The Nation: Lost and Found Dept.

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The Civil War confrontation that changed the course of naval warfare forever and brought an end to the era wooden battleships was the fierce, four-hour battle between the U.S.S. Monitor and the Confederate Merrimack Hampton Roads, Va., on March 9,1862. The contest between the two legendary ironclad men-of-war—the first of its kind in naval history—wound up in a banging, clanging draw, and in May 1862 the Merrimack was scuttled to keep it from falling into the hands of the advancing Union forces. The Monitor met a different fate. Nine months after the fight, she sank in a gale off Cape Hatteras, N.C., taking 16 members of her 63-man crew down with her. The precise spot where the ship—with her eight layers of 1-in. iron plates and two 111n. guns in a revolving turret—went down remained a mystery.

Now a team of oceanographers has located the Monitor in a storm-swept spot 15 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras, at a murky depth of 220 ft. Using sonar equipment to locate the site and an underwater television camera to photograph the ship's remains, the team has pieced together portions of video tape to confirm that the Monitor's broken hull lies upside down in the water, partly buried under 3½ ft. of sediment. But the ruins of the ship are so fragile that attempts to lift them from the ocean depths would probably cause the 112 year-old vessel to fall apart, and for now it will have to remain at rest in the deep.