Hurricane Serves Up Historic Weapon
After Hurricane Sandy smashed ashore on the Delaware River in October, members of the Anchor Yacht Club in Bristol, Pennsylvania, faced quite a cleanup. Among the flotsam was a 28-foot log that had come to rest against a river mooring. Commodore Kevin Coyne noticed something strange about it: One end of the log was tipped with an iron point.
“I told the others, ‘If that’s what I think it is, we’ve found a Revolutionary War artifact.’”
As yachtsmen lifted the object onto a trailer for transport to the club’s boatyard, Coyne contacted Craig Bruns, chief curator of the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. Bruns confirmed that the relic appeared to be a cheval-de-frise, designed to sink British ships.
The giant spear-like object had its conceptual origins in a 17th-century anti-cavalry weapon. During the American Revolution, Robert Erskine, an officer in the Continental Army, adapted the cheval as a subsurface weapon to puncture British ships on the Hudson River. Robert Smith modified the Erskine design to fit the specific needs of the Delaware River. Benjamin Franklin, who headed Philadelphia’s defense committee, approved Smith’s concept as part of an integrated approach that also included construction of two forts flanking the river a few miles below Philadelphia. Iron-tipped lances in the shipping channel would be ready to greet the king’s navy. Fastened to wooden boxes filled with stone, the chevaux-de-frise were lowered to the riverbed where they sat like jagged rows of shark’s teeth to snag British ships, enabling shore batteries to sink them.
The Royal Navy was so concerned it abandoned plans to sail from occupied New York to attack Philadelphia from the river. Instead it landed British troops at the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay; they marched north to defeat the Continental Army at the Battle of Brandywine Creek on 11 September 1777. Two weeks later, the Redcoats occupied Philadelphia and awaited resupply by sea.
On 23 October, a British fleet failed to get past the chevaux. When the 64-gun HMS Augusta ran aground, gunfire from Fort Mifflin on the Pennsylvania side mortally wounded the ship. Despite the setback, England persevered with relentless attacks until the fort fell on 16 November.
After the Revolution, the chevaux were dismantled and all but forgotten until 13 November 2007, when a strange iron object was found mired in mud below Sunoco Logistics’ Fort Mifflin Terminal. The 11-foot relic, the tip of a cheval-de-frise, was transported to the Independence Seaport Museum, where its preservation treatment continues. Yet that was only a fragment of the complete lance. It took Hurricane Sandy, five years later, to finally wrest from the Delaware a fully intact relic at the yacht-club mooring.
But was it one of the Philadelphia weapons?
The lightweight iron point has a diameter of six to eight inches, whereas the one recovered in 2007 is heavier and 18 inches in diameter. “This cheval is very much different,” said Bruns. “I believe the Anchor Yacht Club cheval had something to do with the sequestering of the frigates Effingham and Washington.”
At the time of the Revolution, those 32-gun American warships were under construction in Philadelphia. Fearful the British would capture them, legendary Continental Navy Captain John Barry received orders to move the ships upriver to Burlington, New Jersey, across the river from Bristol. Bruns believes smaller chevaux, such as the one recently found, were constructed to defend the relocated ships. (It was wishful thinking, however—Barry eventually had to scuttle the vessels to prevent the British from seizing them. See “I Passed by Philadelphia with Two Boats,” June 2009, pp. 44–49.)
Now, 238 years later, the members of the Anchor Yacht Club are seeking a permanent home for the cheval after resubmerging it and lashing it to the riverbed for the winter to keep the wood from decaying in the open air.
Bruns estimates it will cost up to $75,000 to properly preserve and display the weapon. “I do believe something good will come out of this.” As he told the Bucks County Courier Times, “To me, it expresses how desperate the people living along the Delaware River were to stop the British navy—which was the largest in the world—from coming up the river and capturing Philadelphia, which was the largest seaport and city in the colonies. The Royal Navy had heard about the chevaux and they were petrified of them.”
—Carl LaVO
New Memorial Honors Monitor Crew
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the New Year’s Eve 1862 sinking of the U.S. ironclad Monitor, the U.S. Navy and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries dedicated a memorial on 29 December in honor of the iconic Civil War vessel and her crew. The memorial is located at Hampton National Cemetery in Hampton, Virginia.
“It is a privilege for us to honor these men, and it is our hope that this monument will memorialize their efforts so that we may always remember the sacrifices they made for their country,” said David Alberg, superintendent of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.
The skeletal remains of two sailors were found in the ship’s turret during a 2002 recovery operation by NOAA and the U.S. Navy. The remains were turned over to the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, which is working to try to identify the sailors. To date, no trace of the other 14 members of the crew has been found.
Hampton National Cemetery is a fitting home for the memorial, as it is located near the site of the historic 9 March 1862 clash between the Monitor and the Confederate ironclad Virginia. The cemetery’s first burials took place in 1862; it is among numerous national cemeteries with origins that date to the Civil War.
The Monitor’s wreck site is on the seafloor in 240 feet of water, 16 miles south of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. In an effort to protect America’s most famous ironclad for future generations, the shipwreck was designated the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary in January 1975—the nation’s of its kind. In the late 1990s through 2002, major Monitor artifacts were recovered—including the rotating gun turret—and are being conserved at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia.
Naval History Article Reconnects Long-Lost Family Members
When Alan Rems wrote “Letters to Iwo Jima” for the February 2009 issue of Naval History (pp. 44–51), he could never have foreseen where it would lead.
A few months ago, a woman in Tennessee came across the article during a Web search for information about her uncle, Lieutenant Sidney Pace, who was killed on Iwo Jima. Although she had been told that her Uncle Sidney had never married, Rems’ Naval History article revealed that a woman claiming to be Sidney’s widow had written to his division commander seeking information about her husband’s death. The woman (hitherto unheard-of by the information-seeking niece) had queried the commander because she wanted to be able to to pass on the war-service details to their son, born just six months before his father died.
To the niece doing Web research, the article was a cascade of revelations: Not only had there been a woman in her uncle’s life, but he’d also had a son. Further Internet sleuthing soon led to the discovery that Sidney’s son, Robert Sidney Pace, now a retired diplomat from the U.S. Foreign Service, had told his remarkable family story in a candid memoir titled Finding My Father ( iUniverse, 2009).
Compounding the coincidences, Robert Pace and article author Rems actually live near each other in Northern Virginia. They now have met several times and have visited the National Archives to look for information about Sidney Pace on Iwo Jima. They both said they look forward to meeting Pace’s newly discovered cousin, the woman whose research ended up putting them in touch.
As a child, through a brief glimpse into a hidden trove of his father’s letters to his mother, Robert Pace first learned about his father’s World War II service. As an adult, from interviews with relatives and a study of military records, he learned about his parents’ brief wartime relationship, which both families had kept hidden. The fleeting but passionate romance, between an exuberant 19-year-old aspiring Marine officer from Kentucky and an introspective 23-year-old college librarian in Allentown, Pennsylvania, exemplified the improbable connections that often occurred amid the dislocations of World War II America. Sidney would be one of the thousands of replacement troops fed into the battle on Iwo Jima.
In addition to keeping history alive, sometimes a Naval History author inadvertently accomplishes something more—in this case, even helping to unite families.