As I become more and more interested in American history and
archeology, I found this latest news about the USS Monitor quite
fascinating: The Monitor finally sank around 1 a.m. on December
31. Twelve sailors and four officers would lose their lives.
Periodicals like Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated
Newspaper would later publish artists' renderings and poems
about the tragedy, but for families of the victims there was
little solace. The exact location of the Monitor's final resting
place and the crewmen who perished would remain a mystery for
more than a century . . . John Byrd, director of the laboratory,
says that "sunken ships can be a very, very good environment for
preserving remains" because of the protective coating of silt
that forms over them. This was the case inside the Monitor,
where tons of coal mixed with the silt, creating an anaerobic
environment that prevented chemical reactions and animal
activity from destroying the skeletons.