Another boat was sent to bring off the remainder of the Monitor's crew, but, being to leeward now, she could make only slow headway against the seas, and before she got to her the men saw the Monitor's light disappear, and knew that she had gone down. The hawser having finally been cleared from the Rhode Island's wheel, she steamed around searching for the boat, sending up rockets and burning blue lights to show her position. When the day dawned nothing could be seen. After hailing a passing government vessel and telling them to search for the boat, the Rhode Island steamed with all speed for Fortress Monroe to report the loss.
When the survivors of the ill-fated vessel were mustered on the deck of the Rhode Island, four officers and twelve men were found missing, all of them probably buried in an iron coffin in a watery grave about fifty miles to the southward and eastward of Cape Hatteras Light.
The missing boat and crew of the Rhode Island were found by that vessel a week later safe in Beaufort, North Carolina. They had been picked up by a schooner and taken into that port. The officer in charge of the boat reported that in the early morning he had sighted a schooner standing toward them, and had hoisted a black silk handkerchief belonging to one of the crew on an oar as a signal of distress, but the people in the schooner, evidently thinking them pirates who had come out of some one of the inlets of the coast, turned tail and scudded away from them. A second schooner, coming along soon after, was more hospitable and took them aboard.