Then the Virginia moved away from her victim's bow and steamed directly for the Cumberland's starboard side, striking and deeply penetrating the hull below the berth deck.

For several moments the ironclad could not extricate herself and, as the Cumberland began to sink, it appeared that the two vessels might go down together. Fortunately for the Confederates, the ram broke off and freed the Virginia but, in so doing, exposed her to the Cumberland's broadside. The Union ship was doomed and all aboard knew it. No uninjured gunners left their stations, however, since they now had the opportunity to retaliate. Despite their devastating casualties, the Union sailors intensified the fighting. The dead were thrown to the port side and the wounded were carried below. The decimated gun crews managed to fire three solid broadsides from a distance of less than a hundred yards, but despaired when these failed to pierce the ironclad's armor.

The Virginia replied with her own barrage and now the Cumberland's gun deck took on a ghastly appearance, powder-blackened and slippery with blood, strewn with shattered bodies and debris. Nevertheless, it was only when the sinking ship's bow ports submerged to within a foot of so of the water that the order was finally given to abandon ship. Water filling the breach opened by the Virginia's ram in the forward starboard quarter now caused the warship to lurch forward and she plunged, bow first, to the bottom of the river, carrying 121 crewman down with her.

Although the Virginia had prevailed, her victory was not so completely one-sided as it first appeared. Despite the Cumberland's inability to penetrate the enemy's armor plate, she managed to inflict considerable damage by firing at the gunports, thereby disabling two cannons, killing two men, and wounding about 15 others, including Captain Buchanan. Furthermore, the ironclad's smokestack was riddled with holes, causing not only a reduction in speed but fouling the air below deck which interfered with the service of the cannons. And of course, the steamer had lost that critical component of her arsenal the ram.

When dawn broke on March 8, 1862, it heralded not only a day of destiny for the crews of the federal blockading squadrons at Hampton Roads, Virginia, but the advent of a new era-the modern age of naval warfare. The helplessness of wooden-hulled sailing vessels against the onslaught of ironclad steamers was most graphically demonstrated in the tragic confrontation between the Confederate States Ship Virginia, better known as the Merrimack, and the U.S.S. Cumberland. By sunset that afternoon the Union fleet had been decimated, the Cumberland lay battered on the bottom of the James River, along with much of her valiant crew, and the course of naval history had been altered permanently.

Historians have paid far more attention to the legendary battle that took place the following day between the Merrimack and the Monitor. But the significance of the first day's fighting in the Battle of Hampton Roads in some ways surpassed that of the second. When the Monitor's crew members petitioned Congress in the early 1880s to grant them prize money for allegedly disabling the Merrimack, a former sailor on the Confederate vessel contended that "If prize money is to be awarded ...let it be given to the gallant officers and crew of the Cumberland, which went down with her colors flying after doing nearly all the damage sustained by the Merrimack on the 8th and 9th of March, 1862:"

The Cumberland had been one of the proudest vessels in the federal fleet. Built at the Boston Navy Yard and launched in May 1842, the three masted, 175-foot-long warship's career spanned nearly two decades during most of which she served as flagship of the Home, Mediterranean or African Squadrons. In 1856 she was brought to the New York Navy Yard where she was converted from a frigate to a sloop of war by cutting down one deck, and her armament was refitted. Twenty-two nine inch, smoothbore Dahlgrens replaced the eight-inch and 32-pounder cannons on the gun deck, and the spar deck battery of 32-pounders was exchanged for two ten-inch smoothbore pivot guns, one in the bow, the other at the stern. With the later substitution of a formidable 70-pounder rifle for the aft pivot gun, these weapons constituted the battery that the Cumberland carried for the remainder of her career until her fateful encounter with the Merrimack.

The Merrimack was constructed as a steam frigate and was first launched in 1855, also from the Boston Navy Yard. In the years to come the two ships would cross paths several times and their fortunes, good and bad, came to be strangely intertwined. In April 1861 both the Merrimack and the Cumberland were docked at the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, Virginia. Fearing Virginia's secession and the seizure of the yard by the Confederates, the federal government decided to evacuate and burn the facility. The Cumberland was towed out to safety, but the Merrimack, despite the protests of a few farsighted Union officers, was scuttled before the yard was set ablaze. The steam frigate settled on the bottom so that only her upper works were destroyed by the fire. The Confederates had little difficulty resurrecting the hull and, like the phoenix, she rose from her ashes to become one of the two most invincible warships that the world had yet seen.

