Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay

A few years ago, my friend Helen told me about one of Washington’s Ten Best Kept Secrets: The Ghost Fleet of the Potomac. An article in a Washington Flyer magazine had mentioned this ship graveyard on the Potomac River that is little known even amongst locals yet a long standing testament to government gridlock and congressional folly. The graveyard is located on the Potomac River in southern Maryland, and it may well be the largest single graveyard of ships in the world in one location. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 ships are left abandoned on a spot called Mallows Bay a few miles south and across the river from Quantico, Virginia. But there is no access from the land side, and the water is very shallow in the area which prevents any but the most shallow draft craft from entering the area. Essentially that means a canoe or kayak.

I was fascinated and did a bit more reading about the site. The most detailed resource I laid hands on is historian Donald G. Shomette’s The Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay, but he also provides an interesting condensed history of the fleet of ships online on the Maryland Department of Natural Resources web site.

The vast majority of the ships are abandoned wooden hulled steam ships built in a crash construction program after the United States entered the First World War. Estimates at the time suggested that the U.S. would need of the order of 6 million tons of shipping capacity to transport troops and equipment, which was roughly twelve times the amount of shipping constructed in the twenty years prior. Congress acted quickly to propose the construction of some 1000 shipsfrom a standardized design made with either Douglas fir or white pine. Of the proposed 1000, contracts to build 731 were drawn up.

The timber construction had two major benefits: the ships could be made more rapidly than those with steel hulls and their construction would not tie up existing ship building capacity. The timbers in question were available in good supply. The objective was to make the ships within 18 to 24 months. The ships would be powered by steam, a relatively simple power plant design geared more towards rapid production than long term viability.

However, no such large program can ever be pulled off without snarls and problems, and indeed a number came up. There would be political infighting, bureaucratic foot dragging and excessive documentation requirements (a sort of ISO 9000 certification prerunner), to unanticipated technical issues. The first ship was completed by December 1, 1917, just nine months after President Wilson had placed the U.S. on a war footing. But by October 1918, only 134 boats were complete and another 263 were partway constructed. When the war ended on November 11th, not a single one of the boats had yet attempted an Atlantic crossing.

The program did not shut down immediately with the war’s end, however, and builders continued to finish up their contract obligations to make the boats. Some did eventually see trans-Atlantic service, and in all, 264 were completed and brought in service.

After the war, world trade contracted severely (in fact by some economic estimates, world trade would not recover to its 1914 levels until around the 1970s), and with the reduction in trade, there was a huge glut of excess shipping capacity, refered to as the “The Great Tie-Up of 1920” as shipping was brought into port and essentially abandoned. The wooden boats suffered an additional blow as their coal power steam engines were rendered obsolete by the advent of the more fuel efficient and powerful diesel engines.

The remnants of this fleet then suffered further blows. Constructed for a cost in the range of $700,000 - $1 million per ship (very roughly, $12 - $16 million 2004 dollars, or about in the range of $4 billion total, putting it in the same general ballpark as a major contemporary space mission such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Such comparisons, however, are somewhat faulty both in the very large rough assumptions of inflation and the growth of the economy. $1 million was a much larger fraction of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product of 1920 than an inflation adjusted $16 million is today, meaning that the cost of this fleet could easily be compared with annual costs of entire space program for a year or two, not just a single major mission.). Coupled with their construction faults from rushed efforts to complete them, and obsolete design, the wooden ships were quite a financial millstone and Congress sold off the salvage rights to some 233 or so of the boats to rid itself of the $50,000 a month storage costs.

The series of salvage operations and events are better documented elsewhere, so I shall not pursue them further, save to say that by the 1940s, most of these hulks, and a few others brought in for salvage, were abandoned in Mallows Bay. Western Marine and Salvage Company attempted and failed to economically recover the scrap metal value of the ships it purchased from the government in 1922. At the height of the Second World War, scrap metal shortages brought Bethelem Steel to attempt the same feat without economic success. The fleet came to be left to amateur scrap metal recovery efforts, and ultimately to be a largely forgotten graveyard of ships tossed aside by economic and political events.

And so over time, the ship graveyard on the Potomac passed from living memory. The hulks gradually rotted away for the most part, but sedimentation from the river filled in around them and preserved some or left shadows of their former presence in the form of ship hull shaped islands in which small trees and grasses took root. The shallow waters of Mallows Bay, sheltered by the hulks, became an area where sea grasses struggling elsewhere took root and provided natural habitat for fish, water birds, and crabs.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has been discussing for some years now the idea of turning the area into a nature reserve and creating access from the banks. As things stand now, however, the only way to reach the Ghost Fleet is by paddling in by kayak or canoe.

And thus begins my own personal adventure.

A little research on my part found only three access points to the river nearby. The first is a marina at Quantico across the river. This seems to be the most popular route to the graveyard to judge from web log reports from avid kayaks. The Washington Flyer also listed an outfitter working from Quantico offering rather costly guided kayak trips across the river to the site out of Quantico. A second is a boat ramp or pier located at Purse State Park on the Maryland side about two miles south of the Bay. However, neither Purse State Park nor Quantico appeared, at least in my research, to offer kayak or canoe rentals for the avid yet unequipped adventurer, not withstanding the guided tours, documentation of which my web research failed to find (though the Washington Flyer did list name and contact details, long since lost). The third put-in point near the river and upstream a few miles is Smallwood State Park, and here I found that canoe rentals were available at the park in addition there being a put-in point. Glory be!

