The Time Capsule: Remember the Maine, and Ensign Merritt’s ring

February 15 approaches, a date our newspapers and an emotional public promised Red Oak would never forget. While no one who made this commitment is still living, the significance remains.  Most readers know this, but I suspect not many are aware of the strange mystery of Darwin Merritt’s ring.    
Before the February 1998 edition of National Geographic was published, I’d read enough about Merritt to know he came from a prominent family, was a good student and athlete, popular with classmates at Red Oak High School; an all-around straight arrow.           Selected to attend the U.S. Naval Academy, he was a starter on the football team and ranked academically near the top of his class. A news item relates that, while home on leave, his
uniformed figure on the streets of Red Oak caused the hearts of young ladies to flutter.     
I’d read letters written as his ship, the USS Maine, set a course for Cuba. Not long after arrival, an explosion sent the Maine to the bottom of Havana Harbor, killing 266 seamen and igniting a war. Ensign Merritt, on duty below deck, was trapped in an officer’s wardroom.  
Red Oak had reason to remember the Maine.  
Years later, following inexcusable delays, the task of recovering the Maine from the comparatively shallow waters of Havana Harbor began. The first steps were encircling the ship with a cofferdam and pumping out the water.   
Preparations were made for dealing with human remains, and it was then that Darwin Merritt’s ring became an issue. Although identification was expected to be impossible with most victims, witnesses knew where Merritt was last seen. That room remained intact. Dental records from his time at the Academy were available. Merritt had participated in a traditional, almost sacred, rite of the midshipman’s class ring, and when that ritual was completed he vowed the ring would never be removed.    
Merritt’s skeletal remains were found in the wardroom, bits of his uniform still clinging, but the ring was gone. There was, at the time, no explanation. His bones were returned to Red Oak, an impressive funeral followed and Merritt was buried without his ring.  
A few weeks later, a Cuban laborer, hired as part of a crew that shoveled silt as water was being lowered in and around the ship, boasted in a bar he had an American sailor’s ring and was willing to sell. An authority secured the ring, confirmed it was Merritt’s, and returned it to family members in Red Oak.  
As I was initially researching this, there was a Merritt display in the basement of Red Oak’s library. This included an officer’s ceremonial sword, a couple of uniform buttons, and other relics related to the Maine and Merritt. I viewed them and crawled through the shrubbery at the Post Office to see the cornerstone that includes a plaque made of metal from the Maine, but I could not locate the ring.  I asked local historians and others and, at the time, found no one who knew.    
I assumed it had been handed down in the family and was perhaps tucked away somewhere in a jewelry box. On the other hand, in 1911 a salvage worker snatched the ring from the bones of Merritt’s hand. Might the ring have been stolen a second time? I really didn’t know and didn’t expect to find out.  
National Geographic, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Maine, assembled a team of experts to take another look at a mystery more profound than that of the ring—what had caused the explosion?  
Near the end of the article is a photograph of Merritt’s ring, and I learned the family had quietly given it to the Naval Academy museum in 1919.  
The ring was new when Merritt wore it during his visit home in 1895, was on his hand when he died, lay buried in the silt of Havana Harbor for 13 years, returned to Red Oak before being sent to Annapolis and can be seen on page 108 of the previously referenced magazine.