![]() One of the key features of the Monitor was the rotating gun turret which can now be viewed at the Mariners Museum in Newport News, Virginia. ![]() The Monitor took part in the first-ever clash of ironclads (a warship covered in iron) in the Battle of Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, against the Confederate vessel, the CSS Virginia (which had been the USS Merrimack before being repurposed by the Confederacy). “The wreck is in an astounding condition after being on the seafloor for 160 years and weathering all of the environmental conditions off Cape Hatteras, including exceedingly strong currents and hurricanes,” said Tane Renata Casserley, of the NOAA, to McClatchy News. An underwater expedition this month found that a Civil War ironclad warship sunk off the coast of North Carolina was still preserved in a time capsule-like state.Ī crew from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) went to Cape Hatteras and sailed out 16 miles to find that the wreck of the USS Monitor, a ship used by the Union during the Civil War, was still in “an excellent state of preservation” on the Atlantic seafloor. This map taken here from the Sable Island section of the Museum of National History site, which is part of the Nova Scotia Museum. Talking about communication – the island is a bit of a holy grail for radio amateurs, what with its inaccessibility and the fact that it has its own callsign (CYO reminiscent of another special island described here some time ago - Market, #6). Resulting from its uniquely extremitous position in the Atlantic, Sable Island was chosen in 1901 by Guglielmo Marconi as the location of a wireless station for transatlantic communication. Other wildlife includes several thousand seals, arctic birds (of which the Ipswich sparrow breeds only on Sable Island). No one can get on it without permission of the Canadian Coast Guard. For the whole island is a nature reserve. They roam the grasslands and drink at Lake Wallace and other freshwater ponds, undisturbed by man. ![]() ![]() The only really permanent island-dwellers are over 300 feral horses (possibly left there by Thomas Hancock, uncle of John Hancock, the proverbial signatory). Safety was greatly improved in 1872, when the Canadian government installed two lighthouses, one on each side of the crescent-shaped island (the last recorded shipwreck occurred in 1999.) The lighthouses have been automated, but Sable island is still home to a year-round crew, of five meteorologists. These include many that are just too fantastic not to repeat here: the Black Duck, the Margarita, the Farto, the Vampire, the Esperanto, the Stranger, the Sadie Knickle (sounds like a lost Beatles track, that one) and (my favourite) the Bob Logic. This map shows many of the ships wrecked on the shores of Sable Island, detailing the type of vessel (ship, bark, schooner, brig, brigantine, steamer), the year of the wrecking (1802 to 1946, even though the earliest wreck is attested as dating from 1583) and the ships’ names. Located in shallow, often stormy and foggy waters, the elongated Sable Island (44 km long but never more than 2 km wide) might have been predestined as a catchment area for ships treading these Atlantic latitudes – a self-fulfilling curse for captains ignorant or oblivious of this huge, constantly shifting sandbar.
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