Witness to History: The Civil War from Aboard the Monitor
Jennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 10/11/2007
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Avi, the celebrated author of children’s and young adult books, is no stranger to historical fiction. His most recent title, Iron Thunder: The Battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac (Hyperion, 2007), focuses on the pivotal contest between two ironclad ships during the Civil War. Readers enter the fray through the eyes of 13-year-old Tom Carroll, who goes to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard after the death of his father, a Union soldier. The book is illustrated with black-and-white maps, photographs of artifacts, and reproductions of period artwork and etchings.
Through his depiction of this high-stakes 1862 naval battle, Avi examines the charged political atmosphere of the period as well as the scientific and engineering achievements of Captain John Ericsson, the designer of the Monitor. Iron Thunder is also the first book in Hyperion’s “I Witness” series of historical fiction titles for middle-school readers.
What prompted you to write about this particular moment in the Civil War?
This particular story is an amazing one. Its essential narrative flow is historical melodrama. There was a [100-day] race to build the Monitor and after so many difficulties, this small vessel managed to save the Union fleet—it's an astonishing story.
To add to that, I learned that the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News [VA] is close to where the battle took place and where they recovered the original Monitor. The Monitor Center at the museum opened last March, and I spent a fair amount of time there, so I was able to work toward an essential recreation of the events. The [ship’s] turret is on display, along with many of the artifacts I mention—a red lantern, and a butter dish with embossed gold.
I write a lot of historical fiction, but looking at Crispin, almost all of that was based on secondary sources. [To research that title I went] to England and looked at artifacts and so on. Working on Iron Thunder, I was able to read the letters and logs of the people who participated [in the conflict]. One of the great moments researching this book was reading a letter a sailor wrote two days after the battle; in it he says, “Mom, it was as if they were shooting spitballs at us.” You think of [spitballs] as a modern concept, but there they were in 1862.
The novel’s suspense keeps readers turning pages, but you also introduce a great deal of science and history as the novel unfolds. Did those details come along out of necessity?
Behind the “I Witness” of the series title is the idea that a young person is witness to the events. Usually I have an idea for a story, and I do the research to fit the story, but here I researched first and created a story that works its way through the actual events. It’s different from the way I usually work.
For example, I had to create a detailed chronology of the events—the building of the ship, and then when describing the actual battle, a minute-by-minute checklist of what is going on—and take that information and try to give it a narrative flow that would work from a boy’s perception.
One of my favorite details was Tom carrying messages between the Monitor’s turret, where the crew were manning the cannons, and the pilothouse, where the captain was stationed.
The connecting tube [between the two stations] actually did break during the storm, and they really needed someone to run back and forth. There was a guy, briefly mentioned in the book, Keeler, who was the actual runner, [but in the book Tom played that role]. There really was a Tom Carroll on the ship. He probably wasn’t as young [as I made him], and he came from Ireland; you change some things.
There are so many terrific details in here—that the Monitor weighed 120 tons “without her guns,” that the cannons were 8 feet long and weighed more than 8 tons each, the cannon balls weighed 135 pounds each.
What’s curious about those cannons was they were very advanced for their day, but the Monitor was not allowed to shoot the full volume and weight that they could have handled. If they had, they likely would have sunk the Merrimac.
Why weren’t they allowed to shoot the full volume and weight that they could have handled?
They were afraid the cannons would blow up. There were lots of things they didn’t know then. For instance, the contract specified that in order to build the ship, it had to have sails—they were afraid it couldn’t travel without them—but Ericsson just ignored that.
This guy, John Ericsson, is amazing. Ericsson was a sort of popular hero and there used to be a statue of him at the Battery; in Brooklyn there is an Ericsson Street and a Monitor Street, so it’s all very real. What’s curious about him is that he’s almost forgotten, but there’s not a Navy ship in the world that doesn’t have a movable turret and a propeller to move it, and those were his inventions.
Hear Avi read from Iron Thunder
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