There’s something primal about going “down to the sea in ships.” One never conquers the sea; one can only hope to coexist with it, and that struggle has played an immense role in defining Americans as a people. Nowhere is this tremendous story told more vividly than on the shores of one of the most heavily traveled complexes of harbors in the world, an area in southeastern Virginia known as Hampton Roads.
The confluence of the Rappahannock, York, and James rivers and the Chesapeake Bay as it empties into the Atlantic Ocean has exerted several attractions throughout history. And that fact is hardly lost on those charged with interpreting this long heritage, especially in the cities of Norfolk, Hampton, and Newport News, on the shores of this gateway to the sea.
To cross Hampton Roads you must go under it, through tunnels that plunge beneath the shipping lanes. As you emerge from the 1-64 Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel southbound, the expanse of the ocean to your left grows wider, its blue-water chop simultaneously inviting and forbidding. To the right is a complex of maritime commerce and naval strength, giant ships in various stages of construction, repair, and replenishment.
There, on the Elizabeth River, a tributary between the James River and the Chesapeake Bay, lies Norfolk, a city that has suffered near total devastation twice in its history: during the American Revolution and the Civil War. Both times its resilient residents rebuilt, and today Norfolk is again in the midst of an ambitious rehabilitation. The city has revivified its downtown seaport area, and its mainstay is Nauticus, the National Maritime Center.
On a quay jutting into the river, the modem building, painted the haze gray of Navy ships, gives the illusion of floating. Obviously designed for the 21st century, the 120,000-square-foot structure offers more than 100 exhibits, mostly on its third floor. The displays encourage participation, but they’re not all geared toward the naval and military experience. Programs for kids abound, and to judge from the usual decibel level, the core audience approves wholeheartedly.
On the second floor, the museum gets serious, presenting a retrospective journey through the maritime history of the region that focuses on its defense. The story begins 400 years ago, in 1607 on Cape Henry, about 20 miles east of this spot, where representatives of the Virginia Company landed and eventually traveled upriver to establish Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in this country.
The Hampton Roads Naval Museum, also part of the Nauticus complex, gears much of its interpretation toward models, artwork, and artifacts of the Civil War era, during which the attention of the whole world was drawn to this area. “Heavy breathing” is how documentary filmmaker Ken Burns once referred, in an interview for Naval History, to the world’s collective reaction to the first battle between ironclads, the new USS Monitor and the converted former U.S. steam sloop-of-war Merrimack, renamed the CSS Virginia. Overseas watchers understood almost from the start that the 1862 duel represented a monumental change in how war would be waged at sea.
In the span of a single long lifetime, the hastily extemporized ironclad evolved into one of the most impressive of all man-made artifacts. Today, a superb example commands the waterfront at the base of Plume Street on Elizabeth Avenue. She’s the battleship Wisconsin (BB-64), and her great bow divides the scene at water’s edge with the authority of a mammoth cleaver.
At first, the World War II-vintage vessel might look out of place here, hitched as she is to the side of the slick Nauticus center. The Wisconsin is one of the four Iowa (BB-61) -class battleships, once the backbone of the U.S. surface fleet. Naval decision makers have deemed smaller ships—working in conjunction with missile-laden submarines and aircraft carriers (many of them berthed at the nearby Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest)—to be more cost-effective than the huge battleships.
Today, the plugged forward guns of the Wisconsin point directly toward downtown Norfolk. Volunteers, many of them veterans of service in the magnificent ship, greet visitors as they step onto her teak topside deck. They detail her service, from naval operations in World War II to Operation Desert Storm, soon after which the Wisconsin was decommissioned and retired to nearby Portsmouth, until she was towed to her new home.
Nauticus is only one stop on the Cannonball Trail, a self-guided tour of historic downtown landmarks indicated by markers set in the sidewalks. An accompanying booklet recommends a minimum of two hours to walk it, but for anyone wanting to absorb the breadth of it all, this is simply not enough time.
The natural beginning of the trail tour is the old redbrick St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, built in 1739 and billed as the city’s “only tangible link to her Colonial roots.” Of course, everyone wants to see the cannonball. Fired during a British bombardment in 1776, it remains embedded in the building’s southeast wall, and this atom of British ordnance gives the trail its name.
You’d never guess the tidy church was gutted by fire during the attack of Lord Dunmore’s fleet that New Year’s Day in ’76. In fact, of the many buildings in Norfolk torched by British sailors and then by Norfolk’s own citizens—to deny the British anything of value—St. Paul’s is the only one to survive the assault more or less intact. During its 225th year, 1964, the church mounted the funeral of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.
While this is decidedly a naval town, General MacArthur has left the impress of his implacable personality, having requested that he be buried here, in the city that was the home of his mother, Mary Pinkney Hardy MacArthur. The general’s remains were interred in the old Norfolk Courthouse, which today is devoted exclusively to him, with a memorial, a museum, and archives. On display are one of the general’s famous corncob pipes and his immaculate 1950 Chrysler limousine.
