-deck in the old rig. Then both
ends of the ship were decked over for a distance of seventy feet;
while the midship section was covered by a sort of roof, or
pent-house, one hundred and seventy feet long, and extending about
seven feet above the gun-deck. This roof was of pitch pine and oak,
twenty-four inches thick, and covered with iron plates two inches
thick. The upper part of the roof, being flat, was railed in, making a
kind of promenade deck. In the great chamber formed by this roof were
mounted ten guns, two of which, the bow and stern guns, were
seven-inch rifles, and fairly powerful guns for those days. A strange
feature of this ship, and one that was not discovered until she was
launched, was that the weight of the iron-plating and the heavy guns
she carried sunk her so deep in the water that the low deck forward
and aft of the gunroom was always under water; so much so that the
commander of another ship in the Confederate navy writes that he was
obliged always to give the "Merrimac" a wide berth, lest he should run
his ship on some part of the ram which lay unseen beneath the surface
of the water. Powerful as this ship was, she had some serious defects.
The greatest of these were her engines. They were the same that had
been in her as a United States vessel, and had been condemned by a
naval board as very defective. Naturally several weeks under water had
not improved them; but the Confederates could not be particular about
machinery just then, and the old engines were left in the new ram. It
was quickly found that they could not be depended upon more than six
hours at a time; and one of the ship's officers, in writing years
afterwards, remarks, "A more ill-contrived or unreliable pair of
engines could only have been found in some vessels of the United
States navy." The second faulty feature about the "Merrimac" was that
her rudder and propeller were entirely unprotected. The ram which was
so much dreaded, and which made the "Merrimac" a forerunner of a new
class of war-vessels, was of cast-iron, projecting four feet, and so
badly secured that it was loosened in ramming the "Cumberland," and
started a bad leak in the Confederate ship.

When this formidable vessel was completed, she was christened by her
new owners the "Virginia;" but the name of the old United States
frigate of which she was built stuck to her, and she has ever since
been known as the "Merrimac," and so we shall speak of her in this
narrati