ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Sometimes, history lies hidden just around the corner. Stroll through London's financial district and you might come across the vine-draped ruins of a church bombed during The Blitz. South of Washington, D.C., down the Potomac River, is a graveyard with more than a hundred wooden ships that date to World War I. It's called the Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay, and it is the largest site of its kind in the western hemisphere. NPR's Frank Langfitt went exploring and filed this audio postcard.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER BUBBLING)
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: So I'm just paddling up to this ship. The gunwales are at least 2 to 3 feet out of the water. And it's basically an island full of foliage. I mean, the bushes are 6, 7 feet. And a bird just flew right past me. It's like a little park sitting in the carcass of a ship that's over 100 years old.
SUSAN LANGLEY: I call them flowerpots.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER LAPPING)
LANGFITT: Susan Langley is the Maryland State underwater archaeologist. She's guiding me through a maze of mostly sunken ships about 40 miles south of Washington. It's best to come here around low tide. That's when you can easily see the gunwales, the top edges of the hulls, which, as Langley describes, became flowerpots that can stretch for nearly several hundred feet.
LANGLEY: They just get filled with soil, and then the seeds blow in or the birds drop them, and they turn into islands. Used to be when the trees reached a decent height, the beavers would take them down. There were deer that were living on them.
LANGFITT: Deer were living on the islands?
LANGLEY: Deer were living on some of the ships back in the '90s.
LANGFITT: How did most of these ships end up here? The story begins in 1970, World War I. German U-boats and mines were sinking lots of steel cargo ships, so the government tried to replace some of them by building wooden steamships. Langley explains the thinking.
LANGLEY: Cheap and easy - we had lots of wood. All the metal was going to military watercraft.
LANGFITT: But the ships ran into construction problems and had mechanical failures. Just a year later, the war ended. Salvagers stripped the ships for parts, burned the hulls to the water line, left them to rot - not just here in Mallows Bay, but in other spots around the country.
LANGLEY: They're in James River. There's Hampton Roads, the Neches River near Beaumont, Texas, and there's about 18 or more up in Baltimore.
LANGFITT: Over time, the hulls deteriorated and sank into the muck. This was - let's be honest - a watery junkyard.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER LAPPING)
LANGFITT: But then nature took over, and it transformed these worthless hulks into something remarkable.
So I'm paddling into a lagoon right now, and I have - and what it is, it's formed by three separate ships. And the only way you can tell is if you look down you can see the gunwales.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER DRIPPING)
LANGFITT: That sound you hear is water dripping from the hull. At first, I'm confused. Why is the ship dripping? I turned to Shellie Perrie. Perrie owns Atlantic Kayak Company here in Charles County, Maryland, and she's out with us today.
So where's the water coming from?
SHELLIE PERRIE: It's coming from the ship. It's a wetland.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER LAPPING)
LANGFITT: It's a wetland.
Now I get it. It's low tide, and the ship is draining. The ghost fleet is one with the bay. I paddle towards another ship.
There are two red-winged blackbird nests on a tree that's sticking out of one of the gunwales of the ship.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CHIRPING)
LANGFITT: Oh, there they go. In a sense, the ships are much more alive today than they were when they were built. Like, they serve more of a purpose.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER LAPPING)
LANGFITT: History can be funny that way. A failed shipbuilding project is now a unique marine heritage site, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says is the only one of its kind in this half of the globe. People come out with Atlantic Kayak to tour Mallows Bay during the weekends. But most of the time, this place is empty. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Mallows Bay.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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