The conversion of the Merrimack to an exclusively steam-powered, heavily armored ironclad required the better part of a year. Her trial launch, in which she was re-christened the C.S.S. Virginia, took place in February 1862, but it was another three weeks before her captain, Franklin Buchanan, could secure sufficient powder for her guns. Buchanan's plan was to slip out of the Elizabeth River under cover of darkness and surprise the federal blockading fleet at daybreak. His primary objective was to ram the Cumberland, whose "new rifled guns"-actually she carried only the one 70-pounder rifle-the captain considered to be "the only ones in their whole fleet we have cause to fear." March 8 dawned clear and bright. It was a day, a Virginia gunner would later recall, "too beautiful to be bathed in the blood of our fellow men, but thus it was so."

For months the men of the Cumberland had been aware of the metamorphosis the Virginia was undergoing, and they had drilled all winter in preparation for the combat that would inevitably ensue when the ironclad emerged. The awesome responsibility of command fell on the executive officer, Lieutenant George U. Morris. Upon first sighting the ironclad, the "quick beat" to quarter; was sounded and all hands moved to battle stations.

When the Confederate ironclad faced her Union counterpart on March 9 she was not the same vessel that had advanced into battle the previous day. Some, including high-ranking U.S. Navy officers, have since doubted whether the Monitor, also in a weakened condition as a result of a rough sea passage, would have fared as well against the Virginia as she did had it not been for the sacrifices of the Cumberland and her crew.

As the Cumberland settled on the bottom of the James River, across the Atlantic another ship that would before long share her burial ground was being born. First of the foreign built Confederate commerce raiders that dealt a blow to the American merchant marine from which it has never recovered, the C.S.S. Florida began her career, pursued it, and ended it amid a flurry of international controversy. She was constructed in secret during 1861 and 1862 in Liverpool under the name Oreto, a ruse contrived to help persuade the British authorities ( who could not by law permit the outfitting of warships for belligerent powers ) that she was intended for service in the Italian navy. Using a British dispatch gunboat for the basic hull model, the vessel was designed for speed and maneuverability. As a transitional type in the evolution of marine propulsion, it could operate under both sail and stream. It was also fitted with a retractable screw, or propeller, to reduce drag when cruising on wind power alone.

On March 22,1862, the Oreto was put to sea and sailed to the Bahamas where John N. Maffitt assumed command for the Confederate Navy, christened the vessel the Florida, and surreptitiously loaded ammunition and a battery of guns consisting of six six-inch and two seven-inch Blakely rifles and one 12-pound Howitzer. The Florida's first cruise in January 1863 was highly successful. Twenty-five merchant ships were taken, including the Jacob Bell and the Oneida, whose cargo values were estimated at a million and a half and one million dollars, respectively. Three of the captured vessels were given prize crews, operated as "satellites" of the Florida, and accounted for an additional 22 ship seizures. By August 1863, the Florida's hull and engines needed a major overhaul.

Maffitt wanted to have the work done in an English shipyard, but in view of the problems associated with British neutrality he elected instead to put into the French port of Breast. Although he estimated that the repairs would only take about 18 days, a series of complications kept the Florida from sailing for over five months. Despite vehement objections by the U.S. government, the French were extremely solicitous of the Confederates during their lengthy stay. When American officials complained that the work being conducted on the commerce raider's machinery could not be considered necessary or justifiable repairs in a neutral facility-formally protesting on the grounds that the Florida had captured as many prizes under sail as under steam-Napoleon 111 himself offered the sarcastic rejoinder, "Because a duck can swim is no reason why his wings should be cut."

During the extended layover in Breast, Maffitt's health deteriorated to the point where he had to ask to be relieved from duty. His replacement also became too ill to continue and the command was assigned to Lieutenant Charles M. Morris. An essentially new and inexperienced crew helped Morris launch the refurbished raider in February 1864. The second cruise was not nearly as successful as the first. Only 13 prizes were captured, due to the fact that there were considerably fewer ships of U.S. registry at sea in 1864 than in 1863-testimony to the effectiveness of the Florida and her sister ships in striking at the heart of the Union merchant fleet.

The Florida's career ended in October 1864 when she was rammed and hijacked by the U.S.S. Wachusett in the South American port of Bahia in defiance of Brazilian neutrality. The Confederate vessel was towed back to the United States to an anchorage off lower Newport News where she quietly sank under mysterious circumstances on the morning of November 28, 1864.

