March 11, 2012

Oil painting by Thomas Skinner depicts the battle of the ironclads, March 9, 1862, Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.

Sunday March 9, 1862 was mild like it is now, a fine day for church, except that, out on the water in Hampton Roads, men lay in wait behind thick armor, determined to kill each other. It’s fair to say they were on edge.

Below deck in the Yankee ironclad Monitor, the only light was what seeped through viewing slits in the turret and flickered from lanterns. For most the sense of not being able to see where they were or where the enemy lay was suddenly brought home.

“I experienced a peculiar sensation,” paymaster William Keeler wrote to his wife. “I do not think it was fear, but it was different from anything I ever knew before. We were enclosed in what we supposed to be impenetrable armour – we knew that a powerful foe was about to meet us – ours was an untried experiment and our enemy’s first fire might make it a coffin for us all.”

Dinwiddie Phillips, the surgeon on board the rebel ironclad Virginia, experienced an almost identical dread. ”Our vessel never having been tested before, and her model being new and unheard of, many of those who watched us predicted failure and others suggested that the Virginia was an enormous metallic burial case, and that we were conducting our own funeral.”

These combatants, many of whom had never served on a warship of any kind – those on the Virginian had not even had a sea trial or fired its guns – were about to make history by shooting at each other from behind heavy armor. There were other ironclads in the world but none had been tested in combat.

The first confirmation most of the Monitor’s crew had that a battle had begun was the howl of gunfire as the Minnesota, a wooden Union ship, unleashed a broadside at the Virginia, with no more effect than peas fired from a pea-shooter.

As captain John Worden maneuvered the Monitor alongside the Virginia. gunners crowded in the cave-like space of the turret waited anxiously as it revolved. Then they raised one of the heavy port stoppers, ran out the 11-inch Dahlgren gun and fired.
There was an earsplitting roar and choking odor of smoke as the immense cannon hurled 170 pounds of solid iron at the Virginia. It was 8:20 a.m. The battle had been joined.
Like heavyweight boxers, the two ironclads seemed to stand toe-to-toe, sometimes actually touching each other as they fought desperately amidst a cloud of thick smoke.
In the hot, stifling turret, gunners stripped to the waist, their bodies black with powder and drenched with perspiration. When the ship first received a direct hit, there must have been a sudden intake of breath and a gasp as the crew realized the shot had dented but not penetrated the armor.
Down in the heavy ironclad casemate of the Virginia, conditions were the same. At one point, when the Monitor fired at close range, gunners near the impact were stunned nearly senseless by the concussion. Adding to the hellish conditions, engines below them belched smoke and heat as the ships jockeyed for position.
Maybe this was better than having wooden timbers smashed to pieces, but it was no less frightening. One Monitor gunner “fell over like a dead man” when a shot hit the armor near his head – he was revived by brandy. Another whose knee was in contact with the iron wall was flung through the air when another shot hit home.
The more agile Monitor – not having to square up to fire broadsides – stung the Virginia again and again. Frustrated gunners on the Virginia stopped firing at one point because they felt it was pointless against the heavy iron of their enemy. Both ships tried ramming the other and narrowly missed.
The closest thing to a casualty was the almost-deadly shot of one of the Virginia’s gunners just as Captain Worden was peering through the viewing slit in the forward pilothouse. He staggered back, blinded and bloody and had to be taken to his quarters.

The Monitor withdrew to deal with Worden, then attempted to get back into the battle, but the Virginia’s officers, realizing that the tide was falling and endangering their deep-draft warrior, headed toward the Elizabeth River. Both sides claimed victory, but it was a hard-fought, claustrophobic draw.

The legacy of the battle was the end of the era of wooden ships. The new ones were, in the words of Herman Melville, “welded tombs.” But he saw a small silver lining: “War shall yet be, but warriors/Are now but operatives; War’s made/Less grand than peace.”

March 4, 2012

It was just after noon on March 8, 1862. A gentle northwesterly rippled the water out on Hampton Roads. In the distance, proceeding down the Elizabeth River, a column of black smoke could be seen. A shiver of fear went through the quartermaster aboard the Union ship Congress as he turned to one of his officers. “I wish you would take a glass and look over there, sir,” he said. “I believe that thing is a-comin’ down at last.”

That “thing” was the CSS Virginia, its hour come to test its fearsome prowess on the aging wooden ships of the Union blockade. The Confederate ironclad looked like the roof of a barn with a chimney belching black smoke, one observer felt. Another compared it to a “half-submerged crocodile.” Gleaming with pig fat that had been slathered on its sloping sides to help deflect enemy fire, it appeared to still another witness as, simply, a “dark monster.”

