At Monitor’s Grave, a Team Dives for Civil War History

The last time Bernie Denny plied these waters, he was more than a half-century younger and dodging German U-boats aboard a Navy transport loaded with explosives.

“It was April of ‘42, when they were at their best,” he says.

This day, Denny is heading out into the Atlantic again, aboard a 38-foot fishing boat called the Lucky Chip. Northeast winds have lashed the North Carolina coast for three straight days, and the crashing of four-foot swells nearly topples Denny, now 79, a retired airline pilot who lives in Virginia Beach.

Twenty-one miles out, the fishing boat pulls alongside the Navy salvage vessel Grasp--a ship bristling with booms and winches, not guns. Heavy rain pelts Denny’s close-cropped white hair as he steps gingerly off the Lucky Chip’s gunwale on an upward swell, grabs the rope ladder and hauls himself aboard the larger vessel.

He has come for a rendezvous with a piece of naval history not his own. He has reached the watery grave of the ironclad warship Monitor.

*

“Tin can on a shingle,” they called the Union Navy’s dark and strange-looking fighting ship. “Cheesebox on a raft.”

Whatever the derisive names contemporaries hurled, Lt. Cmdr. Eric Anderson, the Grasp’s skipper, knows the significance of the rusted skeleton lying 240 feet below.

“The Monitor is the grandfather of all warships,” says Anderson, a 33-year-old first-time commander from Shelby, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. “I mean, our modern Navy historically can trace its roots right back to the Monitor and the Merrimack.”

The Monitor met the Merrimack--the Confederate ironclad also known as the Virginia--only once, on March 9, 1862. It was the first clash between steam-powered iron ships. Although the four-hour confrontation ended in a draw, it changed forever the course of naval combat.

On New Year’s Eve 1862, Mother Nature achieved what the Merrimack could not.

Under tow and headed for resupply, the Monitor ran into a gale with 20-foot seas and 30-knot winds. She foundered, taking 16 crewmen to the bottom in a place that has come to be known as the “graveyard of the Atlantic.”

There she waited until 1973, when Duke University researchers discovered her lying upside-down, balanced on her distinctive turret. In an otherwise barren stretch of sandy bottom, the 172-foot-long wreck has become a home for sponges, barnacles, and soft and hard coral.

A quarter-century after her rediscovery, Anderson and his crew have come to create a video layout of the wreck for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Researchers hope the information will help in the recovery of the turret and the Monitor’s unique engine before the rusting ship collapses.

An old salt named Bernie Denny will be helping them--and himself.

*

Down in the officers’ ward room aboard the Grasp, Denny confesses that the high-seas transfer has shaken him.

“My sea legs are shot,” he tells John Broadwater, manager of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. “It made me feel like a fool. It made me feel o-o-old.”

Never mind what he’s been through to get there. Never mind that just a few months ago, he was lying in a hospital bed wishing for death.

His wife of 47 years, Irene, had died in November. And during a Christmas visit with his daughter in Texas, Denny’s appendix ruptured. His kidneys shut down; he suffered a mini-stroke and developed a blood clot on his lung. He lost 44 pounds.

But this was a man who joined the Merchant Marine at 17 and spent time in a Fascist prison for running supplies to the Spanish loyalists; who hunted Nazi subs as a crew chief on Navy torpedo bombers; who took part in the Berlin Airlift in 1948-49 and later flew every plane in Pan Am’s fleet.

“I was going to make this thing or fall off and drown,” he says.

After all, he has a purpose.

In the ward room, skipper Anderson hovers over a black, barrel-shaped object glued to a flat panel. It is a wooden mock-up of the 1/16th scale working model Denny made of John Ericsson’s idiosyncratic Monitor engine.

“It’s a weird, weird piece of machinery, it is,” says Denny, who collected single-cylinder boat engines as a young man and never lost the passion. “You’ve got to be a machine person to appreciate it.”

Nobody knows exactly what the Monitor engine looked like, so Denny cobbled together his design using plans from later models. When the folks at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Va., found out that their star volunteer had a Monitor engine in his garage, Denny had his ticket onto the surveying team.

The model is important in helping guide divers to what they need to know, what they might encounter.

Last year, Navy divers brought up a prize--the Monitor’s propeller. This year’s quarry is answers: Is the engine still attached to the hull? Can it be recovered?

“We’re getting information,” says Broadwater. “That’s our stock in trade.”

*

In the greenish glow of the Grasp’s bridge, a laptop displays a chart of Diamond Shoals and the Monitor’s coordinates--35 degrees/ 00 minutes/06.8 seconds North; 075 degrees/24 minutes/23.3 seconds West.

Those coordinates are why the Monitor went down--and why she remains there.

The wreck site is where the Gulf Stream skirts the mainland before heading out to sea. It is where the cobalt-blue Gulf waters meet the green, nutrient-rich Labrador currents.

Capt. Art Kirchner out of Hatteras, the first person to run charter dives to the Monitor, remembers one incident when the two currents collided.

“You could actually see the wall of green water coming at you,” he says, his eyes widening. “The temperature dropped 11 degrees in a matter of seconds.”

