8 July 2012: Meeting History -- and Making It -- on the Patuxent

 By Michael English, Producer
 (On location, somewhere on the Patuxent River) -- It's about as still and sticky as a Maryland July can be except for the occasional breeze that rustles tall marsh grass nearby.  I'm standing under welcomed shade provided by a pop-up canopy with Tim Pugh, MPT videographer, on a massive and frying-pan hot aluminum barge that's parked smack in the middle of a lazy bend on this historic and beautiful river.  Tim's Sony XD camera rests on his right shoulder as we wait for a Navy boat to pull alongside to off-load metal shoring.  I'm busy scribbling ideas in my notebook for shoots to come and taking in the visceral beauty of this place.


This part of the Patuxent isn't too wide -- maybe 100' at best.  The eastern bank is covered with lush, river-fed brush and a towering treeline that's deeply dug into a steep bank that rises 10' to 15'.  Looking west is a sparse grove of tall trees and underbrush near buoys that mark the outlines of what could be the wreck of the USS Scorpion.  The trees screen what lies beyond -- a vast marsh, crammed with lilypads, Cattails and bright green pockets of wild rice.   The horizon --  perhaps as far as a quarter mile back -- ends at the western shore.  Ospreys fly lazy circles, and we hear the cries of Red Tailed Hawks and Bluejays.


There's a dramatic history buried in this muddy river.  And there's history being made.  Maryland Public Television is capturing it all in Search for the Scorpion, a documentary that will be broadcast during the bicentennial of the War of 1812.

Archeologists believe that here, on August 22, 1814, a small number of Commodore Joshua Barney's sailors from his famed War of 1812 flotilla of 16 ships used charges to scuttle, or sink, the fleet.  They did so on direct orders from Barney, who was concerned the vessels might be captured by the British and used against Americans forces -- a common practice in those days.


Myth and legend about the flotilla's location is a common conversation in this part of southern Maryland -- something that locals have talked about for generations.  Some people say the fleet was sunk -- with much of the crew's belongings still on-board -- somewhere in the river near where I'm standing.  But the story also says that in the two centuries since, the wily Patuxent has shifted shape, bending and turning time and again -- and now the flotilla rests beneath a Wayson's Corner cornfield.


Those yarns were told, re-told and argued over until 1979, when two amateur archeologists from southern Maryland, Paleontologist Ralph Eshelman, and Author Don Shomette, found the very wreck lying under my feet.  In '79, Shomette and Eshelman dove the wreck, hoping that it was the USS Scorpion.  They excavated the site, gained access to the innards of the ship, and retrieved some intriguing artifacts from the wreck.  Included in the find was a surgeon's kit -- expensive and rare in those days. The thinking goes that such a find would indicate a flag vessel, since the fleet's medical officer would most likely be stationed on it.  Another artifact:  a tin grog cup was gently dug, uncovered and coaxed from the muck that's filled the ship's hold over two centuries.  The cup has the initials "C.W." scratched into it.  Shomette and Eshelman wondered whether it could possibly be Caesar Wentworth, an African American cook known to have been assigned to the Scorpion.


Now, archeologists are building on Shomette's and Eshelman's critical,  earlier work at the site, but this time the effort is better-funded and the investigators have the added benefit of using advanced technologies.  Over the next few weeks, they will use pumps to carefully vacuum sediment from around the wreck.  They estimate the ship -- which is about 60 feet long -- is buried in six to eight feet of sediment.  The bottom layer is clay, a material that has capped the ship in an airtight environment for two centuries.  That  helps to explain how the artifacts found in 1980 survived all of those years underwater.  Archeologists are hopeful the anaerobic nature of the ship's grave means that there are many more artifacts -- and history -- at the bottom of the river.


The buried mass of wood in the shape of a ship could very well be the USS Scorpion -- or it could be one of the flotilla's other vessels.  No one knows yet.  That's why the team will be here on the river for the next  five weeks or so -- to make history while they work to meet it face-to-face.

Check back for further updates on production of Search for the Scorpion.