NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA—A pilot’s jacket recovered from the turret of the USS Monitor will soon be on display at the USS Monitor Center in southeast Virginia. The coat was discovered ten years ago, trapped in a marine concretion found inside the gun turret of the ironclad ship, which sank off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, during a storm on December 31, 1862. “We’ve found all kinds of buttons inside the turret—some made of wood, some of glass, some of bone, some of rubber, some even mother-of-pearl. Clearly the sailors were just tearing their clothes off before jumping into the water—and doing it so fiercely that their buttons were popping off. This coat was left behind by one of those sailors—and it gives you a very real, very personal connection to the story of those men and this ship during its chaotic end,” Monitor Center director David Krop told The Daily Press. The mass of concretion that contained the jacket was soaked to remove destabilizing chemicals and slowly removed with small hand tools and chisels. “It looks like it’s in great shape, but it’s actually pretty degraded,” added senior conservator Will Hoffman. The pieces of the coat are too fragile to be reassembled, and so have been mounted on archival backing for display. For more on nautical archaeology, see "History's 10 Greatest Wrecks."
