- Visit the Photo Place

View the Spotsylvania County community page

Shipwreck Book Sinks

"Encylopedia of Civil War Shiprecks" a good idea but could use some fact-checking. By Scott Boyd.

Date published: 6/6/2009

THERE are some very famous Civil War shipwrecks that have been partially or fully recovered, such as the ironclad USS Monitor off Cape Hatteras, N.C., and the Confederate submarine CSS H.L. Hunley just outside the harbor at Charleston, S.C. There are some that are not as well known, such as the river ironclad USS Cairo at Vicksburg, Miss., and the ironclad CSS Neuse at Kinston, N.C. Others have not been recovered even in part and lie silent and forgotten in their watery graves.

"The Encyclopedia of Civil War Shipwrecks" by W. Craig Gaines aims to be a one-stop reference source for information on the famous and obscure ships lost in America's bloodiest war. By my count there are 1,837 named ships listed, along with 184 entries for unnamed ships (some of the latter are for more than one vessel, such as several unnamed small boats lost at the same time in the same location).

In the preface, after discussing why he wrote the book, the author wisely defines exactly what constitutes a shipwreck for his purposes: "a vessel sunk, scuttled, burned, grounded, lost, capsized, missing, blown up, one that collided with another vessel or object and sank, or one that was generally made unusable without salvage and substantial repairs." It does include ships that were sunk and later raised and removed, such as the CSS H.L. Hunley--it's not just for wrecks still underwater.

Next he describes how he categorized the location of the wrecks. This can get tricky, especially when considering a shipwreck in a river between two states.

One way the author got around this was to include as locations named rivers (the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio) in addition to the nearby states. The location also includes ships lost outside of modern U.S. territorial waters, such as New England whalers sunk in the Bering Sea near the Arctic by the CSS Shenandoah, and Union merchant ships sunk in the Atlantic and Indian oceans by the CSS Alabama. They include the CSS Alabama itself, which rests on the bottom of the English Channel just outside the French port of Cherbourg.

The author forthrightly acknowledges how data found in various sources can be conflicting and contradictory. This is something every Civil War naval history researcher will encounter and must use his best judgment to resolve.

RECOVERING THE MONITOR: America's first National Marine Sanctuary (NMS) was created at the shipwreck site of a Civil War ironclad, the USS Monitor. The Monitor was discovered in 1973 approximately 16 miles off Cape Hatteras, N.C., in 230 feet of water. In 1975 Congress created the Monitor NMS, a column of water extending from the ocean's surface to the seabed (1 nautical mile in diameter) to protect the shipwreck. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CIVIL WAR SHIPWRECKS By W. Craig Gaines (Louisiana State University Press, 264 pages, $35.95)

Follow us on

Date published: 6/6/2009