Back on the north side of Hampton Roads lie Hampton and Newport News, towns known for space travel (NASA Langley Research Center, Langley Air Force Base, and the Virginia Air & Space Center in Hampton) and for fabricating the most sophisticated merchant vessels and warships in the world (Newport News Shipbuilding). But several sites within these two municipalities are indissolubly associated with the early years of the Civil War, when the region was already known for astonishing advances in technology.
The Casemate Museum in Fort Monroe is a good example. The largest stone fort ever built in the United States and still used by the U.S. Army, Fort Monroe—“the Gibraltar of the Chesapeake”—looks out to sea from Old Point Comfort at the tip of the peninsula where Hampton Roads meets the Chesapeake Bay. Begun in 1819, it took 15 years to complete; its l!4-mile moat (the only one surrounding an American fort) encircles 62 acres. Soon after Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter, the Union War Department, keenly aware of Fort Monroe’s importance, reinforced it, and the bastion became headquarters for the Union Army’s Department of Virginia.
Of particular interest to the Civil War enthusiast are the accommodations of two Confederate leaders who lived here under very different circumstances. Robert E. Lee was stationed in Fort Monroe as a U.S. Army engineer during the latter part of its construction. He oversaw the completion of the outer works and found it a place “by no means to be despised.” Nor did his later Confederate colleagues. Although at times surrounded by Rebel forces, the fort remained in Union hands throughout the war. In contrast to the young Lee’s rooms is the cell where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was held as a conspiracy suspect after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln (though, in truth, both quarters seem equally Spartan).
Faced with closure as an Army installation in 2011 by order of the Department of Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC), Fort Monroe’s future is uncertain. The state of Virginia and the city of Hampton have been involved in discussions about its fate, and one group advocating its becoming a park under the auspices of the National Park Service is pushing for a study to determine the feasibility of such a move. As of this writing, no decision has been reached on what to do with this historically significant—not to mention commercially valuable—piece of waterfront real estate.
The trouble with battlefields on water is that much is left to the imagination, as is the case with the site of the first operations of ironclad warships.
On each side of Interstate 664, another passageway that dips beneath the Hampton Roads shipping lanes, are overlooks that commemorate the two sea battles that really made this area famous.
In Christopher Newport Park, the Congress and Cumberland Overlook offers a vista of the brown- water James. This was near the spot where on 8 March 1862, the CSS Virginia—initially thought by her crew to be on a trial run—made relatively quick work of two big wooden Union warships. Lookouts spotted the former Merrimack at about 1330 in the afternoon, coming out of the Elizabeth River and headed for the USS Cumberland. She rammed and sank the sloop-of- war, while the Union vessel’s shot bounced off her metal flanks. Then she bombarded the frigate USS Congress, which had run aground after seeing the Cumberland sink, and set her afire. Only the coming of darkness saved the rest of the Union blockading squadron from this alarming new creature. And when the sun rose the next morning, it showed that an even stranger vessel had arrived during the night.
To the east of the appropriately named 1-664 Monitor- Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel (the k in Merrimack was dropped after the Confederates had converted her) is the Monitor-Merrimack Overlook, which commands the wind-combed, watery acreage where the first ironclads fought it out the morning after the loss of the Congress and Cumberland. The battle is usually called a draw, but the Monitor—with only two guns to the Rebel ship’s ten, but a revolutionary revolving turret to bring them to bear—kept the Confederate from harming any more Union warships. So it’s appropriate that this side of the waterway is the chosen repository for artifacts currently being raised from the sunken Monitor.
Situated on the edge of Newport News in a secluded wooded complex that could just as easily be in the mountains two hours to the west, the Mariners’ Museum is a place visitors must really want to find. Those looking for a sensory arcade like the one at Nauticus might be disappointed, but this museum is, in its way, every bit as engaging.
The scope of the Mariners’ Museum is what makes it especially interesting. Aside from the new Monitor Center are displays that fascinate and educate visitors with even a little salt water running in their veins. There’s an extensive exhibit devoted to the hard lives of the bay’s working watermen, and a huge Alexander Calder statue of Leif Eriksson stands outside an Age of Exploration show that chronicles the history of waterborne conquest and discovery.
Entire galleries are given to a permanent exhibit on naval architect William Francis Gibbs and to a highly popular one on Chris-Craft Industries, makers of the most sought-after wooden motorboats in the world. The Great Hall of Steam contains models of merchant vessels, several of them built just a few miles away at Newport News Shipbuilding, and one of the largest collections of ship figureheads in the country—mostly women with forbidding expressions and heroically large breasts.
Coming full circle from Nauticus, through the sights, sounds, and tastes the Hampton Roads area has to offer, visitors to the Mariners’ Museum, one of the best museums in the United States, come away with a deeper appreciation for the surface warriors, submariners, aviators, and even the fisherfolk who toil just offshore in the Chesapeake. To be sure, the entire region is brimming with tributes to and commemorations of those who have in their own way served this country at sea.