eat it.
It's got the highest lead content we've ever seen."
Well, somehow the laboratory people had not gotten
the message that this has been in...
This jar that had lead content in it for over a century,
and undoubtedly, the lead had leached out,
so they were afraid this was a consumer product.
So I think that's still one of my favorites.
[Shannon] All right.
Well, thank you, John.
I appreciate that.
So if we did not get to your question
or if you have additional ones,
you can always send them to John.
His email address is there on the screen.
Also, we're going to be downloading
all the questions and comments,
so John can read those as well.
You can also learn more about the Monitor at our website.
Okay.
A video recording of the presentation
will be available on the Sanctuary's webinar archives page
found at the URL listed there at the top.
And in addition,
the webinar will be archived
on Monitor National Marine Sanctuary's website.
You can always click on the multimedia tool section
in the toolbar to access the webinar box.
It usually takes us about 10 days
to get the webinar up on the website,
but you'll find future webinars in that same section.
And don't worry,
we're gonna send you all of this information
in a follow-up email when the recording is ready.
[Mark] In celebration of the 50th anniversary
of the discovery of the USS Monitor,
we have just released a brand new 360 degree
virtual reality dive that was produced
during the expedition to Monitor in May of 2022.
Visit the Monitor's homepage, monitor.noaa.gov
to find a link to this video.
If you have a set of virtual reality goggles,
you can even download this video to view at your leisure.
In addition to this celebration,
we have also released nine 3D models of Monitor artifacts.
Again, just click on our homepage,
and there is a link to view these artifacts.
You can also download the STL files from these artifacts
and 3D print them at your home or at your local library.
And last but not least,
we invite you to follow us on social media
to stay in touch with all of the great celebrations
happening over the course of these three years
to celebrate Monitor's anniversaries.
[Shannon] All right.
And lastly, as you exit the webinar,
there is a short survey for formal and informal educators.
If you're an educator, NOAA would really appreciate it
if you just take a minute or two to complete the survey.
Your answers will help NOAA develop future webinars
and also products to meet your needs.
Your participation is voluntary,
and your answers as always will be completely anonymous.
So once again, John,
we just wanna thank you for a fabulous presentation.
This has been awesome.
I'm so glad we got to record you for Prosperity for History.
This is just wonderful.
Thank you, everyone, for taking the time today to join us.
Have a wonderful day,
and this concludes the presentation.
[John] Thank you, Shannon. -: Bye.
You're welcome, bye, everyone.