. When the two ships next met it was in one
of the deadliest combats of naval history.

The machinery of the _Merrimac_ was condemned, and she went out of
commission on our return. She was still at Norfolk when the war broke
out, and was set on fire by the Federals when Norfolk was evacuated.
Some of the workmen in the navy-yard scuttled and sank her, thus putting
out the flames. When she was raised by the Confederates she was nothing
but a burned and blackened hulk.

Her charred upper works were cut away, and in the center a casement
shield one hundred and eighty feet long was built of pitch-pine and oak,
two feet thick. This was covered with iron plates, one to two inches
thick and eight inches wide, bolted over each other and through and
through the woodwork, giving a protective armor four inches in
thickness. The shield sloped at an angle of about thirty-six degrees,
and was covered with an iron grating that served as an upper deck. For
fifty feet forward and aft her decks were submerged below the water, and
the prow was shod with an iron beak to receive the impact when ramming.

Even naval officers were skeptical as to the result. The plates were
rolled at the Tredegar mills at Richmond, and arrived so slowly that we
were nearly a year in finishing her. We could have rolled them at
Norfolk and built four _Merrimacs_ in that time, had the South
understood the importance of a navy at the outbreak of the war.

I remember that my old friend and comrade, Captain Charles MacIntosh,
while awaiting orders, used to come over and stand on the granite
curbing of the dock to watch the work as it crawled along.

"Good-by, Ramsay," he said, sadly, on the eve of starting to command a
ram at New Orleans. "I shall never see you again. She will prove your
coffin." A short time afterward the poor fellow had both legs shot from
under him and died almost immediately.

Rifled guns were just coming into use, and Lieutenant Brooke, who
designed the _Merrimac_, considered the question of having some of her
guns rifled. How to procure such cannon was not easily discovered, as we
had no foundries in the South. There were many cast-iron cannon that had
fallen into our hands at Norfolk, and he conceived the idea of turning
some of this ordnance into rifles. In order to enable them to stand the
additional bursting strain we forged wrought-iron bands and shrank them
over the chambers, and we devised a special tool for rifling the bore of
t