'Monitor fever' gripped John Broadwater. While his team came up short, the archaeologist helps keep the ironclad's story alive

John Broadwater witnesses raising of Monitor turret in 2002

John Broadwater, a maritime archaeologist and author of the book "USS Monitor: A Historic Ship Completes Its Final Voyage," has been on numerous Monitor expeditions and is former superintendent of the Monitor Marine National Sanctuary. He will lead a webinar at 1 p.m. ET Aug. 31 (Thursday) about the ironclad. Broadwater will talk about several 1973 expeditions that tried to find the USS Monitor, including one that was successful. The Civil War Picket asked for his recollections and he submitted this essay.

In 1972, as a young scuba diver with a passion for diving on shipwrecks, I joined Underwater Archaeological Associates, a group of avocational archaeologists in North Carolina. We read a book called “Always Another Adventure,” by famous underwater explorer Robert Marx.

We were excited to read that he claimed to have discovered (in 1955) the famous USS Monitor lying in 45 feet of water less than two miles from Cape Hatteras lighthouse. He wrote that he was never able to confirm the discovery because shifting sands had covered the wreck.

We decided to (locate) the Monitor and become famous and respected among ocean explorers. After much networking and begging, we were able to borrow a top-of-the-line Klein Associates side-scanning sonar, an instrument that could locate object protruding from the ocean bottom. We also obtained a high-quality magnetometer, capable of detecting very small amounts of iron or steel. Our members contributed their own boats and dive gear.

Before the year was out, we discovered that “Monitor fever” had spread to other adventurers. In all, at least seven different groups conducted searches for the Monitor in what I began calling “the Year of the Monitor”.

The team I led consisted of Underwater Archaeological Associates, Marine Archaeological Research Services (a company I co-founded), and, eventually, the USS Monitor Foundation of Washington, DC. One day, another search team dramatically made itself known: a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion flew low over our search boat at Hatteras.

The Orion is designed to locate submerged submarines by detecting the metal in their hulls. We later learned that it was searching for the Monitor in support of “Project Cheesebox”, a class project at the U.S. Naval Academy.

In August, a former Naval Academy graduate announced that he was going to look for the Monitor in deep water south of Diamond Shoals where the U.S. Navy had detected a shipwreck in 1950 using a device called an Underwater Object Locator. The Monitor had not been so popular since its battle with CSS Virginia on March 9, 1862.

However, we found nothing at all near the Marx location. No shipwreck or other debris of any kind. In August 1973, I learned from Gordon Watts that the Monitor had been discovered 16 miles southeast by the R/V Eastward, from Duke University Marine Laboratory. We had failed in our quest because we trusted Marx’s story. (Marx died in 2019).

'Discovering' Monitor in Gordon Watts’s living room

One of my most prized recollections of the Monitor discovery took place during a late December (1973) visit to Gordon Watts’s home. I had been working part time in Gordon’s lab and we had become good friends. He invited me to his house to show me his latest interpretation of the many video views of the wreckage he believed was the Monitor. Because of the poor quality of the video and the limited coverage of the site, most people were skeptical of the identification.

Broadwater was on Alcoa Seaprobe on Monitor trip in April 1974

Gordon led me into a room whose floor was completely covered with sketches, photographs and videotapes, save for a narrow walkway leading to his television and a tape player. He methodically showed me the video, which was so grainy and confusing. I couldn’t make much sense of it. He then began to replay the video while showing me the still photos he’s extracted from the video, along with a number of sketches he’d made. I was still uncertain of what I was looking at.

Then Gordon said, “OK, now look again, but this time assume the Monitor is lying upside down, lying on top of its gun turret.” He showed me a hypothetical sketch he’d made of this configuration, viewed from the stern.

My mental image of the site almost instantly became clear: Monitor had rolled over, her turret had fallen to the bottom, and her hull landed atop the displaced turret. It was obvious that Gordon has solved the mystery! I was the first person Gordon had shared his theory with so, in a sense, I’ve always felt like I played a small role in the “discovery” of the Monitor.

