[Shannon Ricles] All right.
Hi, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining us today for our webinar.
We welcome Susan Langley,
who will be sharing with us about Mallows Bay,
The Ghost Fleet and Beyond.
And I'm Shannon Ricles.
I am the Education and Outreach Coordinator
for both Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
and Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary,
and I will be one of your hosts today.
[Jessie Frayser] And I'm Jesse Frayser.
The Education and Outreach Support Specialist
for Monitor and Mallows National Marine Sanctuaries.
-: This webinar is brought to you today by
NOAA's Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
in collaboration with the North Carolina
Office of State Archeology.
-: Partnering since 1975, NOAA and the state of
North Carolina work to research, honor,
and protect the hallmarks of North Carolina's
underwater cultural heritage, shipwrecks.
These shipwrecks hold information about
the ever-changing technologies,
and cultural and physical landscapes.
They serve as a uniquely accessible underwater museum
and a memorial to generations of mariners
who lived, died, worked, and fought off our shores.
This is one of many webinars that we'll be hosting
in the coming months for the Submerged
North Carolina webinar series in collaboration with the
North Carolina Office of State Archeology.
-: Now, Monitor is just one of 15 national marine sanctuaries
and two marine national monuments in the
National Marine Sanctuary System.
And this system encompasses more than 620,000 square miles
of Marine and Great Lakes water
from Washington State to the Florida Keys.
And from Lake Huron to American Samoa.
And Mallows Bay is
one of the sanctuaries that was created in 2019,
and that's what we're gonna learn more about today.
Now, during the presentation,
all attendees will be in listen only mode.
You are welcome to type questions for the presenter
into the question box at the bottom of the control panel
on the right-hand side of your screen.
This is the same area you can let us know
if you're having any technical issues
that we can help you with.
We'll be monitoring the questions and the technical issues,
and we'll respond to them just as soon as we can.
We are recording this session,
and we'll share the recording with registered participants
via the webinar archive page.
And a URL for this webpage will be provided
at the end of the presentation.
-: So, today, we are excited to welcome
Dr. Susan Langley the State Underwater Archeologist
for the state of Maryland.
And so, we will pass that over to her.
And, thank you, Susan.
-: Okay, I'm sharing the screen with you, Susan.
-: [Dr. Susan Langley} Sorry, trying to find my screen.
-: There we go.
-: All right.
-: All right, perfect.
-: There we go.
Oops, no, I've lost my screen again, one moment.
My apologies.
-: We're seeing it, Susan.
-: All right, okay, there we go.
I was just trying to get the other panel off.
Anyway, let's just jump right in, because
I have way too much and they're gonna have to
get the hook anyway.
Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary.
It's 30 miles south of Washington, DC.
So, you get a sense of the location here.
I think you can see my mouse.
Here's Washington, here we are.
Here is Quantico Marine Corps base.
One of the vessels we'll talk about was,
well, actually, we won't talk about it today.
One of the vessels was built there.
They have an abiding interest in Mallows
and support us in a lot of different ways.
The Mallows Sanctuary, I'm just gonna shorthand it,
is about 17 square miles, or 11,000 plus acres,
in Maryland state waters.
Yes, they do go right to the Virginia shore.
That's a bone of contention since colonial times.
There are Virginia waters as well.
We'll talk about,
largely, the vessels that are on the right hand side in red,
that is Mallows Bay proper.
And, also, cluster of vessels over here
that share Virginia and Maryland waters,
what's known as Widewater.
Yes, the entire collection of vessels are on
the National Register of Historic Places.
As Shannon mentioned, the
sanctuary was designated September 3rd, 2019.
But we cleverly waited until November,
on the coldest day of the year, to have our dedication.
And we have a number of kiosks.
Governor Hogan spoke and visited
the site, and talked to all our volunteers.
Mario Harley, at the bottom,
is bringing greetings and blessings
from the Piscataway Tribe.
This is the ancestral lands of Piscataway First Nations.
And we know they've been here for a long time.
Father White, in colonial times, had contact.
Did a number of drawings of the
First Nations People of these regions.
Archeologically, of course, there's a presence.
And this presence is sustained until today.
These are relatively new signs throughout the park,
Mallows Bay Park.
And the Piscataway are playing a very active role
in interpretation of the site as well.
So, we have a lot of partners.
I'll talk a little bit more about some of the
exciting things that are coming up
as we go through the paper.
If you like Sherman's Lagoon, I had to put this in.
Jim Toomey has been a long time
supporter of the sanctuaries.
He
put together, for the month of October, in 2022, a virtual-
Not virtual, printed,
birthday card to the Sanctuaries Act,
which was 50 years old.
And he spent the month going through all the sanctuaries.
I think he did all of them.
If you wanna go back through the archives,
Washington Post archives, you can check out
your favorite sanctuary, which I hope is ours.
But here are three of them
that relate to Mallows Bay.
We look at the whole area, both land, and water,
and cultural, and natural, features
very wholistically as a maritime landscape.
And, within the landscapes, we know we can do,
there's various ways to interpret it.
We are looking at various themes, perhaps.
There are lots of different ways.
But, as an example, I'm gonna pull out
a transportation theme.
This drawing is by a Colonel William Small.
And it was in Charles County, where we are, 1861.
And this is a region where
the very first aerial surveillance by balloon
from purpose-built vessels,
in this case, it's from the ground,
took place to surveil the Confederate lines.
Samuel Pierpont Langley,
yes, he may be a distant relative, I'm not sure.
Undertook some flight testing on the river
in the early 20th century.
1903 to 1911.
Basically, they sling shotted these aircraft
off this houseboat.
They were not powered.
He wasn't contending with the Wright brothers.
But we do have those bits of evidence.
We do not yet have any First Nations watercraft.
There's a possibility of a
Revolutionary War, a small boat from a larger ship
that went in to look for water.
Whether it's still there or not, we're not sure.
There were a lot of ferry crossings and steamboat wharfs.
So, there's a whole maritime
theme that can be interpreted.
This vessel is still there,
and I wanna talk about it a little bit.
It was built as the Virginia Lee in 1928.
It's a steamboat.
It carried troops to World War II.
