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The Monitor
broadside as the waters of the ocean poured into the muzzles of their guns. Then all was
terror and consternation. Telegrams were sent from headquarters to New \ ork, Boston and
Portland, to all maritime cities: ‘The Merrimac has escaped. She has broken the blockade.
She has sunk the bravest ships of our navy. We have nothing that can cope with her. Take
care of yourselves; we cannot protect you.’
“ I recollect well how the news was received in Portland. How our citizens consulted to-
o-ether. How it was proposed to construct rafts of long lumber, and chain them across the har-
bor, to save, if possible, our beautiful city by the sea from the shot and shell of this rebel mon-
ster. For a few short hours that rebel ram was 1 Mistress of the Seas.’
“Then what! A little nondescript craft comes steaming in from the ocean, ‘a Yankee
cheesebox on a raft,’ it was called in derision. But she steams straight for the Merrimac, the
big turret. ‘The cheesebox’ begins to revolve; the big guns are run out, and the big cannon
balls are hurled, one after another, with crushing effect against the mailed armour of the Con-
federate cruiser. The contest was long; the fight was hard; but at its close this rebel ruler of
the waves, crippled, disabled and defeated, was glad to crawl out of the fight, to roam the seas
no more.
“This is all familiar to you as household words; but let us not forget that the inventive
genius who planned and built and gave us the Monitor, that apparently insignificant means of
defence, which in that hour, under God, was the salvation of our navy, our blockade, and our
prestige on the seas—let us not forget, I say, that he, the inventor of the Monitor, was no Amer-
ican born, but the Swede, John Ericson, the son of a Swedish miner, born and bred in the
backwoods of old Sweden.”
20 Battle Between the Monitor and Merrimac
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