This lethal weapon was the brain child of the South’s secretary of the navy, Stephen R. Mallory, who knew there was no chance of competing with the North’s much larger fleet – unless. “Iron-armored” vessels, he believed, were capable of not only ripping through the blockade but even threatening cities as far north as Washington and New York, striking a blow “from which the enemy could never recover.”

Beginning in July 1861, workers at the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth began transforming what had been the Union steam frigate Merrimack. They cut the ship down to its berth deck, then erected a heavy, slanting oak and pine casemate on top and cloaked it with four-inch sheets of iron. The Tredager Iron Works in Richmond had been pushed to capacity, fashioning the armor with the help of old railroad and trolley tracks.

Rechristened the CSS Virginia, the beast that emerged was the Union’s worst nightmare, an impenetrable gun battery, bristling with weapons and another nasty surprise, a 1500-pound iron ram.

The air was electric as news of the ship’s departure spread.
“In an instant the city was in an uproar, women, children, men on horseback and on foot running down toward the river from every conceivable direction, shouting, ‘the Merrimac is going down’” wrote a Georgia infantry private who watched from the shore. As the Virginia steamed into the Roads, the fragile federal fleet lay waiting like ducks in a shooting gallery.

The Virginia’s first targets were the Cumberland, a 1,726-ton sloop of war, and the Congress, a 1,867-ton sailing frigate, both with long and distinguished careers at sea but both completely dependent on sail power.

Heading straight for the Cumberland at full speed, the Virginia plowed into the Union ship’s starboard side, at the same time reversing its engines and causing the ram to break off in its victim like the stinger of a killer bee, Then, methodically, the Virginia’s gunners mauled the wooden ship. Rivers of blood and gore ran across the Cumberland’s decks as it sank, but the defenders kept firing until their gun ports were under water.

Next, it was the Congress’s turn. Seeing what had happened to the Cumberland, the commander of the Congress ran his ship into shallow water near Newport News and became grounded. Even so, the assassin was able to stand off about two miles and pummel the wooden ship with broadsides.

“The carnage, havoc and dismay caused by our fire compelled them to haul down their colors” and hoist white flags of surrender, flag officer Franklin Buchanan reported.
At the end of the day, 121 men on the Cumberland and 240 on the Congress had lost their lives, one of the greatest losses in American naval history. And there might have been more. The USS Minnesota, had run aground and would have been next had the tide not been falling. No problem, there’d be plenty of time the next day.

The Virginia headed for Sewell’s Point and anchored there for the night.
“We slept at our guns,” one of the officers said, “dreaming of other victories in the morning.”

But that night, as the Virginia crew dozed, a pilot on board noticed a strange shape, silhouetted by the fires of a burning federal ship, gliding across the Roads.

Next: The battle is joined.

Illustration: The wooden ship Congress goes up in flames after being plugged with "hot shot." Mariners' Museum.

February 26, 2012

In late February 1862 a woman who had sensitive information about a secret Confederate project made a perilous and grueling journey from Norfolk to Washington. It was especially dangerous for her. She was a slave. She was a spy.

Most accounts identify her as Mary Louvestre, who may have worked for the family of an official at the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth. Or perhaps knew someone who worked there. At any rate, she had crucially important news about the status of the Confederate’s secret weapon, the Ironclad CSS Virginia: It was almost ready.

In a memoir, Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles said the woman told him that the ship, the former Merrimack, had come out of the shipyard’s Drydock Number One and was being outfitted with guns and ammunition.

“The woman had passed through the lines, at great risk to herself, to bring the information,” Welles wrote, “and, in confirmation of her statement, she took from the bosom of her dress a letter from a Union man, a mechanic in the Navy Yard, giving briefly the facts as stated by her.”

The news caused the Union to abandon plans to send its secret weapon, the new ironclad Monitor, to the yard and blast the ship out of the water. If there was to be any blasting, it would have to be done in open combat.

Only sketchy details about this gutsy woman have come to light. But now My Haley, who collaborated with her husband, the late Alex Haley, on his famous book, Roots The Saga of an American Family, has written a novel about Louvestre and her harrowing journey.

