Ironclad Down: USS Merrimack-CSS Virginia From Construction to Destruction
By Carl D. Park

Illustrated, notes, bibliography, index, 238 pp., 2007. U.S. Naval Institute Press, 291 Wood Rd., Annapolis, MD 21402, $45 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Joseph A. Derie
Joseph A. Derie is a VMI graduate and a long time Civil War buff and military book reviewer. A retired Coast Guard officer and licensed officer of the Merchant Marine, he is a Certified Marine Investigator and marine surveyor.

Review:
Ironclad Down is not just another history of the South’s most famous ironclad with the familiar retelling of how the ship came to be built and the famous battle with the USS Monitor.

Author Carl D. Park is a master model builder. He started the volume when, after deciding to build a scale model of the CSS Virginia, he found he couldn’t find plans to illustrate how it was built. Most things he found out about the vessel’s construction were either contrary to normal shipbuilding practice, poorly described, contradicted by eyewitnesses or simply made up.

The book is divided into three parts that describe the people, the ship and its building.

“The People” is about the three personnel most responsible for the vessel: Confederate Naval Secretary Stephen R. Mallory, Naval Constructor John L. Porter, and the inventor, Lt. John Mercer Brooke.

In “The Ship” Park tells of the building of wooden ships in the old U.S. Navy and of the USS Merrimack in particular. He then recounts the familiar Porter-Luke controversy: “Whose idea was this anyway?” laying it out fairly and objectively with scholarly notations and letting readers decide for themselves.

Finally, in “Building the Virginia” he goes into the iron for the vessel, the guns, the actual building of the ship, and its two days of glory and eventual ignoble scuttling.

The story is well told throughout, well-written and interesting. Park is at his best when recounting the actual building of the Virginia, how the pieces were fitted together, what we do and do not know about how it was built and what we can conjecture and assume.

There are a number of marvelous drawings and sketches of parts of the vessel, some from photos and plans, other wonderfully drawn by the author after countless hours of research. His sketches of things such as “Virginia gun port openings and forward gun position” and “framing plan of the gun deck” are among the best parts of the volume.

The author also goes into great detail on what is available in various museum collections about the Virginia, including plans, specifications and relics. Most of the Virginia was salvaged from its resting place off Craney Island where the Elizabeth River runs into Hampton Roads and sold for scrap.

The National Archives has the correspondence and contracts from the various companies awarded salvage rights, and sections are recounted in the book. As with many relics, there are always questions, such as just how many bells the Virginia had. There are supposedly three in collections.

The anchor on display at the Museum of the Confederacy was discovered in 1907 near the site of the buoy that marked the wreckage site of the Virginia. Is it really from the Virginia or from another 19th-century vessel?

Ironclad Down is an excellent technical and general history of the CSS Virginia. The illustrations, especially those drawn by the author, make the volume. It will be of interest to Civil War navy aficionados and those whose particular interest is Civil War-era technology. It is highly recommended.