The test of her fighting qualities was attended by what almost suggested a miraculous coincidence. On Saturday, March 8, 1862, about noon, a strange-looking craft resembling a huge turtle was seen coming into Hampton Roads out of the mouth of Elizabeth River, and it quickly became certain that this was the much talked of rebel ironclad _Merrimac_, or, as the Confederates had renamed her, the _Virginia_. She steamed rapidly toward Newport News, three miles to the southwest, where the Union ships _Congress_ and _Cumberland_ lay at anchor. These saw the uncouth monster coming and prepared for action. The _Minnesota_, the _St. Lawrence_, and the _Roanoke_, lying at Fortress Monroe also saw her and gave chase, but, the water being low, they all soon grounded. The broadsides of the _Congress_, as the _Merrimac_ passed her at three hundred yards' distance, seemed to produce absolutely no effect upon her sloping iron roof. Neither did the broadsides of her intended prey, nor the fire of the shore batteries, for even an instant arrest her speed as, rushing on, she struck the _Cumberland_, and with her iron prow broke a hole as large as a hogshead in her side. Then backing away and hovering over her victim at convenient distance, she raked her decks with shot and shell until, after three quarters of an hour's combat, the _Cumberland_ and her heroic defenders, who had maintained the fight with unyielding stubbornness, went to the bottom in fifty feet of water with colors flying. Having sunk the _Cumberland_, the _Merrimac_ next turned her attention to the _Congress_, which had meanwhile run into shoal water and grounded where the rebel vessel could not follow. But the _Merrimac_, being herself apparently proof against shot and shell by her iron plating, took up a raking position two cables' length away, and during an hour's firing deliberately reduced the _Congress_ to helplessness and to surrender--her commander being killed and the vessel set on fire. The approach, the manoeuvering, and the two successive combats consumed the afternoon, and toward nightfall the _Merrimac_ and her three small consorts that had taken little part in the action withdrew to the rebel batteries on the Virginia shore: not alone because of the approaching darkness and the fatigue of the crew, but because the rebel ship had really suffered considerable damage in ramming the _Cumberland_, as well as from one or two chance shots that entered her port-holes.