I was reading a book on the recovery of the Hunley, the Confederate submarine, and it got me to wondering. Are there any Civil War era monitors or other ironclads left afloat?
I don’t know of any float, but the remains f a few have been found. Read Clive Cussler’s book on his adventures “treasure hunting” for such craft (He’s the one that found the Hunley). There are few submarins that have been found – I ecall seeing a Civil War submarine on display on the portico of the Cathedral of Saint Louis in the Vieux Carre (French Quarter) in New Orleans back in 1983. I’m sure there are others.
At the maritine museum in Gothenburg Sweden they have a monitor from the post civil war period on display. It is not fully restored, but it is afloat, and you can go aboard.
Now that I think about it, there is an early ironclad afloat – and it predates the Civil War!
We Americans tend to think of the Monitor and the ** Vorginia** as the first ironclads, but that’s largely the fault of our training – it’s what they always told us – and that, in turn, is a bit of ethnocentrism (just like calling the Virginia the Merrimack is a bit pf North-centrism. The Virginia was rebuilt from the wreckage of the burned Merrimack, and calling it by that name is unjustified). The two American ships were oreceded by a French ship and a British ironclad, built just before the Civil War. I don’t recall their names, or whether the French ship still exists, but the British ship does, and is still afloat and sailing. There was a picture of it in Scientific American a few years ago.
To look at it, you wouldn’t guess it was an ironclad. It looks like a wooden sailing ship of the period. The iron cladding is actually underneath the wooden sides, and IIRC, it only covers the middle portion of the ship. But it predates American ironclads by a few years.
Of course, any discussion of ironclads has to mention the Korean ship Tortoise, which predates all of these by centuries. It’s not in existence anymore, and it didn’t actually use metal cladding, but it was clearly in the same philosophy, being a completely enclosed craft propelled from within (by oars – this is long before steam). I’ve seen reconstructions of it in books, and there’s a model at MIT’s Hart Nautical Museum.
I suppose the one in Sweden is some kind of monument to John Ericsson, designer of the USS Monitor?
There is one (a sort of CSS Virginia-esque Union ironclad gunboat) that was recovered a few years back from the Mississippi; I beleive it’s the USS Cairo.
The British ironclad is the HMS Warrior, IIRC. It is preserved somewhere or other in England. The French one is La Glorie, I don’t know where it is. BTW, if US (Naval) ship names are prefaced “USS” and British ships are “HMS”, what letters are French ship names preceded by?
HMS Warrior, launched in 1860 was Britain’s first iron-hulled battleship, and it is on display in Portsmouth, England, where it appears to be very much afloat. For lots more information, see its website: