USS Monitor's Gun Turret, by Jeff Johnston
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riginal construction details of the USS Monitor's gun turret do survive but are sparse to say the least. Surviving historical documents and plans were utilized by NOAA and the US Navy to help formulate the plan that led to the successful recovery of the gun turret in August 2002. Since recovery, archaeological teams from the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary (MNMS) and conservators from The Mariners' Museum have uncovered a wealth of historic artifacts and developed a growing respect for the man who built USS Monitor-and the men who went to war inside John Ericsson's untried experiment.
One of the most critical aspects of John Ericsson's design was constructing world's first rotating gun turret. Ericsson selected Novelty Iron Works in New York City to assemble the turret, only providing terse, but specific, written orders for the materials. His order for turret armor, dated "Octor.9th," was anything but derailed-written on the back of an initial order for iron dated 1 October 1861.
"192 Plates for "Turret" 9.ft. long in 8 different widths, ranging.from 31 318 Inches to 33 314 Inches wide & 24 plates ofEach width - x 1 Inch thick - there will be something over 100 tons ofthem - " Exactly how many component plans rhe engifleer provided for the turret is unknown, bur those rhar have survived are far from complete and often conflict with each other. This leads researchers to believe that nothing nearing a complete set of plans for the gun turret was provided by the Swedish engineer. COURTESY NAVAL HISTORI CAL CENTER
The turret is twenty-one-and-half feet exterior diameter and nine feet tall. The bulkhead armor was comprised of eight layers of one-inch thick plates fastened together with over 900 wrought-iron bolts and rivers. The inner course of plates was dropped one half-inch lower than the outer seven. This layer was only portion of the turret that would actually come in contact with the ship. The recovered turret differs from the one shown in historic plans in that two additional diagonal braces were found running parallel to the cannons from the main roof beam to the outer ends of the gun slides. Ir is unclear if this is a post construction modification or a design feature that surviving information does nor show.
USS Monitor did not survive the year. What Confederate artillery could not do, the seas off of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina accomplished. The ship was being towed to Beaufort when the ships were hit by one of the severe storms for which "Graveyard" is so famous. Monitor slipped beneath the waves just after 0100 on New Year's Eve 1862. The ship began to settle stern first; at some point she rolled over to starboard. The turret, with two crewmembers trapped inside, dislodged from the hull and landed on the sea bed upside down. As the turret hit the bottom, the cannons and carriages fell from their slides and were caught by the diagonal braces and center stanchions. Monitor's hull hit bottom stern first and came to rest on top of the displaced turret. Over time, the wood of the turret deck was eaten away by shipworms. At some point, an avalanche of coal spilled our from the port bunker through two chute .hatches in the hull over the turret and poured down into just about every nook and cranny inside. Finally, silt and sediments kicked up by the Gulf Stream filled the inside of the turret to rhe rim. She lay undisturbed by man for 111 years. The wreck site was discovered in 1973 and given federal protection status in 1975 through the National Marine Sanctuaries Act. The wreck site is administered by NOAA's National Marine Sanctuaries Program. In the early 1990s NOAA scientists began reporting that an accelerated rate of deterioration was evident in several key areas of the wreck. Th i:: loss of one of America's most historic and significant warships was inevitabl~ without serious intervention. Between 1998 and 2002, Monitor's hull was st;oibilized and key components of the vessel were recovered, including the propeller and the turret. 28
SEA HISTORY 108, AUTUMN 2004