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With five Cuban divers, we suit up—myself, Mike and Warren— and drop into the dark green water at slack tide. Even so, the current is strong, and we hang on to the weighted line we dropped earlier and follow it down. The water is dirty with silt, and we cannot see our hands in front of our faces. It gets darker, closing in, grayer, verging on black . . . and then suddenly, 30 feet from the bottom, the water clears dramatically. Below us is the mangled stern of a large steel ship. We trace the stern and find the rudder, knocked free of its mounts and resting against the hull. We follow it to the bottom and find the propeller. Mike shines the light on it, pointing out that one of its blades is missing — and it looks like it was shot away.

We continue on, under the overhang of the hull, past steel plating that dangles from the hull, and up onto the deck. I swim back to the stern and look into a tangle of debris. Lying in there is the ship’s steering gear, and it, too, looks as if it was hit by gunfire. Gouges and broken steel castings provide evidence of a tremendous blow, and I’m reminded, floating and kicking against the current, of Hobson’s account of how Merrimac’s stern was hit by gunfire and lost her ability to steer.

My excitement grows as we drift with the current along the deck, moving towards the bow. The decks of the wreck are laid out exactly as on Merrimac’s plans, with large coal holds, scuttles and ventilators, and the mounts for the ship’s two masts each lying between pairs of coal holds. This has to be Merrimac. I grin with my regulator clenched in my teeth and turn to Mike with a “high five” sign. The centrally located superstructure is badly mangled, the bridge smashed and gone, but, lying in the debris, I see a broken Champagne bottle. It’s too perfect, I think. We know that just before they headed in, Hobson and his crew drank a toast in a melodramatic moment, and I wonder if this is their bottle. It could have been tossed in years later from a passing ship, but just the same, I wonder.

Nearby are pairs of the ship’s davits used to launch Merrimac’s boats, again situated exactly where the plans indicate they should be. Shell holes in the decks are graphic evidence of heavy fire. One shell hole penetrates the deck on the starboard side of No. 3 hold, at an angle that suggests it was fired from an elevation off the ship’s starboard quarter, so presumably from El Morro just after Merrimac cleared the harbor entrance and was proceeding in.

Swimming forward, we find that the charges lowered into the water by the Cubans in 1976 have torn the hull down to below the waterline at the bow, scattering steel fragments along the seabed. And yet, buried in the mud, is the forward anchor. Concealed by silt with only one shank exposed, it is connected to the mangled stem by thick anchor chain. Later, Warren Fletcher finds the stern anchor above the silt off the ship’s starboard side, tightly held by chain, suggesting that instead of being shot away, as Hobson suspected, it had jammed and remained suspended alongside the hull when Merrimac sank. We also find two rows of anchor chain, partially buried in the buckled plating and sediment that covers the deck, running from the bow to the stern, exactly the way that Hobson described how his crew had rigged it.

We can find no definitive evidence of damage from the scuttling charges, though a hole and damage to the port quarter conceivably could be related to the charge that Hobson placed there. The hull is set into the silt of the harbor bottom to a level above the waterline, and our limited time on each dive does not allow for a comprehensive survey of the side of the hull to see if there is blasting damage. But we do see other damage that testifies to Merrimac’s end—and that demonstrates dramatically why Merrimac’s crew, like the men in the Spanish ships who fought through flame and shot—deserve the honor of being called heroes. The decks are warped and