And came back and served as a ferry from,
across most of the Chesapeake,
from the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula to mainland Virginia
until they built the bridge tunnel.
So, it functioned,
rebuilt, in the upper left, in 1952.
Very different, you wouldn't recognize 'em almost.
Same vessel, renamed the Accomac with this big spoon bow.
And it caught fire in '65,
disappeared from the steamship company's register in '72,
and appeared in Mallows Bay.
How you sneak in a vessel that large,
it's a very rural area, but it's a surprise.
We thought, until recently, it might have been
our most recent addition.
The stern end is underwater, unfortunately,
but it does give you, if you paddle out to it,
and I'll show some images later,
the size of the vessels that are in the World War I fleet,
that's positioned here, because it's about 265 feet long,
and that's a good average.
They varied a bit.
That's a good average for our vessels.
So, it's a bit of a sentinel.
It's one of the few, it is the only metal hull,
completely metal hull vessel.
And it's being studied as well.
The study is part of a master's thesis for bio corrosion.
And I'll come back to some of the research
being undertaken later.
But this is one of the focus, main foci of our sanctuary.
It was one of the reasons we were able to,
you know, bring it to the forefront.
It is the largest homogeneous collection of
historic vessels in the world.
There are larger collections of vessels
that were just randomly brought together
for breaking up in India and Africa.
But this is built for one purpose and in one place.
So, background a little bit.
These are not Navy vessels,
they are merchant marine.
During the First World War, the government set up the
US Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation.
And the purpose was to build, at that time,
a thousand ships quickly.
They're gonna be old technology, wood-built, steam ships.
But the purpose was to have enough vessels going over
with supplies to our beleaguered allies
that some of them would get through.
How to tell if you're, you know,
disposable or not, you know?
But they ended up not building the full thousand.
They determined to bill, contracted for 730.
98 were completed at the end of the war.
In 1919, 264 were completed, others were canceled.
Only 195 ever crossed the Atlantic,
and that was after the war.
So, it sounds a bit of a boondoggle,
but there are silver linings all the way along to this.
And I'll tell you a little story.
The middle poster's my favorite.
In the clouds of steam, you can see cavalry,
and biplanes, and submarines, and this massive launch.
The story is that only 94 vessels were ready to launch,
but the posters were already made.
So, we'll go along with it and,
you know, not ruin a good story totally.
One of the purposes, if you're going to build 730 vessels,
you need enough personnel to fully train
to the same standards to man them.
And this actually led to the formalization of
the American Merchant Marine.
That's one of the big points.
I'm gonna make three big points.
This is one of the big ones.
Merchant Mariners always existed,
but this actually brought them together
under coherent training practices for this fleet.
And, if you look at the scale at the top,
Merchant Mariners made a substantial
contribution during the war.
Unfortunately, they are not considered veterans.
Nor are any Merchant Mariners after World War II.
Only World War II.
So, the Merchant Marine are still working
to gain this status.
There are very few monuments.
There's one, this is a Navy Merchant Marine monument
on Lady Bird Johnson Park, on Columbia Island.
It was actually dedicated in 1934.
You can see there are seven seagulls for the seven seas.
And this big cresting wave.
Very beautiful but shared.
This is one of the only two I know of
dedicated Merchant Marine memorials.
This is in Battery Park, New York City.
And it's from a photograph taken by the
U-boat captain who sank that vessel.
And none of these men actually survived from the photograph.
But, very poignantly, the sailor in the water
symbolically drowns twice a day with the tide changes.
So, a World War II monument
dedicated solely to Merchant Mariners.
And there's one other I've found on the
eastern shore of Maryland at the,
on the Marine Engineers Benevolent Association campus.
It's private, but the park is open,
and you can go and visit the memorial.
So, we have the coalescence of the Merchant Mariners.
This is a map.
It was put together by Donald Schomad,
who's a well-known maritime author who did a,
has a book, Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay.
Most of the research on the history,
which we're all adding now.
This is a shipyard representing,
all of the shipyards that are listed here
have a vessel in Mallows Bay as of 1929.
So, we know there were at least 58 shipyards
contributed vessels to Mallows Bay.
I've since located about another dozen,
so we can say at least 70 shipyards
were built or were established to build vessels
for this World War I fleet.
And that brings me to, sort of, the second big point.
Because of these facilities being created,
because of all the people they trained,
America was propelled to the forefront of
shipbuilding for the 20th century.
So, that's the second outgrowth of this construction,
of this fleet.
So, it does have a big silver lining.
The plans for these are fairly available.
And I'll come back to a little mystery
that has recently solved.
There were ten designs.
Nine of which are seen in, somewhere,
represented in Mallows Bay.
You look at the bottom right, it says supple and ballin.
That was one of the designs.
And then, at the top, it lists the names of
some of the vessels built to that design.
The Chief Naval Architect for this whole
company was Theodore Ferris.
And, the most,
the largest number of vessels of one design
were Ferris designed vessels.
Sorry, I'm just getting ahead of myself here.
This is a number of the vessels when they're,
you know, afloat.
And they're, you know, quite dramatic, as I said,
that we had, 264 ended up being built.
This is a lovely one of the, I believe this is the,
the first one was the Rockland.
Or, pardon me, the Utoka.
It was built in Rockland, Maine.
It is at Mallows.
This one is the Benago built in 1918,
but I've put it in because it has
what's known as dazzle camouflage.
Sadly, all photos are black and white,
but I've seen watercolors.
It's shades of blue, and gray, and black, and white
that look like light refracting off the water.
So, they're much more art deco looking
than others we've seen.
I wanna spend a bit of time here.
This is in Alexandria, Virginia.
It is where Jones Point Park stands now,
which is right under the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
If you know the area, right where you cross
into DC from Virginia.
And a lot of ships were being built in this area.
And, interestingly enough, this is sort of where
the fleet story comes full circle.
Because, let's take it from here.
The war ends.
It ended a little bit before it was anticipated.
That's never a bad thing.
But you have 264 wooden steamships
that are very slow, speed-wise,
very large to fill cargo.
What do you with them?
You'd say, "Well, we'll sell them off."
Okay, you can try.
And they did sell a number into private service.
But you have a lot of metal hulls and diesel engines
coming back from the theater of war.