Although a U.S. government investigation concluded that the loss of the vessel was due to mechanical factors (leakage and pump failure), it was more likely the result of a deliberate attempt on the part of the Union high command to put an end to the international furor that had been created by the Florida's abduction from a neutral port and the Brazilian government's subsequent demand for her safe return. Years later, John N. Maffitt reported that in a conversation after the war with David D. Porter, Rear Admiral of the North Atlantic Squadron in 1864, the Union officer admitted giving the order to scuttle "that Rebel craft:"

After the Battle of Hampton Roads, the federal government was anxious to determine the feasibility of raising the sunken remains of the Cumberland. As early as March 21, 1862, a New York salvage firm had been approached, but the actual preliminary examination of the wreck was conducted in May by Massachusetts salvage diver Loring Bates. His report, the earliest account of conditions on the sunken warship, stated that "the Cumberland lies in sixty-six feet of water deeply imbedded [sic] in the mud healed [sic] to an angle of forty five ...the water is very thick and it was with some difficulty that we could get about ...every thing appears in confusion:

"Bates concluded that the damage sustained by the vessel was too extensive to justify the cost of raising Accordingly, the government sold the rights of recovery to a succession of salvage firms whose effort over the course of a decade met with limited or, at best, questionable success. The primary objective was to retrieve the paymaster's safe, reportedly containing a minimum of $40,000 in gold specie. Despite a Detroit salvage company's claim to have located and raised the safe in 1875, George B. West, a Newport News resident whose memoirs contain the only known eyewitness account of post-Civil War salvage activities in the Hampton Roads area, observed that no one ever "knew what was done with the safe, and it was never reported that any gold was taken from it."

West's 'Memoirs also offer a rare glimpse of the modus operandi of the nineteenth-century salvage diver as well as the hazards associated with his profession. A German salvor's plan to reach the safe was to begin under the stern of the wreck I and progressively blow his way-by detonating a series of charges-to the paymaster's cabin. Today we can only marvel at the daring of such men who, before the invention of portable "submarine lamps" in 1871, were required to grope in the utter darkness while risking the perils of cave-ins and mechanical failures associated with their crude and cumbersome breathing apparatus.

West reported that the German was actually brought up unconscious several times and observed that, though he was a "splendid looking fellow" when they first met, "this deepwater diving injured his health, and he reduced rapidly and did not live long." Regrettably, official reports concerning the progress and extent of post-war salvage operations, both government and private, are virtually nonexistent, particularly for the Florida. Only George West's account informs us that the commerce raider was "stripped by divers" after the war. Unfortunately, West, who witnessed much of this operation, declined to elaborate on the nature of these activities except to remark that "She [the Florida] must have been magnificently built, for the divers said the state rooms were very handsomely decorated:' Documentary evidence suggests that all the major salvage efforts concluded within a decade after the end of the war, and from that point on the memory of the Cumberland and the Florida-the glory of their exploits as well as the location of their remains-quickly faded. Except for beef periods of revived interest in the 1920s and the 1960s, both the Union warship and the Confederate raider reined out of sight and, for the most part, out of mind.

In the early part of 1980 Clive Cussler, popular novelist (Raise the Titanic, Deep Six and other adventure thrillers and chairman of the board of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) -a private, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of maritime heritage-decided to actively pursue his long-standing interest in the two ships. He hired a Washington-based researcher and contacted a local historian who had calculated probable locations for the sunken vessels based on a correlation.

However, Riley described how he first discovered the wreck four or five years earlier when he lost a pair of clam tongs on a "hang" in the James River and how, in an effort to retrieve them, he recovered a brass sword hilt and handle decorated with an eagle and fish scale pattern, a design emblematic of the U.S. Navy prior to and including the Civil War years. He had also tonged from the site a large copper-alloy cylinder which bore a notable resemblance to a section of bilge pump pipe depicted in the builder's plans of the Cumberland. Furthermore, the clammer estimated the depth of the wreckage to be about 65 feet, very close to the figure submitted by Loring Bates in 1862.

Riley's artifacts and his description of the location and depth of the site clearly warranted a first-hand investigation, the clammer offered to help. Several days later he shortened his dawn-to-dusk workday to transport a UAJV dive team to the site. Without the benefit of instrumentation, Riley moored the clam boat over a spot where his visual calculation of land bearings indicated that the wreck was lying. It mattered little that the sun was setting as the archaeologists plunged into the water, since daylight rarely penetrates more than 30 feet or so beneath the surface of the James, even at high noon.