“The Treason of Mary Louvestre,” which has not yet been published, begins in wartime Norfolk and is rich in detail about the city and the people who inhabit her world. There’s “Fat Johnny Two-Fingers,” a fishmonger, and Devereaux Ranier Leodegrance de Perouse, a driver for Mary’s owners, among others. The city is crowded with Confederate volunteers and entrepreneurs. Rough around the edges, the place stinks of manure. Drunks share the streets with pigs, rats and scrawny chickens. There’s something else, as far as whites are concerned, “uppity” free blacks who regard themselves as equals. And then there’s Mary Louvestre.

She is owned by the family of Simeon Louvestre, a naval engineer who’s involved in converting the frigate Merrimack to the ironclad Virginia. Alarmed that the deadly ship will tilt the war in the South’s favor, she stealthily traces the ship’s plans onto tissue paper and escapes.

Although it’s hard to believe the real Mary Louvestre made the entire 200-mile journey to Washington on foot in the dead of winter, the fictional one does just that, encountering several more memorable characters and all the while dodging a mean-spirited deputy sheriff. At last she meets Welles and changes the course of history.

Haley, who has spent several years researching the novel, told me she was captured by Louvestre’s character. “How can a person like her, a slave, be willing to risk everything? What kind of strength does it take? She intrigued me in so many ways.”

The book ends with Louvestre agreeing to do more spying for the Union, and that, Haley says, will be included in her next historical novel, one of six she’s hoping to publish.

She will be speaking Thursday, March 8, -- the 150th anniversary of the first battle of Hampton Roads – at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum at Nauticus. The talk will be at 6 p.m. and admission is free.


Photo: My Haley, author of The Treason of Mary Louvestre. Courtesy of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum,

February 19, 2012

The interesting thing about a history column, I’ve just realized, is that it’s everybody’s.

Take this past month. I wrote about a general store in Fentress, and one reader mentioned the moonshiners who once plied their trade nearby. I wrote about moonshiners and half a dozen people told me I should take a look at the origins of stock car racing. I wrote about stock racing and another half dozen picked up on my mentioning “Chinese Corner,” the intersection of Witchduck Road and Virginia Beach Boulevard where there used to be a race track.

There were as many theories as emails about how it got the name. There was once a small Chinese settlement there; a laundry owned by a Chinese family; a Chinese farmer who owned land there. Furthermore, another reader pointed out, the 1870 census showed there were two Chinese residents among 8,273 people in Princess Anne County.

And nearly everyone wanted me to write about Joe Weatherly.

Chinese Corner Speedway, a three-eighth-of-a-mile dirt track, was built in 1948 and was in use until 1960, according to NASCAR. It was also called Virginia Beach Speedway and, at one point, Joe Weatherly Speedway. That’s because the famous driver and a partner bought it, along with others in Richmond and Wilson, N.C.

Weatherly was a legend, a clown prince, a tragic figure. And he had one of the ugliest scars to ever haunt a face – and it wasn’t from racing.

Joe Herbert “Little Joe” Weatherly Jr. was born in Norfolk in 1922. After a hitch in the Army during World War II, he began racing motorcycles – a one-time high school passion – and racked up an impressive record, winning several national racing titles. Then he turned to stock car racing.

As Pilot reporter Earl Swift wrote in 2007, Weatherly became one of NASCAR’s first big stars, winning 25 races, placed in the top five 105 times and won the points championship two years in a row. “He was a favorite among fans for his flair as much as his victories. Weatherly was an archetype of the early NASCAR hero, an inveterate practical joker and hell-raiser, a resilient hard-partier, a rough-and-tumble southern rogue.”

And the scar? Most assumed it had been acquired on the racetrack. Or, as Weatherly sometimes boasted, from a bullet that creased his face while he was chasing Germans during the war in North Africa.

But Swift revealed the true story. It was in October 1946, before he began racing cars. He was driving with five passengers eastbound of 26th Street in Norfolk in a 1942 Buick sedan. The car hit the curb in a tight S-turn, careened across the road, jumped the far curb and crashed into a tree.

Three of the passengers weren’t badly hurt but one of them, Edwin “Eddie” Baines suffered a fatal head injury. Weatherly’s girlfriend, Jean Flanagan, had both of her legs broken and Weatherly had his face cleaved in two” by the windshield, with blood spurting from a puncture in his neck.

One of the police officers who arrived at the scene probably saved Weatherly’s life, staunching the blood flow by clamping his hands on the driver’s neck until an ambulance arrived.

Weatherly, who was driving without a legal license, was initially charged with homicide, but after lengthy court appearances the charge was reduced. He ended up paying fines, serving suspended sentences and later paying damages to his girlfriend and the family of the man who died. He had several other traffic misdeeds, losing his license for a time to drive on public streets.