So, it's really hard to sell these.
As I said, they did sell a number of them.
I think they ended up,
well, I'll come back to it.
We sold a number of them, 18 of them were in Baltimore.
14 of which, I must say, are a bulkhead.
But a number of them were used by the
Davidson Chemical Company to sail to
Cuba and bring back pyrites.
So, you didn't need to fill it completely with a heavy load.
But the problem was, if you had to wait around,
or move up and down the coast to get a full cargo,
it's costing you money.
You can't take anything perishable,
because it moves too slowly.
So, it was really hard to sell them.
And, even the ones that were carrying pyrites,
ended up being abandoned after two years.
So, they have what-
After they've made their sales, they have 233 ships left.
And they put them out for bid.
And it took three bids to, finally,
get a company to buy them.
And it bought the entire fleet.
Two California lawyers set up the
Western Marine and Salvage Company.
Bought the entire fleet for $750,000,
the cost of one vessel.
There are still vessels scattered around.
There's still some in Texas.
There's still some in Virginia.
They're out there anyway.
But the gentleman, then, took the vessels and-
Oh, you can see a better shot of it here.
You can see the Jones Point light.
So, it gives you a better sense of it.
But they left these moored off of Widewater, Virginia,
basically down where the sanctuary is.
And they would bring a few up at a time
to break them down in this yard.
Most of the engines and things were out of them.
They were tearing the wood apart to get cross strapping,
cross strap metal, that ran between the frames,
or ribs as you call 'em, and the outer hull.
And they wanted that metal, and they wanted the drift pins,
the big spikes that held them together.
So, if you go there today, there is still one shipways left
that you can visit from World War I.
Here's the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
So, Jones Point Park in Alexandria.
The vessels were,
due to a number of economic and political problems,
they decided they would stop using Alexandria
and they would just break them down at Widewater.
They bought the land over at Mallows Bay
and we're pulling them up on the shore there.
Breaking them down, and burning them,
and settling them into the harbor.
Strangely enough, coincided with the downturn
in the fishing industry, despite being,
locals being assured that the charcoal
would sweeten the water and be good for fish.
Probably not.
Now, the company did these mass burns.
Here's one of the extreme ones.
And this is at the mouth of the, of Mallows.
But vessels would break loose in storms,
sail off, become hazards to navigation.
They would catch fire without being set on fire.
And the responders for the area were the Marine Corps.
And this got old for them very quickly.
And they insisted the company corral these vessels.
So, they were all pushed into Mallows Bay,
bow in, stern out, in parallel rows,
and sort of burned down there
or pulled up on shore and broken up.
They put rocks in them to keep them from sailing away.
And tried to drive stakes in around the front of the
base, so they wouldn't go walk about.
The Depression hits,
and the company, which was always a bit sketchy, went under.
The local people took it on.
And this is the, my third big point is,
it provided 15% of the per capita income
for Charles County during the Great Depression.
It's a very poor, rural county, especially at this time.
And so, this was a huge boon to these people
to survive the Depression.
This is a 1929
US Corps of Engineers survey of the Bay
and the vessels in it.
And, because of this map,
most of them can be identified at this time.
There's still some over on Widewater, Virginia,
and we'll come back to those.
The local folks, actually, once they started
breaking it too, the company came back
and tried to reclaim it.
They went to court,
they won the right to continue breaking it.
So, the workers have the right to do this.
They brought in this vessel.
It's the Ida S. Dow.
It was in an accident over in Newport
News. It was, had been repaired, and no one wanted it.
So, they brought it over as a dormitory and dining hall.
It was same vintage.
It was built in 1918 in Maine.
And we were contacted by a gentleman who,
to my knowledge, is still with us.
Who said, "I was the last person alive
to walk the decks of these ships."
He was a child, his dad was a breaker, his mom was a cook.
So, we're very lucky to have Mr. Arthur Willett
giving us information on these sites.
This one never exposes, we know where it is.
It does not expose.
I've never seen it surface at any time.
So, it's one that, I still wanna dive on that one.
So, this was, you know, one of the non-vessel,
non-World War I vessels, and we will see more.
So, let's have a comparison here.
1929, this is based on the Corps map.
You can see all the vessels.
If you look up here at the top, near the compass,
the shore is smooth.
We see this accrete onto a vessel later.
Here is
19, oh, gosh, sorry, it's covered up on me,
but I think this is in the '30s.
And this is when the local folks are working on,
we start to see barges appearing.
And you start to see beginning of this spit.
So, here we are, in 1952, big difference.
We see lots of little barges that were brought in
to help with the breaking process.
The spit still hasn't fully accreted.
And one of these ships is now under it,
so I'm not sure which one.
Many more of them are now unidentified.
Every time one was removed, the rest shifted.
So, it's become harder and harder to identify them.
And here we are, in 1994.
And these were produced, also by Donald Schomad,
who was surveying the area for us.
And, again, fewer are being identified.
We do have, now, down here, there's the Accomac,
our steamer, that's been brought in.
This is the Ida S. Dow,
that lovely schooner I just showed you.
These are more pilings to try and contain the vessels.
So, big difference between 1929 and 1994 here.
And, of course, we know what happened between
the thirties and the nineties here, the fifties.
World War II happened.
So, here's Mallows on Google Earth.
We can see Quantico.
Here's an overview of it.
And, you can see, here's the Accomac, our metal hull.
This is the Ida S. Dow.
This is the Benzonia, which hurricane Isabel
lifted up in 2003 and dropped on the vessel beside it.
And you can now see there's a spit here
that's overgrown a couple of vessels.
And this is what happened in World War II.
Bethlehem Steel was given authority to come down,
take over breaking, they built, basically, a lock,
or a burning basin, in the back of the bay.
And they would pull the ships from the closest point,
that's why our big gap here, in here.
And, you know, burn them down, flood them out.
They could float them in, burn them,
you know, drain it, collect the metal.
They did about a dozen vessels,
one of them upside the gates and 11 in there,
and basically said, "This is not cost effective."
"It's not worth it."
And so, basically, that ended with the war.
I will say, that there's a lot of drama
between then and now with land ownership,
and various efforts to remove the ships.
But, they're still there, so we're gonna just move forward.
And this is what the bay looked like
as late as 1948, in winter.
There's ice in between them.
You could still almost walk across it, on these vessels.
Again, these are each 265 feet long.
One of the, I think one of the indicators we have of
increasing sea level rise, if you will.
This area is tidal, although it's basically fresh water
at this point, but it is still tidal.
The vessels do not grow this much vegetation anymore.
I took these in the mid '90s, '96 or so.
And we had a fair bit of vegetation
still growing on these vessels out in the water.
That doesn't happen as much now.
It does happen on one's closer to the shore, like these.
And we have some that are, you know,
because of the rocks in them,
picking up all kinds of soil, and then seeds,
and, you know, they become little,
you know, holders if you will, or flower pots.
Here's an overview of it back in, again, the '90s.
So you can see a lot more vegetation.
Now, the ones near shore, down here,
yes, these are virtually garden islands.
And you can see one of the Depression Era barges on here.
This was result of a survey,
a still taken from a survey that was undertaken by
Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing
for Duke University and Syracuse University.
And, to give you a sense of scale,
you can see the kayakers in the upper center.
You can see people on the spit.
And these massive, massive vessels.
And we did, I guess we do still get some
vegetation on some of them.
It just doesn't strike me as quite as much as in the past.
And, surveys like this, this is to three centimeters.
So, the files are enormous.
But we can use them in interpretive programs.
And we are working up a whole bunch of new ones.
We started out with getting waterproof paddling maps.
We put out some seasonal buoys,
they're not there right now, but they do go out seasonally.
NOAA funds and our natural resources department
puts out a data buoy every year for,
not just the weather, and water temperatures, and things,
which help the recreational boaters and the watermen,
but also dissolved oxygen, salinity,
and things that we need for studying
the climatic effects on the bay.
And also for biometric studies.
So, our waterproof maps give you a little bit of
history on this side.
On the other side, there is flora, and fauna,
and other information.
We do have hiking maps as well for the park around.
There is a story map we put together
with Chesapeake Conservancy.
But we continue to evolve these.
And this does have sound, but I'm leaving it muted
so I can talk over it for a moment.
But this is a available on the website.
You can find it on YouTube.
You can just Google Mallows Bay virtual tour.
But it is, if you have virtual reality goggles,
it's amazing.
I'm gonna pull it.
Gosh.
I guess we got sound after all on this one, there we go.
I'm just gonna skip along with it to
cover out, to show you some of the features,
because it's four minutes and I can't take that.
You can watch it yourself.
If you have a touch screen or a mouse,
you can still play with it 360.
This is where a drone goes up in the sky
and you can move it.
I'll try not to make you too seasick.
This is in autumn, so you can turn it right around.
You can look below you at the kayakers.
You can look above you.
You can, there's our Benzonia,
the one that got lifted up by the hurricane.
And you can play with this in general.
In a bit, it moves along.
And we get to go paddling.
You can
go, turn around and see the person
who's paddling behind you.
I think I can, I'm not in the water yet.
There's one where you turn around,
the gentleman's right behind you paddling.
But you can do this wonderful virtual tour there.
As I said, there is audio with this,
but that's one of our newer contributions.
Now, I've gotta see if I can get outta this.
It doesn't always let me.
Oh, we got on, okay.
Some very new stuff that isn't quite up yet,
but will be soon.
I wanna make sure I didn't skip something.
I think I might have.
Let me just back up one if I can.
Nope, sorry.
Maybe I did lose it.
One of our, the doctoral,
I have a doctoral student working on a site.
I'm a little bit mortified,
I think I've lost a slide, maybe, we'll see.
She is actually putting the skin back
on a number of the vessels and making them 3D.
So, you can actually go in and see
how they were constructed.
And this is going to be featured in a
whole bunch, if I will, a number of new layers of
interpretation that are gonna be made available later,
either late spring, early summer.
But this is part of it.
She's also a recipient of the Nancy Foster Scholarship.
Very prestigious NOAA scholarship.
So, very cool stuff there.
And, oops, oh, here we go.
The woman who's doing this, Allyson Ropp,
is also doing her doctorate on this ship, the Aowa.
And they put together these posters.
East Carolina University held a field school at Mallows.
Hopefully, they're going to hold more.
I think they're in the planning.
Overseen by Dr. Nathan Richards.
And these drawings are, oh, goodness, let me just back up.
Are five feet long.
I've got some four footers on my wall at my office.
So, you can't expect to read these, it's too small.
But you can see, on the bottom one,
the ship's profile of what it would be.
You can see the dark gray of what's left of it.
Allyson is doing a study of the
microbiome of the vessel to see what,
you know, what's living on it.
Is it deleterious?
Is it beneficial?
What do we have?
What can we anticipate?
Can we determine how long they have before they
disappear entirely?
The vessel above, the Bayou Teche,
was an additional study of interest.
We were approached by a museum in Louisiana
where it was built on Lake Pontchartrain
at the shipyard where it came from.
So, they wanna partner with us.
But, one of the mysteries was,
when students were mapping these,
they did not match the plans.
And you might say, "Geez, are we on the wrong boat?"
Possibility.
Did the shipyards just do their own thing?
You know, possibility.
Dr. Richards just announced two weeks ago,
at the Society for Historical Archeology meeting,
that, through research, they've determined that
the engineer, Ferris, and the naval architect,
was adamant that his designs were good.
Other naval architects had said to him
that there's problems.
And he didn't budge until Lloyd's of London said,
"We won't certify these unless changes are made."
Changes were made and plans do exist,
they're just not as widely distributed.
These match the approved plans.
So, thank goodness for Dr. Richard's research and his,
you know, detective work, they were able to determine
that these are the vessels we thought.
They are built to the correct plans.
So, detective work, you know, is just very, very cool.
All right.
The 3D vessels you saw
that Allyson Ropp is putting together
were sort of an outgrowth of another Master's program,
a Master's thesis.
And Taylor Pickard
managed to do a sublime Master's during the height of COVID.
Trying to get research done was astounding.
This vessel was in the back of our burning basin.
It's always just been called the Sea Scout boat.
He was able to determine that it had sat
at the torpedo factory in Alexandria.
It's now an art gallery.
'Til 1983, and was moved down here
where there was a somewhat illicit boat club,
as it was called, but it wasn't really legal,
and most of the vessels were half sunk anyway.
And it was all taken out except this vessel.
These are my photos from 1997.
By the time he came out,
and that's him wading out there in 2020.
The one above is probably between the two.
Somebody put a Santa on it for Christmas.
I have a hard time being mad about that.
But it's going downhill quickly.
So, he managed to get enough drawings,
this is it last fall,
to create, also, some of the early 3D models.
You can see he used Sketch Fab.
These do move, I'm not going to do it.
But, you can see it, skin off, skin on.
And so, when we saw that, we saw the potential for it,
and that's been carried forward.
Let's quickly run over to the
other side of the river for a minute
to look at the wrecks over near Widewater here.
These are volunteers from the
Institute for Maritime History.
And they have, out there documenting these.
Interestingly, without even using fancy side scan
and magnetometer, which are mine.
They actually took a fish finder out there
and were able to determine
that there aren't nine vessels as we thought.
There are actually maybe close to 15.
And they're layered up like this.
Again, remember how big these are, 265 feet.
We also have, here, the fastest vessel that was
built in the fleet, in 17 days.
And this is just getting the hull in the water.
The first one built the north bend
is actually in Mallows, it was 28 days.
So, this is an area that requires more research.
This is one of the vessels that does
tend to expose periodically.
Well, it's exposed often, when we have low tides.
I'm a little bit worried because it pivots a little bit.
We don't want it go,
it won't really go away, but it could break up.
And, you can see, this is an area
full of hazards for boating.
So, it's all charted as, you know, no boating here, please.
It's something else we do have to warn guests about,
you know, who show up with inflatable kayaks
and cardboard foldable kayaks.
They don't usually wanna listen, but it's not recommended.
So, as I said, what what fun can you have?
What can you do at Mallows?
Paddling among the wrecks, of course,
is always a good time, canoeing, kayaking.
If you wanna get right in among them,
please do it at low tide.
I don't like it when people high-center and get stuck,
and then they have to use their paddle,
and they chop up the wreck pushing themselves off.
You can fish, you still need a fishing license.
It's great for bird watching.
In fact, it speaks well to the health of the river that,
when I first went there, we saw maybe three eagles.
Now it's not uncommon to see seven.
These are osprey of course, but they're seasonal,
but we do see those a lot too.
This was the Benzonia.
It was going to be our poster, you know, logo, whatever.
Beautiful vessel in great shape.
Unfortunately, in the mid twenty-teens it had a fire.
The fire department from Virginia,
Prince William County, came over and put it out.
We're very grateful.
And then, about four years later, we had another fire.
And this one didn't get put out as quickly, unfortunately,
and did an astounding amount of damage to it.
But it does show, this is concrete.
The vessels, oh, I shouldn't touch it.
The vessels
have these concrete frames or ribs in the bow and stern.
Not all of them, just some.
And there's nothing in the record.
Some places have masses of concrete.
So, this could have been a response to,
it shook too badly from the engine.
It had leak problems.
A lot of 'em were built with green wood.
And the captain said
they expected them to bud in the spring and provide
pine cones for the Christmas mass.
You know, they,
so they could have been trying to resolve a problem.
We're not a hundred percent sure,
but they do become exposed.
What do we think caused the fire?
It was not lightning.
There was none for either time.
It could have been a stray cigarette
that blew into the osprey nest.
'Cause, in both cases, it's at the stern where the nest is.
It could also been the osprey themselves.
If you ever look in an osprey nest,
it looks like a frat house after a party.
They bring in all kinds of junk.
And, if they brought in any prismatic plastic,
it could easily have acted like a magnifying glass.
And, as I said, both times it started in the nest.
So, we don't know.
This is a little bit upstream,
and you can see this one vessel is full of trees.
Not good for the vessel, but it's doing great guns
at staving off erosion of the shore.
And that's significant in and of itself.
I wanna talk about debris for a moment,
and I'll come back to that ship.
We did a number of trash pickups in the spring,
and they were very successful.
A few times they were overly successful.
People would go into the brush and bring out artifacts,
because World War II's not that long ago.
Or World War I for that matter.
But, either case, they would traipse out with cans of,
you know, kerosene cans.
And I'm like, "No, no, no, put it back, put it back."
So, we had to sort of restrict what people collected as
trash, because we can't expect them to differentiate.
That brings us to a couple years ago,
when they opened the Conowingo Dam,
there was a huge amount of debris came down.
Bad enough that they had to cancel sailing races,
the Governor's Cup, because of all the deadheads.
This is Annapolis Inner Harbor,
or city dock, cleaning it out.
And that's one of the things, when people go out to
collect all these and help clean up,
we don't know if they're collecting artifacts
as well as just plain trees and debris.
Now, should we care?
I don't know, that's debatable.
This is right back in front of that vessel
that I just showed you with the trees on it.
Clearly, this is modern.
It's been drilled and chiseled.
Here's some modern hardware over here.
This is from that World War I map.
So, people would clean both up, calling it debris.
Do we care?
Well, in this case, we know where that came from,
but we do, on the coast, have a wreck tagging program,
where we put QR codes on stray timbers
and track their movement.
We can't put them on every ship up there.
Remember, there are at least a hundred left,
105 something, that are still left in Mallows Bay.
So, yeah, it's gonna, we couldn't tag every timber
on every one of those ships.
So, maybe, we just have to look at this and say,
it's going to happen.
It'll be out of context, you know?
And we have to let it go.
You have to sort of, you know, pick your battles I suppose.
Or, maybe, there are other suggestions of
things we can do for this.
What are our challenges?
The fire is a challenge, of course.
The marine debris is a challenge.
Safety is always a concern.
As I say, you can see here, in the bottom,
when those crisscross strapping,
that was a lot of what they were trying to recover.
As well as all the drift pins you can see.
Again, we don't want people, you know,
impaling their plastic kayaks
or rubber inflatable cardboard on them or themselves.
We don't want people climbing on the wrecks.
It's one of the few rules we have.
But the area is remote.
And, for your safety, because, being remote,
there is no one on shore who's going to
paddle out to rescue you.