There were still plenty of doubters, however, and it wasn’t until a photomosaic (above) of the wreck was produced aboard the R/V Alcoa Seaprobe in April of the following year  that the question was put to rest. I was honored to have helped develop that mosaic.

PICKET COVERAGE OF USS MONITOR

-- Cathryn Newton: At 16, she was the youngest crew member. She says the find was a group effort.
-- John Harris: He became a hang glider pilot and founded Kitty Hawk kites. But first, he ran the 1973 expedition's underwater camera system.
-- Gordon Watts: Young archaeologist confirmed location of shipwreck.
-- Go deep for 50th anniversary of USS Monitor discovery: Printable 3D artifacts, webinar and a 360-degree video of ironclad's resting place
-- USS Monitor: Navy recognizes Virginia museum for cleaning of ironclad's two Dahlgren guns, which are still being conserved
-- The USS Monitor overcame doubters. Its crew trusted the ironclad, even during the terrible storm that sank the famous ironclad.
-- What do USS Monitor, Jimmy Fallon have in common? Saugerties, NY. This town morphed from industrial 'Inferno' to a cool tourist spot

Cathryn Newton, then 16, was on watch when the USS Monitor was found. The project was an amazing collaborative effort, she writes

Cathryn R. Newton on Eastward in 1973 (Courtesy of MIT Museum). Her mother,
Sunny, asked her father whether they found the wreck. He whispered, 'We think so'

Cathryn R. Newton found her career calling while sailing as a teen on the RV Eastward with her father, John G. Newton, and other scientists. They located the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor on Aug. 27, 1973. Since then, the Syracuse University dean emerita and professor has conducted extensive research on shipwrecks and marine fauna and environments. Newton, who was raised in Beaufort, N.C, recently led a scientific team that traveled to Newfoundland. The Civil War Picket asked for her recollections of the Monitor expedition and she submitted this essay.

50 years ago: Just after noon, we found the wreck of the USS Monitor, the most famous missing ship in America, on Aug. 27, 1973. Four investigators conducted this two-week, blue-water expedition organized and funded through the work of my father, John G. Newton, a Duke oceanographer and marine superintendent of the oceanography program; Harold "Doc" Edgerton, strobe pioneer, inventor, and longtime MIT engineering faculty who’d invented many of the instruments we used; Bob Sheridan of Delaware (later Rutgers), accomplished and hard-charging marine geophysicist who had a nearby seismic survey funded; and Gordon Watts, the brand-new marine archeologist at the state of North Carolina (the inaugural one).

Duke University's research vessel Eastward

Our team decided to take Monitor’s (+ towship USS Rhode Island’s) mariners at their word --and search near the edge of the continental margin 16 miles off  Hatteras. {All but one of many other Monitor searches in summer 1973 were near shore). My father, Bob Sheridan and Doc Edgerton wrote the proposals that had secured funding for the E-12-73 cruise from NSF and National Geographic Society (NGS).

My father had mapped the NC continental margin in a recent geological atlas and, with Orrin Pilkey, published the first work on the Hatteras Submarine Canyon. This background elevated our odds of success, but did not guarantee it.

I was a 16-year-old Duke sophomore who’d worked all summer making cross sections and assembling geological/bathymetric data for the upcoming cruise; my friends Paul Kelly and Bob Springle were deployed in parallel. Shy, hardworking and unconfident, I logged many hours at the Duke Marine Lab preparing cruise materials, and had expressed an interest.

Yet the expedition consisted principally of towering figures in ocean sciences, with a few doctoral students. Then came a surprise: 24 hours pre-departure, a space held for a woman member of the NGS Explorers Club came vacant. This young girl leapt into the air with joy.

1973: Gordon Watts, front left, behind him John Harris; on right, from back,
Robert Sheridan, John Newton, Cathryn Newton and Harold Edgerton (NOAA)

Following the one best piece of advice ever from my mother Sunny Newton, I kept a journal of the expedition, the only one extant. When my father died without notice at 52 of heart failure in 1984, I inherited every bit of planning material for the expedition and all the files amassed while they (Dad, artist Sandy Belock and Gordon Watts) tried to figure out what we were seeing in this complex shipwreck. I have written a book manuscript on all this, with input from many, and sent it to my superb editor.