But not on racetracks. Weatherly went on to a fabulously successful racing career. But it ended abruptly at a race in Riverside, CA, when the left side of his car slammed into a wall. Weatherly, who never wore a safety belt, died instantly of head injuries.

A barely relevant footnote: The fellow I met the other day who was wearing a “Moonshine” t-shirt, said he carried a quote in his wallet from the legendary baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean: “It ain’t braggin’ if you done it.”


Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com

Photo: Joe Weatherly, Pilot file photo.

February 12, 2012

Angolan musicians and dancer, from a 1690 drawing by Antonio Cavazzi. Courtesy of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.

As you walk into the exhibition hall at Jamestown Settlement you’re suddenly plunged into a village in the small African kingdom of Ndongo, surrounded by sounds of the forest and greeted by the serene figure of a woman smoking a long-stemmed pipe.

There’s a circular hut and, just beyond, a woman tending a field with a hoe, a baby nestled into a sling on her back. There’s a man stripping bark from a baobab tree, which was to be hammered into fibers and woven into a fine, soft cloth.

If you pick up an audio stick you hear the cheerful voice of a native speaking in Kimbundu. Chances are you won’t understand a word, unless you’re familiar with the languages of West Central Africa. And I’ll wager not many of us has ever been to this region of the world.

But it’s very much part of our culture, and may now be, because of the historical importance of Fort Monroe, more relevant than ever.

Old Point Comfort, where the fort is located, is the spot where Dutch privateers, who had captured a Portuguese slave ship in the Caribbean, stopped in 1619 and traded the slaves for provisions. These 20 or so residents of Ndongo, now part of Angola, are considered to be the first slaves brought to America.

As the American colonies and the Caribbean sugar plantations grew more and more dependent on forced labor, the Europeans obliged by setting up a massive slave trading industry, with headquarters on the western African coast. Port cities like Norfolk and Charleston were gateways for this massive human cargo. The slave population in Virginia grew from those original 20 to 472,494 in 1860, according to the group Slavery in America.

It’s fair to say that many blacks in the U.S. today can trace their origins to these West African villages.

The Jamestown Settlement, the state-supported facility next to Jamestown Island, has a major exhibition hall that depicts “The World of 1607,” with equal attention to the English, Native Americans and Africans. During Black History Month in February the staff has highlighted parts of the exhibit with gallery guides titled “From Africa to Virginia.”

That African culture, both before and during the slave years, was richer than I realized – and the reason I’ve returned to see the exhibit.

West Central Africans lived in rural villages, towns and cities. Ruled by kings and queens, they prospered from extensive trade networks. They had developed the technology to make tools and weapons from smelted steel.

Ndongo religious practices were a blend of Christianity that was imported from Portugal and indigenous beliefs that included a high god called Nzambi and territorial deities and other lesser spirits. Daily religious life revolved around ancestors, and priests who – not unlike European counterparts – offered spiritual advice, problem-solving and healing.

They played a wide variety of musical instruments – drums, tambourines, flutes, guitars and lutes; they perfected crafts like weaving and wood carving; and they danced frequently, even adopting European-style court dances for special occasions.

One of the striking parts of the African exhibit is a life-size, bronze-like statue of Queen Njinga, the ruler of Ndongo for nearly 40 years who spent much of her reign battling the Portuguese who had sought to enslave villagers they had captured.

She was evidently a shrewd leader, aligning herself with powerful African military factions to defeat the Portuguese, then, later, converting to Christianity and signing a peace treaty with them. Still later, with help from the Dutch, she fought off the Portuguese again, often leading troops into battle.

Then the inevitable happened. After her reign, the English set up the Royal Africa Company. English-made goods were sold to Africa for gold, ivory and slaves. The slaves, hundreds every year, were shipped to Virginia and sold to planters – who used them to produce tobacco, which in turn went back to England. It was a vicious triangle that lasted for almost two centuries.

There you have it, Among the baobab trees, farm fields and thatched mud huts, awaits a whole lot of history and culture.

February 5, 2012

One of the former Alcohol Beverage Control agents I interviewed recently mentioned a moonshine maker who supercharged his car so he could make fast getaways when the “revenuers” showed up.

“He used to brag about how he could out-run ‘em and out-smart ‘em,” the agent said.

It turns out that this moonshiner was right smack in the middle of a hell-fer-leather tradition that ran deep into backroad traditions of the rural South. You might have thought the movies “Thunder Road” (1958) and “The Last American” (1973) and the TV series “The Dukes of Hazard” (1979-1985) were fantasies, but they were straight out our not-very-distant past.