And 911's not around the corner.
It takes a while to get out there.
So, we really want people to err on the side of caution.
To be careful, to not climb on the wrecks,
not hurt yourself, not damage these, you know,
fragile elements of our heritage either.
I mentioned fisheries before.
There was a very strong shad fishery in the area.
It's not gone, but it's not as strong as it was.
There was an amazing, these are some menhaden boat.
There are no menhaden, the vessel was up there for some
other reason, and it was illegally destroyed unfortunately.
The house in the background is a caviar cannery.
We had sturgeon, and enough sturgeon
to have an active caviar industry.
Now, if a sturgeon is found,
it literally makes the newspaper.
And they are coming back very, very slowly.
And, unfortunately, the fishery,
and there was a fishery in Mallows Bay
that belonged to the Wilson Farm,
that was the land where the park is.
And they had net repairs and tarring stations,
and those are still there to be studied.
But the sturgeon went away very quickly after that.
So, we hope they'll come back.
But, now, so far, it's baby steps.
What we do have, unfortunately, are blue headed catfish.
Very invasive.
And the ones on the left are edible.
The one on the right, the really big ones,
and that's Captain Danny Slater,
gave me permission to use this one,
you can't eat that.
They're big enough and old enough that they've accrued
too much pollute, too many pollutants in them.
I've heard they take them to the fish market
in DC that sell, chops 'em up, and sells 'em with cat food.
I'm not sure I want my cat eating it.
And, I think, maybe, fertilizer.
But they've told me, the captains,
there's half a dozen captains
who are doing their best to capture these.
That there are even larger breeder catfish
that will actually bend a gaff hook.
They said that they'll probably never get those.
So, unfortunate for us that we're stuck with these.
Fortunate for us, they have a sustainable living,
and are doing their best to get them out.
There are studies being undertaken.
People on the lower left are studying the biota
on the vessels.
Blue herons love to live in the burning basin.
We named them all Mr. And Mrs. Wilson, it doesn't matter.
Just, you know, for the folks who live there.
There are trees here, up in the upper right.
We have a beaver dam, a beaver lodge rather, lives on this.
And, as much as, being Canadian, I love my beavers.
They're all majestic.
I was very worried they were chewing
their tunnels through it, but they cleverly didn't.
They actually used the space between the frames,
the ribs, to make their getaway.
So, they're being very sensitive to their environment.
And they often chew down the larger trees
before they damage the vessels.
Although, they haven't got that pine tree yet again.
Fish studies are, of course, being undertaken all the time.
And there are studies of the osprey and the eagles.
The fellow with the cross beak is sort of known,
because he's being monitored by
an organization in Virginia.
Hydrilla, unfortunately, was introduced in the '80s,
1983 I think, into the Potomac to help clean it up.
You know, the nation's river was in
sad, sad state back then.
Unfortunately, with most introductions, it's run amuck,
and is causing a lot of problems.
These are nutria.
I've been told they're in the area.
I've never seen one.
I've been told they make good pets or they're good eating.
So, either way, it could be a win-win for you.
Snake heads are the other invasive species in the area.
That's a teeny one.
They've gotten, you know, three feet long now.
Obviously, we encourage fishing those out.
Some of the local bars serve appetizers called snake bites.
Or put them in sandwiches.
So, please, eat your fill.
It's sort of like eating the lion fish.
Eat the snake heads, save a ship.
Or save the waterway, really,
they don't harm the ships per se.
We don't know quite what else might be out there,
but there are studies being undertaken at all times,
and who knows what will turn up.
But we have one more,
a future problem that I'm concerned about.
This is, it's called a bivalve, even though it's a worm.
This is teredo navalis, and it's called a ship worm.
It will eat any wood that's exposed
that's not below an anaerobic level in the soil.
And, originally, they came from India and Southeast Asia,
brought back by the explorers to Europe.
They lived mostly in very warm,
very salty water, like the Med [Mediterranean].
Which is why we never find boats
unless they're under piles of amphra,
or something like that.
The problem with them is, they will, yes, here,
the one on the left is archeological.
The one on the right is a test sample.
Ships have sunk from having them eat the bottoms out.
And, I mean, active ships in the day of sail.
The problem with these is
they're becoming cold water tolerant.
They were found off of Svalbard in a timber.
Svalbard's 116 kilometers from the North Pole.
There were multi-generations alive in this timber.
So, it wasn't like it just washed up the day before.
It had been living in there some time.
So, cold water tolerant.
They're turning up in the Baltic, which is only
three percent as salty as the Atlantic.
And think of the Vasa or the Mars,
any of the ships up there that are exposed,
Vasa is outta the water.
But, I mean, famous ships that are
still in the Baltic are at risk now.
And, a secondary danger we hadn't thought about,
off of Rhode Island, where Captain Cook's vessel,
Endeavor is, ship worm are eating one side,
gribbles, or Limnoria, another wood eater,
is eating the other side.
And then, when the wood gets weak,
predators of these worms tear the wood apart to get to them.
So, we've got secondary damage
from the hunters of the predators.
So, if these come up in Mallows Bay,
and as I say, Mallows is still considered
fresh water at this point.
Occasionally, when we've had a drought,
the salt water does come up that far,
and people can go crabbing.
We don't have any resident oyster beds or clams.
It's not saline enough.
However, with climate change,
and with the adaptation of these vessel,
these creatures to fresher water, colder water,
if they rode up on a salt wave,
they could easily look at Mallows as a smorgasbord.
And, unfortunately, it's an understudied
area of the Chesapeake.
Most of the studies I found are from the 1950s.
So, any marine biologists out there,
we need studies on ship worm in the Chesapeake.
If you have students, steer them to us out.
It would be phenomenal data that would be extremely useful.
We are studying or looking at, there's a paper out now,
research on climate change impacts in Mallows Bay.
Maryland is very cognizant of ocean acidification
and has a climate change action plan.
At Mallows, we welcome, not just archeological,
but any academic field schools for,
you know, studies in the area.
As I said, we do have microbiome, bio corrosion study.
We have another entity using hydrophone to hear what
the critters are saying to each other down there.
Academic partners are welcome.
We desperately wanna do some oral histories of the area.
Obviously, there's no one left who worked on these vessels.