As I write, it is noon on August 27. Fifty years ago to the minute, our 12-4 midwatch came on duty. My watch was headed by get-it-done geophysicist Bob Sheridan. Second mate Tom Stout, a veteran Navy captain on loan from University of Rhode Island, was on the bridge. The other three investigators were having lunch in the galley. I was deployed to the Simrad recorder in the wet lab -- a basic depth recorder, not as refined a view of things as on the vertical PDR (portable diver recall) in the electronics lab.

Just after noon, it recorded something that looked like a smudge. I was trying to figure it out when veteran electronics technician Fred Kelly, one of my father’s closest colleagues, was coming in to put his fishing gear away and told me this could be it.

Bob and Tom Stout instantly reacted, and Stout remarkably brought the ship about immediately over the wreck. A high-contrast target appeared on the vertical PDR up above -- with the intensity expected for a metal wreck. It could be Monitor! Doc Edgerton’s side-scan sonar disclosed an arcuate piece that might be the turret, but in the wrong orientation.

We spent several days documenting the wreck, as the ship time ended on August 31. The target was not what we’d expected -- rather than atop the wreck, the turret was underneath, and had landed slightly to one side. But working with artist Sandra Belock, a recent Rhode Island School of Design graduate, and replaying the underwater television tapes again and again, and gaining input from Gordon Watts, the three figured it out.

By January 1974, Gordon confirmed their collective view that the ship had “turned turtle” as Doc said aboard E-12-73. The turret, which was only loosely articulated to the hull (in part to support the rotation) had fallen off as the ship inverted, and the upside-down hull fell only partly atop the turret.

We announced the find at a press conference at Duke University with then-president Terry Sanford, one that Dad, Gordon and I attended in early March 1974. But that is a story for another day. Walter Cronkite (CBS evening news broadcast) and The New York Times (front page) covered the story -- not bad for a group of ocean scientists out of Beaufort, North Carolina!

For my dear friends and students, you now see the origins of my impassioned commitment to undergraduate research. Being part of this changed my life. That is likely true of everyone involved -- all 60 people on three research vessels, including those of us on Duke’s RV Eastward. (Cathryn R. Newton at left)

There were more than 60 or us at sea and dozens more on land. John Newton would be the first to mention the tremendous contributions to finding Monitor from the remarkable people of Eastward, as well as boatswain (bosun) Curtis Oden Sr. of Beaufort or the stunning seamanship of Capt. Harold Yeomans of Down East in deploying both underwater television and two cameras simultaneously. He would mention the core contributions of historical cartographer Dorothy Nicholson of NGS, and would note with pride that the first woman ship’s mate at Duke, Susan Barker, was also part of this team.

These ocean scientists and Eastward's professional crew, both highly accustomed to mapping at sea, acted in an interdisciplinary way to find something that no marine archeologists at the time could have found -- they just were not yet using these techniques of swath mapping that are now standard.

Moreover, I remain sincerely and deeply grateful to every person who contributed -- both in E-12-73 and especially the stunning sanctuary, recovery and museum processes to follow. Let's honor the full expedition as well those who've done such a tremendous job to keep Monitor alive.

PICKET COVERAGE OF USS MONITOR

-- John Harris: He became a hang glider pilot and founded Kitty Hawk kites. But first, he ran the 1973 expedition's underwater camera system.
-- Gordon Watts: Young archaeologist confirmed location of shipwreck.
-- Go deep for 50th anniversary of USS Monitor discovery: Printable 3D artifacts, webinar and a 360-degree video of ironclad's resting place
-- USS Monitor: Navy recognizes Virginia museum for cleaning of ironclad's two Dahlgren guns, which are still being conserved
-- The USS Monitor overcame doubters. Its crew trusted the ironclad, even during the terrible storm that sank the famous ironclad.
-- What do USS Monitor, Jimmy Fallon have in common? Saugerties, NY. This town morphed from industrial 'Inferno' to a cool tourist spot