Within a year we had a million men building ships, cutting the timber, mining the iron for them, building the machinery for them. At one point we became the greatest shipbuilding nation in the history of the world, we had to create from nothing a shipping industry that was going to build a thousand wooden ships in 18 months -- normally it would take a year and a half to build a wooden steam ship.

Don Shomette

Categorized in : US News

I took some folks from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration down there and they were stunned when they saw the place, we have 185 archeologically-documented shipwrecks in a 14-square-mile area, which makes it one of the most densely-populated places in the western world for historic vessels.

At low tide all you see is these forest of things sticking up and at the north end of Mallows Bay, it looks like shore, but it's ships -- bow to stern, bow to stern -- I call these the flowerpot ships. Each of those ships have become islands -- some have trees 30-40 feet tall... It's very exotic, it's just beautiful.