had personally paid for the costs of all the officer's furnishings. Many details of Monitors history and insights of everyday crew life have been discovered from correspondence sent from the various crew members to family and friends while serving aboard the ironclad. In particular the correspondence of George S. Geer, who sent more than 80 letters, often referred to as The Monitor Chronicles, to his wife Martha during the entire time of Monitors service provide many details and insights into every chapter of the ironclad's short-lived history, offering a rare perspective of a sailor's experience on the naval front during the Civil War. The letters of Acting Paymaster William F. Keeler to his wife Anna also corroborate many of the accounts of affairs that took place aboard Monitor. The letters of Geer and Keeler are available for viewing and are housed at the Mariners' Museum in Virginia. Other crew members were interviewed later in life, like Louis N. Stodder, one of the last crew members to abandon Monitor minutes before she sank in a storm at sea, who was the last surviving crew member of Monitor and lived well into the 20th century. Service On 6 March 1862, the ship departed New York bound for Fort Monroe, Virginia, towed by the ocean-going tug Seth Low and accompanied by the gunboats and . Worden, not trusting the seal between the turret and the hull, and ignoring Ericsson's advice, wedged the former in the up position and stuffed oakum and sail cloth in the gap. Rising seas that night washed the oakum away and water poured underneath the turret, as well as through the hawsepipe, various hatches, ventilation pipes, and the two funnels, so that the belts for the ventilation and boiler fans loosened and fell off and the fires in the boilers were nearly extinguished over the course of the next day; this created a toxic atmosphere in the engine room that knocked out most of the engine-room crew. First Assistant Engineer Isaac Newton ordered the engine room abandoned and had the able-bodied crew drag the afflicted engine room hands to the top of the turret where the fresh air could revive them. Both Newton and Stimers worked desperately to get the blowers to work, but they too succumbed to the noxious fumes and were taken above. One fireman was able to punch a hole in the fan box, drain the