“This Filthy Ironpot” (Februrary 1968 | Volume: 19, Issue: 2)

“This Filthy Ironpot”

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Authors: Robert B. Ely

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Februrary 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 2

 

In the spring of 1864, Robert B. Ely, a twenty-threeyear-old acting volunteer lieutenant in the United States Navy, was assigned to duty in the U.S.S. Manhattan , a single-turret, ironclad monitor fresh from the builder’s yard at Jersey City. After meeting the usual problems that go with fitting a new crew into an untried ship, the Manhattan sailed for the Gulf of Mexico, and on August 5 it was with Rear Admiral David Glasgow Farragut’s fleet in the momentous Battle of Mobile Bay.

 

Ely kept a private journal, and he found a good deal to write about. He distinguished himself in battle—apparently he was what would nowadays be called the gunnery officer—and he won promotion, along with assignment as his ship’s executive officer. What makes his journal readable today, however, is not so much his account of a famous sea fight as his unvarnished story of what life on a Civil War monitor was really like.

That life, as he quickly discovered, was about as uncomfortable as anything the Xavy has ever had Io offer. Those primitive ironclads were jusl barely seaworthy and almost completely uninhabitable. Simply living on a monitor was so trying that the. ordeal of battle struck all hands as a positive relief.

At sea, the monitors were utter slugs, needing to be towed if they were to make any headway—the Manhattan made the entire trip from New York to Mobile Bay at one end of a towrope, the other end being attached to the stern of a wooden gunboat, the U.S.S. Bienville —and in action, when the tows were cast ojj, they were slow and very hard to steer. They were shotproof, but when a solid shot hit their armor, boltheads would snap off and fly about the interior in a most lethal manner. They had so little reserve buoyancy that a leak could be fatal, as one of the Manhattan ’s sister monitors, the U.S.S. Tecumseh , found when she struck a mine going into Mobile Bay.

But it was the day-to-day discomfort of life aboard that was the real problem. In anything but a flat calm, a monitor’s deck was awash, so that the crew either had to stay below or go up on top of the turret, where most of the space was taken up by the conning tower. This meant that most of the men, whether on duty or off, had to stay below, and that was abominable because at sea the hatches were battened down and the ventilators were usually inoperative. The hot Gull const sun beat down on the iron deck, turning the interior into a veritable oven (Ely noted one time when the temperature in the engine room ran above 130 degrees), and the air in the living and working quarters was a thick fog that could hardly be breathed. Everything was wet, partly because of condensation from the humid air and partly