Monitor Chronicles 1 Sailors Account Today's Campaign to Recover the Civil War Wreck

Marking the ongoing efforts to recover the 136-year-old wreck of the USS "Monitor," The Mariners' Museum presents a lavishly illustrated commemorative volume of the renowned Civil War ironclad's past and present. The short, fabled life of the USS "Monitor" began on January 30, 1862, at Green Point, Brooklyn, New York, and ended on December 31 of that same year, when the legendary Civil War ironclad sank in 230 feet of water off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Serving on the "Monitor" -- where engines and living space lay completely below the waterline and the iron deck rose a scant eighteen inches above it -- was like no other duty in the U.S. Navy. "The Monitor Chronicles" brings shipboard experience to life through the words of Civil War sailor George S. Geer, whose never-before-published letters home to his beloved wife, Martha, faithfully chronicle the events of that dramatic year. Like many men of his station, George Geer had joined Abraham Lincoln's navy less to help save theUnion than to earn money and learn a reliable trade, so his accounts are unflinchingly honest -- at times colored by the bravado of a man at warMariners' Museum Newport News, Va. Staff is the author of 'Monitor Chronicles 1 Sailors Account Today's Campaign to Recover the Civil War Wreck' with ISBN 9780684869971 and ISBN 0684869977.