- NEWPORT NEWS, Va.
-- Jeff Johnston crouches low with his hammer and chisel, tapping patiently
at what looks like dirty concrete surrounding a piece of rusted iron.
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- Bang, bang, bang, his hardened-steel tools sing, the
sound rising up from the bottom of a deep, 20-foot-wide shaft that resembles
a giant mineral-encrusted water main plucked from the sea bottom off the
N.C. coast.
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- For eight weeks, Johnston and his fellow archaeologists
have battled this stubborn material for hours at a time, laboring to unlock
the secrets of one of history's most famous warships. Four hundred artifacts
have emerged from its grasp so far, including a cache of officers' table
silver, as well as shoes, buttons, pocketknives and the remains of two
long-dead sailors.
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- Less dramatic but equally important is the slow materialization
of the walls, roof and other structural features of this celebrated Civil
War milestone. Only now are their original surfaces beginning to appear,
after more than a century of marine encrustation and corrosion.
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- "The longer you stay in here, and the longer you
look around, the more things you start to recognize," Johnston said
recently, taking a break from his work at The Mariners' Museum.
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- "It's really starting to look like we're inside
the gun turret of the USS Monitor."
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- Recovered from the wreck off Cape Hatteras, N.C., in
early August, the Monitor's revolutionary iron turret has been the focus
of an intensive archaeological investigation led by scientists from the
Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and the museum.
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- Made up of a four-member team of excavators - and supported
by what seems like a small army of sediment screeners, conservators and
other helpers - the archaeologists have removed tons of coal, coral and
silt from the turret since they started. But no one realized when the work
began how difficult it would be to reach the bottom.
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- The excavators extracted the last of the human remains
in September. They said hammering through the concreted rust and coal in
search of artifacts has required stamina and patience.
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- "We're running into lots and lots of coal, all the
way down to, and then in between, the roof rails," Johnston said.
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- After nearly 140 years at the bottom of the Atlantic
Ocean, the thick iron walls of the turret are loaded with unstable chloride
salts. So they must be flooded every few days to stave off the potentially
catastrophic effects of a reaction with the atmosphere, which could cause
the historic armor plates to expand and crumble.
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- That dire threat has reduced the number of days the archaeologists
can crawl into the giant 70,000-gallon tank.
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- http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/sunnews/news/local/4355371.htm
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