Even their children are elderly.
So, we're probably dealing with grandchildren
who are not exactly young either.
And, before we lose all these data,
and they still have stories and photos and things,
we desperately would like to see an oral history done.
We were thinking about that when COVID hit.
And that put kibosh on, because, of course,
trying to get a bunch of older folks together
is risky enough, you know, at a center or something.
But it's an area that needs looking at.
So, if anyone wants to do work in the area,
you have research ideas,
you can email, you know, Shannon,
she'll get it to Paul, Sammy Orlando,
who's the superintendent.
Or to me, you can email me here if you have questions.
If you have ideas, you know, we welcome research.
It truly is a living laboratory.
And I'm gonna leave it there and
answer any questions that I can.
[Shannon] Okay.
Thank you, Susan.
I learned a lot today.
I don't know about everybody else,
but, man, that's fascinating, thank you.
I'm going to take the screen back.
And, if you have not downloaded Susan's bio in the chat box,
you might want to do so now.
'Because, in that bio, you're going to find
more information about Susan
and links that might be of interest to you.
So, we do have some questions, Susan.
A lot of them came in.
We'll take one of the ones on climate change.
It says, "What is projected outcome of climate change
and sea level rise on the Mallow Bay fleet?"
"Will they be inundated?"
You touched on that a little bit.
You wanna expand upon it at all?
-: As much as I can.
We do know, I mean, I've seen,
in the 30 years I've been here,
I've seen, you know, fewer of the vessels
surface every time.
Now, I didn't put it in here, but once in a while,
we get what's called a blowout,
when we get an extremely low tide.
But we've also had a sustained wind blowing off shore,
and it's shown us vessels we still didn't know are there.
So, we keep learning stuff.
Are they going to go away?
Yes, of course, they are eventually.
However, it's gonna be a long time.
It's been over a hundred years now,
and they're still very substantive, very heavily built.
But we do wanna know what's happening.
And that's one of the things Allyson Ropp is looking at.
Now, the Aowa's in that front line,
so it's gonna have, you know,
it's gonna have more storm surge impact.
You know, more regularly than the vessel
that's protecting behind it.
So, that's one of the things she has to consider.
She's actually trying to come up with
an actual estimate on when it might go away.
But there are just so many aspects to,
you know, variables to each of these vessels
and what they were made out of.
Most of it was fairly soft wood.
Do we get teredo coming up and eating them?
Eventually, you know, 200 years, 250, 300 years,
they're gonna be gone.
But that doesn't mean that we still can't,
they won't be above the surface, they won't be gone, gone.
But it's like going to Gettysburg, you know?
You can still see where the battle was, even if,
you know, there still aren't
cannons sitting there or whatever.
So, it can still be interpreted,
it still played an important role in the area.
It's still a fabulous place to come and, you know, recreate.
And so, as I said, we're still studying climate change.
We're interested in what's going to happen.
Will the water become more saline over time?
I don't know.
I don't think it will, in the sense that,
if it rains in West Virginia,
we've got high water the next day.
And, that's the other thing,
it's not just a very small area.
The Potomac is a huge river system that goes way up
into the Appalachian Mountains.
So, that'll play a role as well.
So, it's an ongoing study.
I mean, I think, like anything, eventually it will go away.
But, I don't, I think we're talking
a couple hundred years anyway.
That's a guess.
[Shannon] All right, thank you.
Another question that came in says,
"Given that there were 50 shipyards around the
continental US on both coasts, were local timbers used?"
"And can you determine that, via a wood analysis,
which species of trees were used
in the construction of these ships,
and did they reflect the local environment
in which they were built?"
-: Good question, and I so wish that was true.
They were all over the Great Lakes,
shipyards mostly built metal hulls.
That was a different arm of the emergency fleet companies.
The vast majority, of course, being West Coast,
there was a lot of fir.
There are yellow pine and some others.
We can, a little bit.
But, even some, like that was one of our
first points of concern with the Bayou Teche.
It wasn't made of woods we would
expect to find in Louisiana.
And that's when we, and it didn't match the drawing.
So, we're starting to go, "Uh-oh, is this the wrong vessel?"
I mean, they do move around.
But it was determined that,
because it was a government project,
they had areas where timber would be shipped into
and you went and picked up
the timber there for your vessels.
So, a lot of it is West Coast timber.
And, you know, there are some exceptions, but not overall.
They were all pretty consistently,
you know, Douglas fir and things,
there's some yellow pine, stuff like that.
Very little oak.
That would've been used in very few areas
where you had to have hardwood.
So, not as easily as we would've hoped.
-: Okay.
Jesse, are there any questions that you would like to ask?
I see there's lots of them.
[Jessie] There are.
One asks about
indigenous knowledge.
"Is your division incorporating indigenous knowledge?"
"If so, can you elaborate on
what you've gained from NOAA's tribal-indigenous partners?
-: We're working directly with the Piscataway Peoples,
who are, that is their ancestral lands.
And they
have, are doing interpretation.
In fact, this is going to be,
some of this next big rollout,
more interviews with them.
Their views on everything there.
There is wild rice in the area.
They have done
plant analysis, they are putting up signage.
They're actually giving us a very good perspective.
We've talked to them about, do they have,
you know, is there any chance there'd be
a vessel that they know of?
Well, they don't.
We know that, very likely, one of the large
palisaded villages that is on a map by John Smith,
Nusamek, is adjacent on the southern end of Mallow's Bay.
Private property.
But it's been researched, and it's very likely NusaMak.
However, I love the answer I received from
Erin Savoy when I said something about other sites.
I was talking about important sites and she said,
"All our sites are important."
"We don't need some colonial tourists
to tell us what's important."
And I just thought that rocked.
But there is a lot of
indigenous folk.
Now, obviously,
the draw to this was this enormous World War I fleet.
But we are looking, very much, at
the knowledge of the Piscataway People.
And they are being interviewed in our next
upcoming interpretive layers.
And they are helping with the, like,
as you saw that one sign, well there are more signs,
more interpretive panels on the trails,
and things like that.
So, definitely, involving those folks.
I don't know if, I presume if NOAA has a branch,
they'll be involved as well,
but I haven't dealt with them personally.
