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173 The Cooper River Anchor Farm What is it about old ship anchors? What exactly is their appeal as decorative items? I can see why a seafood restaurant would want a few of these barnacle-encrusted relics outside the premises, perhaps on either side of the front door. Should a prospective customer miss the forty-foot fiberglass lobster/crab/fish (pick one) on the roof or the red-and-green channel buoys marking the entrance to the parking lot, the anchors are sure to quell any doubt that seafood is served inside. Old anchors are just gawky hunks of iron, usually rusting. Yet I see these nautical artifacts embellishing the most unnautical places. I see them as centerpieces in front yards of homes. I see them gracing flowerbeds in back yards. I see them as mailbox posts. I see them displayed in public parks and in front of National Guard armories. I once visited a home near Charleston just before Christmas and was greeted by a sevenfoot anchor propped upright in the corner of the living room, decorated like a Christmas tree with lights and ornaments. I wouldn’t be surprised to see one marking a grave site in some cemetery. I also see them in scuba shops, often in window displays showing off the newest dive masks and regulators or draped with this year’s line of wet suits. Or they are strategically placed around the store as apparent evidence of the staff’s diving prowess—subliminal messages to customers that they too could collect a maritime treasure from the ocean bottom (if they do business only with that dive shop). Unfortunately these lawn ornaments, mailbox poles, and dive shop displays, now removed from their underwater resting places, usually lack proper conservation and are left to do what they do naturally, that is, corrode away to nothing. Or they are painted, usually black or silver (although I once saw a turquoise one), in a futile attempt to prolong their inevitable deterioration. 174 The Day the Johnboat Went up the Mountain The problem is that iron does not get along well with seawater. As soon as an iron object, such as an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century anchor, settles on the seafloor, it begins to corrode through chemical reactions far too complicated (for me) to explain here. This corrosion can be due to biological as well as chemical reactions, as bacteria in seawater can account for as much as 60 percent of the deterioration. At the same time, minerals, bits of sand, and organic material in the seawater begin concreting on the surface of the iron, forming a coral-like encrustation. Often those who retrieve anchors from a saltwater environment believe they are rescuing the anchor from this corrosion. They are in fact making things worse. Without proper conservation, air accelerates the formation of rust. And worse, the saltwater that has infiltrated the cracks and crevices in the iron evaporates. The salt particles that remain solidify and expand, enlarging the cracks and crevices, causing huge flakes of rust to fall away from the iron. Despite all this, however, restaurants, home gardeners, public parks, National Guard armories, and dive shops continue to acquire old iron anchors. The fact of the matter is that old anchors are easy to acquire. Commercial shrimpers snag them with their nets and pull them up to prevent future snags. Anglers grapple them with their boat anchors and bring them home in lieu of that record catch. Dredge barges suck them up as they go about their job of deepening the shipping channels. Even sport divers retrieve these pieces of maritime history from South Carolina waters (provided they are customers of the right dive shop, of course). Over the years the institute’s Maritime Research Division has itself acquired a few of these salvaged relics. Conservation of the anchors, or rather coming up with the money for conservation, being out of the question for our meager budget, we are left with the problem of what to do with them. The answer: the Cooper River Anchor Farm. In the history of ships, the anchor holds a special place—the seafloor. The first recorded anchors were rocks with lines attached. These rock anchors were flat and triangular with a hole chiseled in one corner for the line. Because they relied on weight to hold the bottom, size mattered , and the larger the better. It wasn’t long before anchor makers started drilling holes in the other two...

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