On New Year’s Eve, 1862, USS Monitor was under tow off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina in a winter storm. The ship was taking on water and in grave danger of sinking. Francis “Frank” Butts, of Providence, R.I., the Monitor‘s helmsman, was bailing water from the ship’s turret which housed two 11″ smoothbore Dahlgren guns.

USS Monitor was an iron-hulled steam-powered warship whose battle with the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia, ex-Merrimack, had made wooden battleships obsolete in a single afternoon. While the Monitor survived its battle with CSS Virginia, it was losing its battle with the Atlantic winter storm.

Butts would later write that he hoped that “our noble little ship was [not] yet lost.” He wrote that he took his boots, rolled them up in his new coat and stuffed coat and boots into one of the gun barrels, which he sealed with a tompion, a wooden plug.

Then he heard the sound of a wailing cat. A noisy black cat was sitting on the breach of one of the guns. He wrote, “I caught her, and, placing her in another gun, replaced the wad and tompion, but I could still hear that distressing howl.” 

Sailors of the day were superstitious about cats onboard a ship. Killing a cat was considered to be very bad luck. Whether Butts was attempting to put the cat in a safe place or just to stop the howling is unclear.  

USS Monitor sank that night in the storm. Frank Butts escaped, but if his story was true, his coat, boots, and the noisy cat, along with 16 of his fellow crew members went down with the ship. 

Now, 158 years later, archeological conservators at the NOAA Monitor National Marine Sanctuary are cleaning concretions — a combination of sediment, corrosion, and marine growth, from the barrel of the Monitor‘s Dahlgren guns. The wreck of the Monitor was located on the seafloor of Cape Hatteras in 1973. The turret and guns were raised in 2002 and have been undergoing conservation ever since. 

So what of Butts’ coat, boots, and cat?  So far there is no sign of any of them. The most prevalent foreign material found in the gun barrels were pieces of ship’s coal, which had apparently washed into the turret from the engine room as the ship sank. This suggests that the gun barrels may not have been plugged when the ship went down. 

Did Butts make it all up? The Washington Post quotes Laurie King, an assistant conservator, who said that she loves the story anyhow.

“Even if it turns out to not be true, I really like Butts, and the fact that he had such an imagination, and felt like, ‘Oh no one’s going to know the difference,’ ” she said. “I don’t think he ever would have imagined that we could bring it up a hundred and fifty years later.”
 
“It’s … wonderful to be able to do this archaeology to confirm or deny stories and oral histories that have been passed down over generations,” she said.