So on one fine sunny October morning, my friend Helen and Melissa, another friend talked into the day’s adventure, joined me for the drive down past Indian Head to Mattawoman Creek and the Smallwood State Park. We got there close to opening time and rented a canoe and set off.

I had estimated from a map that the mouth of the Mattawoman Creek on the Potomac was roughly six miles north of Mallows Bay. A very little math concludes that this is a journey of about twelve miles. This should have rung alarm bells in my mind: a twelve mile day hike is a reasonably substantial hike, and paddling is hardly speedier nor more effortless than hiking. Furthermore, not quite figuring into that mental math was a non-trivial distance of perhaps a mile and a half from the park to the mouth of the Mattawoman Creek. But with three people, I figured we would have no problem. Or perhaps more accurately, I guess I just did not figure.

And off we sent into the wild blue yonder. It was an easy voyage out to Mattawoman Creek from the park’s edge and a pleasant bit of paddling down into the Potomac on what was to prove to be a very pleasant, warm, and sunny day on the river. Once clear of the Mattawoman Creek, we quickly came upon our first wreck of the day.




Alas, this steel hull remnant, whose history I have been unable to find, is not one of the Mallows Bay Ghost Fleet and served only to taunt us onward. After shifting seats to give tired arms a rest, we paddled southward with the river’s flow down past the next river open and under the massive power pylons across the river near Quantico. After a good two hours or so, we had managed to merely arrive at the starting point of typical full day guided (and expensive) kayaking trips from Quantico, though at least we were on the correct side of the river. Onward we went.

By around 1 PM, tired and sunburnt, it became clear we were not going to reach our destination. Reconstructing our position from maps after the fact, I believe we got within a half mile of Sandy Point, the northernmost limit of Mallows Bay. But it is probably a blessing we never got there to see what we would be missing and thus turned back somewhat unsatisfied, but without the sense of having narrowly missed our goals. Not far back towards the park, we found a place to pull off, complete with a picnic table not far from the water’s edge, took in a pleasant picnic lunch and break, then turned back north for Mattawoman Creek and the state park.

Unbeknownst to us, our presence, or rather our lack of presence, had been noticed by the park service and the outfitter renting the canoes there. Concerned that we had strayed into a power boat right of way and been swamped and perhaps either stranded or run down and drowned, they called in the Natural Resources Police.

Oblivious to this, we noticed a boat coming up in our general direction while paddling hard up the Potomac back towards Smallwood State Park. Complete with police lights. Believe it or not, you don’t have to be on the road to be “curbed” by the police. Yeap, a power boat got a canoe to “pull over”. Not for speeding, of course, but it turned out that in one of those criminal acts that is plainly apparent after the fact, but never crossed our minds, we had in effect stolen the canoe for the day. It was never intended to be allowed out of the state park. We got a gentle lecture from the police officer who mostly seemed relieved to realize he was not going to have to spend his afternoon dragging the bottom of Mattawoman Creek looking for drowned corpses of three city idiots who got a canoe run down by an inattentive and possibly drunk power boater. He did warn us of two things as we headed back. First, there would be an officer awaiting us at the dock to “talk to us” and that the closing time for the dock was actually an hour earlier than advertised to us before because it was the last day of the season and there was an annual end of season picnic for the staff and could we please pick up the pace to get back in time.

We did our best, but recall this was a very long paddle, especially considering how long a distance we had gone already and that the current was now somewhat against us. Anyone who thinks they can arm wrestle Melissa or myself or Helen might be in for a rude surprise. We did quite a muscling job to get back. And while we got such pleasant rewards as seeing a bald eagle fishing near us on the way back in, we still made it about five minutes late.

For the original closing time, that is, not the early one.

Needless to say, we were not expecting to be very popular when we got there. And the promised long arm of the law was there to give us the stern lecture about the evils of renting canoes with ill intent, with scaring park employees, and denying them their picnic time by coming in so damned late. We pleaded innocence on nicking off with the canoe off the grounds of the state park, claiming with some believable gullibility that we had not realized that that was one of the rules (and quite frankly, given the size of the water area of the park, I to this day cannot fathom why anyone would rent a canoe under those limitations: paddle a hundred metres in a few minutes, and it is time to give up and come home). We apologized for the inconvience of our late arrival and our own failure to correctly anticipate the level of effort and hencetime for our voyage.

I should at this point add three important points to this narritive. The natural resources policeman at the dock assigned to give us the stern lecture was very young officer and male. Helen is drop down gorgeous, and Melissa is quite the head turner herself, though having dated her at one point, I will confess to not being an completely disinterested party in that assessment. The poor officer never had a chance: he would try to give me the stern lecture and then couldn’t help himself but moderate his tone in Helen’s presence.

Lesson learned: never get in trouble with the law while canoeing without a gorgeous blonde or two around to help you out.

Truth be told, the officer was (in a male sense) not to shabby himself. Or as Helen put it over ice cream later “He could have spanked me, as long as he kept those beautiful blue eyes open when he did.”

Sunburnt and forgiven by the law and surprisingly enough, not told to never ever rent canoes from them ever again (We haven’t anyway), we took our sunburnt leave as the park closed for the late afternoon and the poor lady whom had patiently waited for us for hours put the canoe away and closed the shop for the seaon. A stop on the way home for ice cream and our day was done.

But the siren song of Mallows Bay still calls to me years later. I wish to rest my eyes on Wilson’s Folly and the hulks of yesteryear on the edges of the Potomac, to visit with time to spare to explore, to seek, to ask, to understand, to do so legally and unencumbered, and perhaps to pose that most wonderous question...

So what are the other nine Best Kept Secrets of Washington? And I can I visit them without getting in trouble with the law this time?