Christopher Gregory/The New York Times
A procession of sailors at Arlington National Cemetery on Friday to bury a pair of their Civil War Navy predecessors. More Photos »
ARLINGTON, Va. — Older women in hoop skirts and petticoats came together with youthful sailors in their dress blues for a rare public double interment at Arlington National Cemetery on Friday.
After a chapel service that included remarks by the secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, more than 500 people, including regiments of Civil War re-enactors and teenagers in camouflage-patterned pants, watched as the coffins, carried by horse-drawn wagon, were prepared for burial by a 76-member ceremonial guard.
The dead were two unidentified sailors from the ironclad warship Monitor, buried with full military honors 150 years after their ship sank during a storm off the coast of Cape Hatteras, N.C.
"This may well be the last time we bury Navy personnel who fought in the Civil War at Arlington," Mr. Mabus said. "But we do not hesitate to keep faith and to honor this tradition, even more than 150 years after the promise was made."
The flags over the sailors' coffins had 50 stars, not the 34 they fought under. And their bones, a Navy official said, were covered with contemporary dress blues.
The funeral was inspired by an enduring fascination with the sunken ironclad, which is credited with helping save the Union in the Civil War, as well as the military's pledge to leave no one behind.
It was also a reminder that family ties, however tenuous, are reinforced as much by narrative as by science.
"I've had relatives who served in World War I, World War II," said Pete Gullo, a descendent of Jacob Nicklis, whose body may have been one of those interred. "For some reason — and it shouldn't be, because he's farther back in time — it's almost like a more direct connection."
Of the 16 men who went down with the Monitor on Dec. 31, 1862, researchers have narrowed the identities of the two sailors to six possibilities. While there are no conclusive DNA matches with their descendants, forensic researchers are convinced that they will eventually find these men's stories in their bones.
Getting to know the six has helped some descendants feel a deeper sense of the sacrifice. Mr. Gullo, 47, has never served in the military, but he has thought about how Mr. Nicklis might have felt, drowning in the ship's turret.
"What was it like to suffer through that kind of very physical event?" he said.
The Monitor was a technological marvel that took the sailing — and in many ways, the sailor — out of sea warfare. It survived the world's first battle between two ironclads, fending off a much larger Rebel warship that threatened to destroy much of the Union fleet. But the Monitor's glory was short-lived.
"It's the irony of the ship that saved the Union," said David Alberg, superintendent of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. "Ten months later, it was lost in a storm."
In early 1862, the 62 or 63 crew members knew they were signing up for an experiment that the whole Union was watching, volunteering to be submerged astronauts in a 19th-century arms race. John Ericsson's design was unlike the wooden steamships and sailboats of the day, and only about two feet of the deck was above the water line.
Compared with the 44-gun frigates that were dominant, the Monitor was small, less than 180 feet long. It had only two guns, though with an innovation still used today: the turret rotated. The South's ironclad, the Virginia, was a Frankenstein — the salvaged hull of a destroyed Union ship, the Merrimack, 270 feet long with 10 guns.
By the time the Monitor left Brooklyn and arrived in Hampton Roads in 1862, the Virginia had already destroyed two Union frigates. The clash between the ironclads, on March 9, 1862, was deemed a draw, but the nimble Monitor successfully stopped the Confederate naval advance.
"For the Union, she was a symbol of American ingenuity," said Anna Holloway, the curator of the U.S.S. Monitor Center at the Mariners Museum in Newport News, Va.
For much of history, the Monitor's significance has overshadowed those who lived and died on it. "It's this real abstract notion," Ms. Holloway said, "and that's compounded by the fact that most of the imagery of the battle doesn't show people."
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