[Shannon] Okay.
[Susan] We did have, I will mention, we did have,
actually, a ceremony down on the site
before we had our big, you know, opening.
And there was a grandfather tree,
and it had little medicine bundles tied all through it.
We had to use a cherry picker.
Mervin's like, you know, a senior lady.
I said, "Are you going up in that?"
She said, "No."
But, folks went up and did hang it all
through the grandfather tree.
We also have other cedar trees where bundles were placed.
And there are other
ceremonies planned for the future as well.
[Shannon] All right, another question we got is,
"If you were going out to kayak,
what is the most or the best starting point
to see the most vessels?"
"Where would you start from?"
-: We actually have a kayak launch.
If you go, on the Maryland shore, you go to
Mallows Bay Park.
It's on the site of what was the Wilson Farm and Fishery.
And you can, there are porta pot facilities.
There's no running water yet.
There was an old well.
I keep arguing we need to get it re-upped.
But there are, there's a kayak launch, there's a boat ramp.
And you can, there's a little sandy spot,
you can also launch there.
If the watermen aren't using the ramp, you can use that.
There is a, I understand, a launch,
I believe, on the Virginia side,
but that's a hard paddle against a strong current.
So, if you're launching in Widewater State Park,
you're probably going to the Widewater wrecks.
You can launch upriver at Smallwood State Park
and paddle down.
It's an effort, it's a day effort,
but Sea Scouts have done it.
Although, with the tides and currents,
you'd probably better get picked up at Mallows.
But we do, that's where you should launch, it's closest.
You can go right into the burning basin,
especially if you haven't kayaking
and you wanna get some practice.
You can also go to the back,
look at the Sea Scout boat,
look for the wild rice, look at the heron.
There is one or two,
there's a boat in there that you can see as well.
And then, you come out and you go around the peninsula,
and you can kayak through the wrecks.
You can either go out around the Accomac, the metal hull,
go right around it, or cut across in front of it
and go through the wrecks that way.
I suggest going around the hulls,
not necessarily through them,
unless it's a very low tide and you can see
where you are between the various hulls.
But we do have those waterproof maps.
They're at, they're on the site.
You can get those there.
If you're coming and you're not sure,
we can mail them to you,
if you think you're gonna be visiting.
You do have to get out,
to really get a good view, you need to be on the water.
We have put in some viewing scopes.
But, because most of the vessels are around that peninsula,
the view's a bit limited.
[Shannon] Okay, thank you.
Jesse, I think we have time for one more question.
Is there one that you would like to ask?
[Jessie] Yes.
So you showed pictures of Grady Spit.
There's a question that asks, is that growing naturally?
Or is it being added to by human action?
-: No, it's completely natural.
You put a vessel in, it's like the others,
soil will accrete around it.
And then, of course, seeds get dropped by the birds.
And, yeah, it just accreted over.
The vessel acted like that little trap,
and picked up the sand, and the spit just grew naturally.
And, interestingly enough, it's now,
the plants that are growing on it,
seem to be attracting a lot of pollinators.
It was covered in hummingbirds one time,
and I had never seen them there before.
And we do see a lot of butterflies.
It's a very protective area.
When we were nominating it, I was thinking,
"Well, I might find half a dozen
endangered species that we can reference."
And there was something like three pages of rare,
threatened, and endangered species.
And a lot of them were insects or fish,
but there's one endangered snake.
There are a lot of turtles that are,
now, maybe at risk, you know?
So, we love seeing that happen.
I mean, it's naturally becoming part of the environment.
As I said before, they act as artificial reefs for
both commercial and recreational fish and the birds.
You see the eagles teaching their young how to hunt.
There's one snake I always see, he never gets any bigger,
but he's always got a fish in his mouth.
He'd be enormous by now, but he's not.
So, no, it's completely natural.
[Shannon] Oh, that's awesome, Susan, thank you.
Well, all right, everyone.
If we did not get to your question,
or if you have additional ones,
you can always send them to Susan
at the email address that's listed on this slide.
You can also learn more about Maryland's Underwater
Archeology Program at the URL listed there.
And I'm sorry, Jessie, I stole your slide.
So, you do the next-
Well, I was just gonna say,
I put a slide in here as well.
A lot of people in the chat were saying that our,
the link that I put in for the Mallows Bay sites,
that you can go to watch the webinar was not link working.
So, this is the link up here,
if you would like to be able to go there.
You can watch that VR video.
And, also, learn more about Mallows Bay.
And we do have those maps, Susan, on our website
that people can download, they're PDF copies.
They're not waterproof.
But they can download those as well to get a,
get an idea of where they want to go
before they go out there.
All right, Jesse.
[Jessie] All right.
A video recording of
this presentation will be available on the
sanctuary's webinar archives page,
found at the URL listed here, at the top.
[Shannon]In addition, the webinar will be archived
on Monitor National Marine Sanctuary's website.
You can just click on the multimedia section
in the toolbar to access that webinar box.
You will, it usually takes about ten days
for the webinar to be posted after we get it captioned
and we get it up to headquarters.
But you will also find future webinars in that same section.
And, don't worry, all of this information
is going to be sent to you in a follow-up email
once the recording is ready to view.
[Jessie] And we are proud to announce that both of our
Sanctuary Advisory Councils are seeking new members.
For a list of the council seats or an application kit,
please use the links in the chat
for both Monitor and Mallows.
That will take you to our sanctuary advisory webpages.
The Monitor application window is open now.
And the Mallows Bay applications will be open soon
for a second recruitment.
So, if you're interested or have questions,
please email me at the address on the screen.
[Shannon] All right.
And, lastly, of course, we always invite you to
follow us on social media to stay in touch
with what's happening in the sanctuary.
And, as you exit the webinar, there is a short survey
for formal and informal educators.
If you are an educator, NOAA would really appreciate it
if you just take a few minutes to complete the survey.
Your answers will help NOAA develop
future webinars to meet your needs.
And your participation is voluntary.
And your answers will be completely anonymous.
So, once again, we want to thank you, Susan,
for a fabulous presentation today.
And thank you for, everyone,
for taking the time today to join us.
You have a wonderful day.
And this concludes the presentation for everyone.
Thank you.