Stock car racing and its grandchild, NASCAR, came straight out of those traditions.

I’m not sure why, but the whole business of white lightning and wide-open car chases, with moonshiners outracing hapless law enforcers in souped-up cars (think Deputy Cletus Hogg in Dukes of Hazard) has an element of pure comedy about it. The folks who made the likker and stomped on the gas when cops showed up came across as good old boy entrepreneurs. Just tryin’ to make a living, don’t you know, without all them bothersome reg’lations and taxes.

Sure, people got killed, and some who drank bad “corn” got plum sick, but these guys, some of them at least, were just about heroes.

Witness Tom Wolfe’s trailblazing piece in the March 1965 Esquire, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”

The article, which established Wolfe as one of the first masters of “new journalism,” made Robert Glenn Johnson Jr., a former moonshine runner from North Carolina, famous. And Wolfe, too.

In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper still operators of all times, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a rich stock-car racer. . . .

It was Junior Johnson specifically . . . who was famous for the “bootleg turn” or “about face,” in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were two close behind, you threw the car into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on down the road exactly the way you came from. God!

Wolfe’s article was turned into a 1973 movie, “The Last American Hero,” staring Jeff Bridges.

NASCAR itself has acknowledged its indebtedness to moonshine runners, and included a whiskey still made by Johnson in its Hall of Fame in Charlotte. Johnson himself, the winner of 50 NASCAR races before he became a race car owner, helped assemble its barrels, condenser and so forth.

The best of the moonshine runners felt the urge to compete. In the late 1940s, one of those legendary fellows gathered racers, car owners and mechanics in Daytona, Fla., where they established rules for racing, and the next year staged a race on the beach.

I have no doubt that some of the drivers dubbed their cars “White Lightning,” and maybe “Corn Likker. “ Those early race cars were directly linked to those early supercharged cars.

There were many not-exactly-high-class tracks around here. William Petty of Virginia Beach writes that there was a dirt track racetrack at “Chinese Corners’ – can anyone tell why it was called that? – at the corner of Witchduck Road and Virginia Beach Boulevard. There must have been many others.

They and the big daddies of them all, the tracks in places like Langley, Richmond, Charlotte and Darlington owe their heritage to this illegal, but definitely good-old-boy, activity.

The legend lives on. One legal product you can buy in liquor stores is “Junior Johnson’s Midnight Moon Carolina Moonshine.” And online stores sell t-shirts with slogans like the one I saw the other day in Norfolk: “Moonshine. If it wasn’t so good, they wouldn’t chase us.”


One of the former Alcohol Beverage Control agents I interviewed recently mentioned a moonshine maker who supercharged his car so he could make fast getaways when the “revenuers” showed up.

“He used to brag about how he could out-run ‘em and out-smart ‘em,” the agent said.

It turns out that this moonshiner was right smack in the middle of a hell-fer-leather tradition that ran deep into backroad traditions of the rural South. You might have thought the movies “Thunder Road” (1958) and “The Last American” (1973) and the TV series “The Dukes of Hazard” (1979-1985) were fantasies, but they were straight out our not-very-distant past.

Stock car racing and its grandchild, NASCAR, came straight out of those traditions.

I’m not sure why, but the whole business of white lightning and wide-open car chases, with moonshiners outracing hapless law enforcers in souped-up cars (think Deputy Cletus Hogg in Dukes of Hazard) has an element of pure comedy about it. The folks who made the likker and stomped on the gas when cops showed up came across as good old boy entrepreneurs. Just tryin’ to make a living, don’t you know, without all them bothersome reg’lations and taxes.

Sure, people got killed, and some who drank bad “corn” got plum sick, but these guys, some of them at least, were just about heroes.

Witness Tom Wolfe’s trailblazing piece in the March 1965 Esquire, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”

The article, which established Wolfe as one of the first masters of “new journalism,” made Robert Glenn Johnson Jr., a former moonshine runner from North Carolina, famous. And Wolfe, too.

In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper still operators of all times, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a rich stock-car racer. . . .

It was Junior Johnson specifically . . . who was famous for the “bootleg turn” or “about face,” in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were two close behind, you threw the car into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on down the road exactly the way you came from. God!

Wolfe’s article was turned into a 1973 movie, “The Last American Hero,” staring Jeff Bridges.

NASCAR itself has acknowledged its indebtedness to moonshine runners, and included a whiskey still made by Johnson in its Hall of Fame in Charlotte. Johnson himself, the winner of 50 NASCAR races before he became a race car owner, helped assemble its barrels, condenser and so forth.

