Two Navy sailors will be interred March 8 at Arlington National Cemetery — 150 years after they went down with their ship, the famed Civil War ironclad Monitor.
The two unidentified men were crew members on the Union warship, which fought to a draw with the Confederate ironclad Virginia (the former Merrimack) at the Battle of Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, signaling the end of the era of wooden warships.
The armor-plated Monitor, likened to a "cheesebox on a raft," was 179 feet long, had a rotating gun turret and rode just 18 inches above the waterline.
On Dec. 31, 1862, 16 crew members — four officers and twelve enlisted men — perished when the Monitor sank off Cape Hatteras, N.C., while under tow in a storm.
The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, headquartered at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, had the remains of the two Monitor sailors since 2002, when they were retrieved from the ironclad’s 120-ton turret.
They were the only remains ever recovered from the Monitor. One had a gold ring dangling on a bony hand.
The command, whose job is to investigate, recover and identify the nation’s missing war dead — mostly from World War II and the Vietnam and Korean wars — was tasked with identifying the sailors.
JPAC determined that both men were Caucasian. One was 17 to 24 years old and possibly 5 feet 7 inches tall, while the other was 30 to 40 and about the same height.
The older man, with thicker lips and a wider nose, had a pipe stem groove in his teeth. He also broke his nose at some point, had a deviated septum and was "a pretty robust guy," JPAC concluded.
Identification, though, proved to be a challenge, even after JPAC collected mitochondrial DNA from both sets of remains.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the wreck site as a national marine sanctuary, hired a genealogist in 2011 to trace the family histories of each of the 16 sailors who died aboard the Monitor.
Some sailors used aliases, though. One of the 16 who perished went by the name John Stocking, but his real name was Wells Wentz, NOAA said.
JPAC was able to narrow down possible descendants to 30 family members from 10 different families, but individual identifications were not made, the Navy said.
Interment will take place at Arlington National Cemetery on Friday to coincide with the March 8-9 Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862.
"The decision to lay these heroes to rest in Arlington honors not only these two men but all those who died the night Monitor sank, and reminds us that the sacrifices made 150 years ago will never be forgotten by this nation," David Alberg, superintendent of NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, said in a Navy-produced news story.
The research put faces, if not names, to the sailors found within the wreck, which was discovered in 1973.
The Monitor’s revolutionary turret, fortified with eight layers of 1-inch-thick laminated iron and shielding two 11-inch Dahlgren guns, was plucked from 230 feet of water in 2002.
The intact skeletons of the two sailors were inside.
The turret was jammed with silt and corrosion, and the bones had to be immersed in flowing freshwater at the JPAC lab for months to desalinate them; otherwise they would have split and warped, officials said.
More months were spent using little hand chisels to remove rust that was concreted onto bone.
"We are comfortable that all testing that required us to hold onto the remains is complete, to include obtaining a mitochondrial DNA sample," said Capt. Jamie Dobson, a JPAC spokeswoman. "The Navy’s efforts are continuing in the search for family members of these sailors to obtain more family reference samples, so potentially in the future they will be identified and laid to rest under a marker that bears their names."