The divers soon appreciated the waterman's accuracy in reckoning the position of the site. When they reached the bottom they discovered bits of scattered wooden debris. As they extended their search line to begin a systematic sweep of the river bed, they encountered an area of concentrated wreckage dominated by massive wooden timbers protruding eerily out of the mud at odd angles in the murky gloom. Groping amid the debris, archaeologists searched for evidence that might help to establish the ship's identity. Several of the artifacts gathered from the surface of the site proved to be particularly significant. The bottom of a white ironstone plate fragment bearing the manufacturer's name, John Alcock, and his mark, a crowned shield flanked by a lion on one side and a unicorn on the other, established the sherd as a product of the Staffordshire Potteries in England between 1853 and 1861. A remarkably well preserved pair of brass gunner's calipers, a device used to measure the diameter of cannon bores and projectiles, was practically identical to the standard type listed in the US. Army Ordnance Manual of 1862.

Another armament-related object that had survived in surprisingly good condition was a sabot, a solid cylinder composed of a single block of wood with a flat lower surface and a concave upper one. Its function was to insure, through its use in conjunction with iron straps, that a ball would be seated in the bottom of a cannon bore with the fuse facing toward the muzzle in order to prevent explosion in the tube upon firing. Though the iron straps had corroded completely, their former presence was attested to by iron concretions and rust stain covering much of the wooden surface The sabot's most intriguing feature, however, was its nine-inch diameter, corresponding as it did to the bore of the 22 smoothbore cannons that constituted the greatest part of the Cumberland's broadside battery on March 8, 1862.

Though by no means definitive, the evidence of the artifacts suggested that the wreck, which was designated the Pier C Site, represented the remains of an American warship dating to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the location of the wreckage and the failure of documentary research to indicate the presence of any other sunken vessels in the immediate vicinity further reinforced the hypothesis that the Pier C Site was, in fact, the final resting place of the Cumberland. Considering the condition of the non-ferrous metals and organic materials that had been recovered, UAJV team members were optimistic that further investigation would yield additional evidence regarding the ship's identity. Also encouraged by the implications of this preservation for the survival of the Florida's remains, the archaeologists decided to take leave of the Pier C site temporarily to search for the lost commerce raider.

Working on the supposition that the wreck just examined was actually that of the Union warship, UAJV investigators further reduced the dimensions of the survey area to include only the section upstream of Pier C, since George West's account of the post-war salvage operations indicated that the Florida was lying in that direction relative to the Cumberland. By operating the recording fathometer while crisscrossing the search area with survey lanes parallel, perpendicular and diagonal to the shoreline, the crew detected only one significant anomaly located approximately 500 yards upriver and offshore of the Pier C Site. The series of peaks that appeared on the fathometer paper were much less dramatic than those recorded on the previous site, but the location, almost directly offshore of the Home Brothers Shipyard pier, closely corresponded to the landmarks identified in West's memoirs.

Investigators positioned the survey vessel over the center of the anomaly and dropped a buoy where the recording fathometer registered its highest peak. A pair of divers descended to examine the site, confirmed the presence of concentrated debris, and recovered several artifacts: a liquor bottle, dated stylistically to the third quarter of the nineteenth century; a leather bayonet scabbard; and a hinged, copper alloy hoop of unknown function, perhaps part of one of the brass ornaments that decorated the Florida's staterooms.

Cussler then entered into a cooperative arrangement with the state archaeological agency, the Virginia Research Center for Archaeology (VRCA ), which offered to supply diving archaeologists to help conduct a search for the two wreck sites. The joint NUMA/VRCA undertaking established a survey area of one mile by one quarter mile in the lower James River which, according to the research, seemed to offer the greatest potential for containing the remains of the sunken vessels. Using a proton magnetometer and a recording fathometer to detect ferrous and contour anomalies in the muddy river bed, and following up these procedures with first-hand examinations, the 1980 survey team was still unable to discover the location of either wreck.

With undiminished enthusiasm for the project, the following year NUMA contracted with Underwater Archaeological Joint Ventures (UAJV), a private firm operated by archaeologists based in Yorktown, Virginia, to search for the ships and, if successful in locating them, to attempt to gather sufficient data to verify their identities. NUMA and UAJV jointly applied for and were granted a permit by the Virginia Marine Resources and Historic Landmarks Commissions to conduct survey and limited recovery activities in the James River.

