When Naval History began publishing biannual historical travel packages last year, we knew it was only a matter of time before we'd feature eastern Virginia's tidewater area, a longtime center of Navy power. Goings-on there this spring prompted us to feature it sooner rather than later.
Four hundred years ago this May, three ships ventured into the tidewater, up what became known as the James River, and their passengers established Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World. In "Four Centuries Ago . . . ," Joseph Gutierrez Jr. of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation explains the political and naval developments that made possible the settlers' voyage.
The tidewater's nautical epicenter is Hampton Roads, where Virginia's rivers converge and flow into the nearby Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean. In his article "History Abounds at Hampton Roads," Naval History Senior Editor Fred Schultz tours the roadstead's leading historic sites. Like most other parts of the Old Dominion, Hampton Roads is steeped in Civil War history; most notably, it's the site of the epic battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, formerly the USS Merrimack.
On 9 March—the 145th anniversary of the ironclad duel—the Mariners' Museum's Monitor Center, a state-of-the-art museum focusing on the innovative Union ship, opens its doors in nearby Newport News. Craig Symonds, the center's chief historian, describes the vessel's momentous but brief life and efforts to raise artifacts from her wreckage in "Odyssey of Ericsson's Ironclad." The Monitor Center also features a world-class facility for conserving undersea artifacts. Jeff Johnston of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary explains the center's efforts to excavate and preserve the ironclad's most significant artifact in "Conserving the Iconic Turret."
We first came across 22-year-old Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene's account of the Monitor's fight with the Virginia, "Voyage to Destiny," in a 1923 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings. The battle was one of the U.S. Navy's greatest moments, but it would haunt Greene, the ship's executive officer. He assumed command when the captain, Lieutenant John L. Worden, was wounded, but chose not to pursue the retreating Virginia. Afterward, Worden, Chief Engineer Alban Stimers, and designer John Ericsson seemed to receive all the credit for the Monitor's accomplishments.
Worden, moreover, never filed an official report of the battle and therefore had not gone on record as agreeing or disagreeing with his subordinate's decision not to chase after the Virginia. In 1868, after some lobbying by Greene, Worden sent the secretary of the Navy his account of the fight, presented here as "To Remedy a Wrong," in which he explained why Greene made the correct decision.
Over the succeeding years, veterans of the ironclad duel refought the battle in newspapers, journals, and books, but Greene stayed out of the fray until his article "In the 'Monitor' Turret" was published in the March 1885 issue of Century Magazine. Tragically, it was his last word on the battle; shortly after writing it, in the early afternoon of 11 December 1884, then-Commander Greene committed suicide, using "a heavy 38 calibre revolver." According to his obituary in the Army and Navy Journal, "The only cause assigned for the act is mental anxiety over literary matter he was preparing for publication in relation to the fight between the Monitor and Merrimac."
—Richard G. Latture,Editor-in-Chief