The best of the moonshine runners felt the urge to compete. In the late 1940s, one of those legendary fellows gathered racers, car owners and mechanics in Daytona, Fla., where they established rules for racing, and the next year staged a race on the beach.

I have no doubt that some of the drivers dubbed their cars “White Lightning,” and maybe “Corn Likker. “ Those early race cars were directly linked to those early supercharged cars.

There were many not-exactly-high-class tracks around here. William Petty of Virginia Beach writes that there was a dirt track racetrack at “Chinese Corners’ – can anyone tell why it was called that? – at the corner of Witchduck Road and Virginia Beach Boulevard. There must have been many others.

They and the big daddies of them all, the tracks in places like Langley, Richmond, Charlotte and Darlington owe their heritage to this illegal, but definitely good-old-boy, activity.

The legend lives on. One legal product you can buy in liquor stores is “Junior Johnson’s Midnight Moon Carolina Moonshine.” And online stores sell t-shirts with slogans like the one I saw the other day in Norfolk: “Moonshine. If it wasn’t so good, they wouldn’t chase us.”

Photo: Junior Johnson after winning pole position for a race in Atlanta in 1954, averaging 146 mph. AP file photo.

January 29, 2011

The Monitor is launched at the Continental Ironworks in Brooklyn, N.Y. on January 30, 1862. Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.

It was a brisk and stormy morning. But that didn’t stop a crowd from gathering, 150 years ago tomorrow, outside a brooding warehouse-shaped building on the Brooklyn, N.Y., waterfront. They knew all about the strange vessel that was about to be launched, or at least thought they knew. It wasn’t going to float; they came to watch it sink.

It was preposterous, really: a ship made entirely of iron, and what’s more, designed to operate mostly underwater. “Sub-aquatic,” as its controversial inventor, John Ericsson, had described it. The freeboard – the part above the water – was a mere 13 inches, and it surely must have been top-heavy from the massive revolving turret sitting on its deck.

“Ericsson’s Folly,” the critics called it. But the inventor had another name: Monitor.

Well, we know it didn’t sink and we’ve read all about the battle of the ironclads – I guess I’ve written about it ad nauseam – but this is the year for this sea-changing event to receive special attention, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Hampton Roads.

It was on March 8, 1862, that the CSS Virginia, the South’s iron-covered warship, sailed out into Hampton Roads and decimated the old wooden ships that were blockading the waterway. And the next day when the two adversaries met, fought to a thunderous draw and abruptly brought down the curtain on the era of wooden warships.

The Mariners’ Museum, home of The Monitor Center, will put on a major three-day event the weekend of March 9-11. There will be encampments, reenactments, speakers, tours and, new this year, an opportunity to play at being a spy for the Union or Confederacy.

But it’s the launch of the revolutionary warship that set the stage for the conflict. And the Yankees will be the ones to observe the event.

Today in Greenpoint, Brooklyn – where there’s a Monitor Street and Monitor School – locals are staging a parade through town to the entrance of the Continental Ironworks where the ship was built and launched. There’ll be a ceremony they and then a trip across the East River to Battery Park for a wreath-laying ceremony at the Ericsson statue there.

No doubt references will be made to the audacity of the ship and its inventor; how crowds of naval officers and their wives braved the cold, wet weather to glimpse the vessel that a navy board had described as like “nothing in the heavens above or the earth below or the waters under the earth.” And to watch it slide down the ways into – and possibly under – the water.

The cocksure Ericsson, along with some of his associates, stood defiantly at the bow for the ride down the rails, and no doubt burst into smiles as the iron ship settled comfortably in the choppy water.

It was a desperate time for the Union. Reports of the conversion of the sunken frigate Merrimack to the iron-sided Virginia had struck terror into the hearts of President Lincoln and his cabinet. Hurried calls went out for designs for an ironclad and, with great apprehension, Ericsson’s battery was chosen and built within 100 days of the signing of the contract.

And almost before the launch, the call went out from Washington: “Hurry her for sea as the Merrimack is nearly ready at Norfolk and we wish to send her there.”

There would be faulty sea trials and a near-catastrophic trip down the Atlantic, with crew dropping like dead men from boiler exhaust and the ship nearly foundering as torrents of water poured into its engine room.

As the unlikely vessel rounded Cape Charles on the afternoon of March 8, the crew could hear heavy explosions in the distance – the devastation caused by its deadly opponent.