But on this late June day, the 225-foot-long Grasp sits almost placidly at its mooring, where four orange buoys mark the spot where the Monitor went down. The ARS-50-class ship has 40,000 pounds of bottled gas, 21,000 cubic feet of salvage storage space and a lift capacity of 300 tons. It was the lead ship in the salvaging of wreckage from TWA Flight 800 off Long Island, N.Y., and last week took part in the search for John F. Kennedy Jr.’s missing airplane.

Against the swells, four 8,000-pound anchors hold the Grasp steady.

*

After a lunch of chili-mac spicy enough to strip paint off the ship’s hull, Anderson heads to the aft deck to prepare for his dive.

On deck, muscular men wait in the rain to suit up the divers. Most wear khaki shorts and blue T-shirts with inscriptions such as “Navy Divers--the men your wife dreams about” and “Fly Navy--we need the work.”

Coiled behind the men are the divers’ “umbilicals,” licorice twists of colored hoses. Yellow is air; red is communications; blue is a pneumofathometer for depth readings; a thick black hose circulates 120-degree water through the dive suits; thin black is power for helmet lamps.

On the port side, away from the action, Chief Petty Officer Michael Jones lands two shimmering yellow-blue mahi-mahi in quick succession.

“Hey, chief!” Anderson calls. “No fair fishing while I’m stuck in the chair.”

As Anderson and the other divers suit up, Master Diver Scott Heineman conducts an opera in grunts and shouts. A laminated checklist is his libretto.

“Any dives in the last 12 hours? Aches? Pains? Medication? False teeth? Contact lenses?”

To the crew: “Any problems--solve it!”

The yellow-helmeted divers move to a metal stage suspended from a thick cable. They face away from each other as Heineman gives the hand signal to hoist them up and over the edge.

Broadwater waves as the divers slowly disappear. Denny captures the scene on video.

When the divers reach 20 feet, they switch to a bottom mix of 14% oxygen and 86% helium--because oxygen becomes toxic after 130 feet. Men who went into the water talking like John Wayne now sound like Donald Duck.

Every few seconds, the communications officer checks on them.

“OK red?”

“OK red.”

“OK green?”

“OK green.”

“OK both divers,” the radio man shouts.

“OK both divers,” the crew echoes.

All is professionalism on deck. The phrase “cuss like a sailor” has no meaning here.

“We don’t use profanity on the dive site,” says Engineman Chief Will Rubow. “It’s all kind of like ‘Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.’ ”

The descent takes seven minutes, leaving only about 20 minutes of bottom time. Anderson, the “red diver,” moves out with a video camera and walks the 30 or so feet to the Monitor’s pockmarked armor belt.

Visibility is just 10 feet as sand and marine life course toward the camera lens in a snowstorm effect, played topside on a small monitor. The images are scored by the constant “suck-gurgle, suck-gurgle” of Anderson’s breathing apparatus.

His mission is to climb onto the wreck and work his way into the engine room, one of the only parts of the hull that still has most of its plating intact. But the unpredictable current has picked up, and he can’t get enough slack on his umbilical.

The voice change makes it hard to understand what Anderson is saying. Heineman grabs the twin stopwatches dangling at his sides like a gunfighter drawing his pistols from their holsters.

Anderson has just enough time to lay a hand on the scarred turret before Heineman orders him back to the stage to give “green diver” Andrew McKaskle a shot. McKaskle reaches the wreck but can’t find anything to crawl up on.

Heineman: “Green diver, you think you’ll be able to get anything done in the next two minutes?”

McKaskle: “That’s a negative topside.”

Heineman to Broadwater: “Anything you want him to do just while he’s standing there?”

Broadwater: “If he heads to the right, the slope is down and he could probably just get up and pan, but that’s about it.”

Heineman: “Tell both divers to return to the stage.”

The divers ascend to 120, then stop for several minutes to begin decompression and purge the gases from their bloodstream. The next stop is at 90 feet, then every 10 feet until they reach 40. They’re facing each other now, watching for signs of oxygen toxicity.

At 40 feet, the divers are switched to 100% oxygen for 10 minutes, then brought quickly to the surface. Like a pit crew at the Indy 500, four sailors each swarm the divers in a scramble to strip them to their shorts and get them into the decompression chamber within five minutes.

The divers will spend the next hour and a half in the cramped chamber--a three-hour bill for 20 minutes in nature’s domain.

*

It would be several more days before conditions improved enough for divers to explore the Monitor’s bowels. After his frustrating first dive, Anderson finally reached the hulk.

He climbed under the armor belt and looked up into the engine room. The encrusted machine has fallen loose but still appears to be intact--and recoverable.

He also explored the 120-ton turret, which has filled with silt and sand, burying the duffel bags the frantic sailors stowed there as they tried to save the doomed ship. Visibility that day was 50 feet, and he could clearly see three indentations where the Merrimack’s guns pounded--but could not penetrate--the Monitor’s iron skin.

Anderson felt them with his own hand.

“I’ve seen photos showing those dents since I was a little kid, and it was amazing to be actually on the wreck,” Anderson says via cellular phone.

Back on the mainland, the people at the Mariner’s Museum fill Denny in on the mission’s successes.

“I just drooled,” he says.

Broadwater has promised to come by soon with video and photos of the engine. And Denny dreams of someday laying his own hands on it.

“It would mean an awful lot,” he says. “It would just mean you’ve got a piece of history.”