UAJV concentrated its initial efforts in two areas. A review of the previous research persuaded the group that the length of the 1980 survey perimeter could be substantially reduced and that the center of the new search area should be established in the offshore vicinity of the Home Brothers Shipyard and the Virginia Port Authority piers. Project members contacted local watermen, charter boat captains, clammers and crabbers - hoping to obtain information about the recovery of artifacts or irregularities in the river bottom that might indicate the presence of a wreck site. Interviews led investigators to Wilbur Riley, a veteran clammer of the York and James Rivers, who reportedly knew the location of a wreck near the Port Authority's Pier C and had retrieved a number of objects from it. For the archaeologists, similar reports regarding shipwrecks, cannons and even sunken treasure in Virginia waters in the past had almost invariably proved to be without foundation.

Now that two potentially significant sites had been located, there remained the task of trying to identify them by recording and interpreting site features, and by collecting and analyzing diagnostic artifacts. Environmental circumstances, however, posed formidable obstacles: swift currents and poor visibility hindered almost all aspects of the underwater operations, particularly on-site recording and measuring over long distances. Water depth, over 60 feet at both sites, restricted daily bottom time without decompression stops to barely over an hour for each member of the four-man dive team. Decompression diving was considered too risky because of the location of both sites near the center of the river channel in an area where ship traffic is often heavy. Even so, the hulls and propeller blades of the freighters, tankers, and barges which regularly make their way up and down the river represented a constant source of concern to divers during ascent and descent.

By far the greatest cause of consternation, however, was the frequent disappearance of site-marking buoys which were inadvertently dragged away by passing vessels during the night. Loss of the site marker was often accompanied by the disruption of lines that archaeologists had established on the bottom to serve as lifelines and tactile road maps in the murky depths.

Despite these difficulties, the UAJV team succeeded in recording enough information to construct a rudimentary plan comprising a major portion of the Home Brothers Site. Initial investigations focused on a section of nearly intact deck planking, running fore and aft approximately parallel to the Newport News shoreline, at the downriver end of the wreck. A preliminary examination of this area revealed a massive, cylindrical, iron object over four feet in diameter, believed to be the foundation support for a mizzenmast, which divers used as a reference and departure point for subsequent exploratory work.

Other significant features in this vicinity included a small scuttle -a circular floor opening used to facilitate the transfer of materials between decks-and, at the downriver extent of concentrated wreckage, the deteriorated remains of a large hatch-type opening. In view of its location and its sloping interior surfaces, it was thought to represent the lowest portion of an aperture intended to accommodate a retractable propeller.

The inspection of an exterior section of ship's hull adjacent to and inshore of the decking revealed the presence of copper sheathing used as protection against marine worms, indicative of a position below the vessel's waterline. Unfortunately, the only known set of construction plans for the Florida consist solely of a plan (overhead) view of the main deck and a sheer (longitudinal) inboard profile of the entire vessel. Thus, the features observed on the deck of the Home Brothers Site cannot easily be compared with documented characteristics of the commerce raider. The corresponding level on the Florida would have to be the berth deck, though, since it was the only one, according to the sheer plan, that was both situated below the waterline.

Archaeologists examined over 120 feet of the inshore hull line from its downriver terminus to where it disappeared beneath sedimentary overburden and could no longer be detected. A number of features observed during the measuring and recording process proved to be consistent with the Florida's general structural characteristics: relatively small frames, six and-a-half by seven inches, indicative of the light construction typically associated with cruisers as opposed to large warships or merchantmen; engine apparatus, consisting of a copper-alloy intake valve running through the hull 15 feet directly to the starboard side of two large, adjacent cylinders which appeared to be boilers; and an athwartships width of 23 feet, as measured across the exposed decking near the stern end, that compared favorably with the 27 foot beam; or widest breadth, of the Florida's main deck.

Artifacts collected from the surface of the site conformed, in terms of age, type and function, to what one would expect to find aboard a Confederate commerce raider in general and aboard the Florida in particular. Significant among the armament related objects were two ammunition boxes, one containing 119 lead balls comprising five calibers of round shot and the other holding over 400 fifty-six (.56) caliber Enfield bullets (most of which still retained a wooden plug recessed into the back end); a brass 1848 model Brunswick bayonet handle; and a small cannon fuse. Arms and munitions of British manufacture such as the Enfield bullets and the bayonet handle were used by both sides during the Civil War, but more commonly by the Confederacy which had a greater dependency on the importation of foreign war materiel. More specifically, the cannon fuse was of a type inserted in shells used in Blakely rifles like those that constituted the Florida's main battery.

