Our Trip To Virginia Beach, June 2007

MARITIME AND MILITARY HISTORY

The monument celebrates the development of Navy air defense development through the past several decades.

There are tributes to female aviators as well.

This region is heavily invested in Naval aviation. Fighter jets flying overhead above the beach were as common as pelicans.

This is the outside of the Mariners' Museum in Newport News.

Inside, the anchor of the HMS Dictator, a 64-gun ship of the line that was in the Chesapeake Bay before US independence to protect commerce, then to participate in the invasion of Washington during the War of 1812 when it dropped this and failed to recover it.

This is the gallery of steamships, with dozens of model steamers. At the back is a Titanic exhibit with some artifacts and a replica lifeboat.

A full-size replica of the turret of the USS Monitor as it looked when it was raised from the ocean floor.

The real thing is in a chemical bath in a conservation facility attached to the building.

This ring was found on the hand of one of the sailors whose remains were inside the turret. There are no initials among the carvings, so the owner has not been identified.

These canes were all made with wood and metal from the Virginia (previously the USS Merrimack) and the Monitor, several owned by military officers.

This gallery is devoted to the development of the Monitor in 1862, from her launch at the start of the year to her sinking on December 31st, and how naval warfare changed with her.

The Virginia is not neglected either; this is a partial scale model with interior exhibits, many focused on local Virginia economy and the shift from US to Confederate loyalties. Even more than at Gettysburg, the exhibits went out of their way to portray the Southern fighters as patriots in their own way.

From the Nelson-era exhibit, a surgeon's kit. (There's no doubt which side Stephen Maturin would have supported in the US Civil War.)

In the Chesapeake Bay gallery, the boys try their hands at knot-tying.

At a ship's wheel in the gallery on US Revolution-era ships, including the Constitution and the Bonhomme Richard.

And sitting in a 1930s Class 1A lifeboat like those on the Titanic.