Bone Remains: Cold Cases in Forensic Anthropology

12. The USS Monitor and Her Crew

83 12. The USS Monitor and Her Crew O n December 30, 1862, the USS Monitor, an ironclad warship, was being guided to shore in turbulent seas off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, when it sank beneath the waves, ending up on the ocean’s floor. Sixteen of the fifty-nine seamen on board were lost—and never found. Commissioned in February 1862, Monitor gained notoriety for its Civil War battle with the ironclad CSS Virginia, which the South had refurbished from the USS Merrimack. The battle of ironclads began on March 9, 1862, at Hampton Roads, Virginia, and lasted for several days, with the Virginia being somewhat bested by Monitor. However, less than a year later, Mother Nature handed Monitor that devastating fate. On a summer day in 2007, I met Dr. Wayne Smith, an archaeologist from Texas A&M University and a member of a special commission created in association with the USS Monitor project. Wayne just happened to be in Baton Rouge to consult with Dr. Heather McKillop, one of my colleagues, about conservation of wooden artifacts she had recovered in her archaeology work in Belize. That introduction at the LSU FACES Laboratory led to a collaborative research project several years later between the lab, Smith, and the U.S. Mariner Museum in Washington, D.C. Monitor sits at a depth of 240 feet below the Atlantic Ocean’s surface, sixteen miles offshore from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. When it sank, its most iconic feature, the armored gun turret, was displaced, ending up beneath the ship’s hull. The exact location of the Monitor has been known since 1973. However, it was not until the late 1990s that part of it was raised, the propeller and shaft. In 2002, the gun turret was brought to the surface. Once the turret was raised, archaeologists began the daunting task of literally excavating the materials inside of it. That task was 84 Bone Remains made more difficult because a thick layer of debris had turned to sludge; that sludge was made even denser by rotting organic matter from the sea. The archaeologists’ progress was slow, but in the process of excavation, they recovered a boot, multiple pieces of silverware, a gold ring, a comb, a knife, a few other personal possessions , and, surprisingly, two fairly complete sets of human skeletal remains. More than likely, the cold water and debris in the turret had helped to preserve the remains and kept them from floating away from the ship. Scientists had no idea who the men might be out of the sixteen seamen who lost their lives. Following recovery, the bones were shipped to JPAC in Hawaii —the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command—for analysis by their forensic anthropologists. The JPAC anthropologists are charged with accounting for Americans lost in past conflicts. Their team concluded that both of the males were white (at least one and perhaps more black seamen had been on Monitor when it sank). The anthropologists also determined that one of the sailors was between seventeen and twenty-four years of age, and the other was somewhere between thirty and forty. A plan began to create a documentary about Monitor and these two young men. Part of the plan would include facial reconstructions of what the two unknown seamen may have looked like in life. Our FACES Lab had the expertise to develop the facsimiles and a long record of helping indentify unknown persons, sometimes decades after death. I knew immediately that I wanted our lab to assist if possible. Leaders in the Monitor project embraced our willingness to perform free of charge the service of recreating faces of the two men, and they made arrangements to have replicas of the skulls sent to us. Within a matter of weeks following our agreement to work on the project, a large black suitcase containing the replicas of the skull and hip bones for each of the men arrived at our lab. Upon close examination of the replicas, I concluded that I agreed with the designations of age and ancestry provided by JPAC. The older of the two individuals had grooves in his teeth where the enamel The USS Monitor and Her Crew 85 had worn down. This suggested to JPAC and to us that he might have smoked a pipe. For the next two years, Wayne and I went back and forth with the...