“At the same time the Monitor got under way, and her officers and crew took their stations for battle,” Captain Worden going into the pilot-house with Quartermaster Peter Williams, who was to handle the wheel, and Pilot Howard to tell the route. These three filled the little coop, that rose just four feet above the deck. Lieutenant Greene went to the turret with “sixteen brawny men, eight to each gun.” Engineer Stivers also entered the turret to assist in handling the machinery turning it, and Acting Master L. N. Stodder was there as second in command. Newton had charge of the engines. The most important man in the ship that day was Greene, for it was his duty to aim and fire the guns.
Something like an hour passed, after the Merrimac left her anchorage, before she arrived in range of the government ships, but when yet a mile away she opened with her big bow rifle on the Minnesota. The Monitor had waited for her, and now, as the first shot was fired, headed straight at her. It astonished the hosts of spectators to see the tiny steamer taken directly alongside her huge antagonist. As she ranged up in place, her engine was stopped, and Worden, stooping over a speaking-tube that led to the turret, shouted the order:
“Commence firing!”
The crew in the turret triced up the shutter that covered the port, ran the gun out as far as it would go, and then Lieutenant Greene, taking deliberate aim at the broad but sloping wall, pulled the lock-string. The shot struck its target with a resounding crash, split and broke the iron plates in its path and bounded clear. The Merrimac replied with a broadside, and every shot struck the revolving turret, but all without exception bounded away harmless. “A look of confidence passed over the men’s faces in the turret,” and with good will they fell to the work of reloading the gun, while Greene ran out the other one and fired as before.
The most important naval battle in the history of the world was fairly on. “Never before was anything like it dreamed of by the greatest enthusiast in maritime war.”
The Fight between the Merrimac and the Monitor.
From a lithograph published by Currier & Ives.
With deliberation the crews on both sides worked their guns. The Monitor fired a gun in seven or eight minutes, and the Merrimac for a time made an average of a gun once in less than three minutes. But the Monitor, having a revolving turret, could easily direct her guns at the Merrimac, while the latter, huge and unwieldy and with narrow ports, had to trust to the fortunes of the battle for a chance to get a good aim at her tiny opponent.
Standing in the little pilot-house, Captain Worden peered through the chinks left for eye-holes between the iron logs of which it was built. He saw that the shot first fired against the broad wall of the Merrimac bounded away without doing material harm, so he lessened the range—laid the Monitor so close beside her that an active man might have leaped from ship to ship. Still the Monitor’s shot failed to penetrate, and he then went cruising to and fro, seeking a vulnerable point, but finding none, although a single well-directed shot would have sunk the Merrimac out of sight. Failing in this, Worden made a dash at the stern of the Merrimac, hoping to disable her rudder or screw. He missed the mark, it is said, by the narrow margin of two feet. Then the speaking-tube leading to the turret broke, and the purser and the surgeon were stationed to pass the orders of the captain. The interior of the turret became filled with smoke, and the walls and deck were covered with the grime of battle. A painted mark which had been laid to enable the turret’s crew to tell which side was starboard and which port, was obliterated. The turret’s crew were shut in and unable to learn, save with great difficulty, the bearing of the enemy. The machinery that turned the turret was not quite equal to the work; “it was hard to start and harder to stop when once agoing.” Greene was obliged to fire from a moving turret, and the intervals between shots were lengthened.