The assemblage also included various types of fasteners and fittings, liquor and apothecary bottles, and drinking as well as serving vessels. Of particular interest were a pewter pitcher with a silver handle and top, a brass porthole with a glass window, a wooden box with a faintly discernible printed or burnished label, and a small apothecary bottle whose yellow liquid contents had remained undisturbed for nearly a century and a quarter. Two wooden pulley blocks may suggest a more specific association with the Florida. If they were used in connection with sail rigging, as was most often the case, then this, combined with the evidence of engine machinery, would establish the vessel as a sail/steamer such as we know the Florida to have been. A less speculative link between the wreck site and the commerce raider, however, was provided by the recovery of a small white ceramic pharmaceutical jar bearing the seal of the Paris School of Pharmacy as well as the druggist's name and his business address in Brest, reminiscent of the commerce raider's protracted sojourn in that French port.

With the scheduled end of the survey approaching, the UAJV team curtailed its investigation of the Horne Brothers Site and returned to the Pier C wreck. Unfortunately, an accelerated loss of sitemarking buoys and unexpectedly difficult conditions on the wreck itself thwarted efforts to conduct a thoroughly comprehensive examination of the site. Unlike the Horne Brothers wreck, which settled in the river bed on a more or less even keel with relatively little sediment over most of its surface, much of the Pier C Site lay deeply buried. Many of the areas which were accessible appeared to be in a state of inextricable disarray.

But just as the essentially undisturbed condition of the Horne Brothers Site were consistent with the Florida's peaceful demise, the same conditions that frustrated archaeologists in their attempts to map and record the Pier C Site also supported its identification with the remains of the Cumberland. The damage sustained by the Union warship during her violent encounter with the Virginia, subsequently compounded by the destructive efforts of the salvors, could easily account for the chaotic situation observed on the Pier C wreck. Furthermore, the abnormally heavy and unusual sedimentary deposits covering much of the site-more granular than the fine silt and soft mud ordinarily found on the river bottom-coincided with George West's testimony that sometime after the documented salvage activities an enormous quantity of dredge spoil was dumped over the wreck, prompting the chronicler to conclude that "no doubt now the boat is entirely covered over."

The longitudinal axis of the wreck was found to lie approximately perpendicular to the shoreline-in accord with contemporary accounts of the Cumberland's position as she engaged the Virginia with a considerable downriver list estimated at about forty degrees, similar to Loring Bates' 1862 assessment.

On-site investigations also produced a small array of artifacts that contributed significantly to the dating and identification of the wreck. The assemblage, most of it armament-related, included two oddly shaped brass objects that functioned as touch hole covers for cannons. One of the covers bore the impressed markings "U.S.N.Y. 1856 Ord. Dept. J.A.D. No. 32," signifying its derivation from the ordnance department of a federal navy yard; the year in which the Cumberland was extensively refitted in just such a facility; and the initials of John A. Dahlgren, commander of the federal Ordnance Department from 1855 to 1861. The "32" may correspond to the battery of 32-pounders on the Cumberland's spar and gun decks when she was brought to the New York Navy Yard for renovation in 1856.

Two unique artifacts which evoke a sense of the drama and pathos associated with the warship's last stand are a small wooden frame, custom fitted around a broken piece of mirror glass-fashioned, no doubt by a common seaman for his personal use-and a magnificent ship's bell, one-and-a-half feet high and cast in bronze. The imaginative viewer can envision it tolling the warship's death knell as she succumbed to the Virginia's deadly assault and descended to her watery grave.

Despite the difficulties encountered in the preliminary survey, both UAJV and NUMA investigators felt confident that the collected data concerning the condition, location, and physical properties of the wrecks constituted persuasive evidence to indicate that the Home Brothers and Pier C Sites do, in fact, represent the remains of the C.S.S. Florida and the U.S.S. Cumberland.

When field activities ceased, NUMA, which had already offered to donate all materials recovered during the project to the state, additionally contributed the necessary funds for conservation of the assemblage. Many of the artifacts have since been displayed at the Mariners Museum in Newport News and at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum in Norfolk. Both the Home Brothers and Pier C Sites have been nominated for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places-an important first step toward safeguarding these unique monuments to a pivotal and momentous period in American naval and nautical history.