Pre-dreadnought battleships were sea-going battleships built from steel and powered with coal-fueled steam engines. Built between the mid to late 1880s and 1905, they replaced the ironclad battleships of the 1870s and 1880s. By 1906, they became obsolete with the arrival of the HMS Dreadnought, a battleship of the Royal Navy designed with heavier, longer-ranged guns.
With the shift to new designs, the U.S. Navy began conducting gunnery and aerial bombardment tests on seven pre-dreadnought ships between 1911 and 1923. Three of those tests occurred in the Chesapeake Bay, the most famous of which was the USS Texas.
The USS Texas was one of the first two battleships constructed by the U.S. Navy. Launched in 1892, she was intended primarily for coastal defense and served in the Spanish-American War. She was renamed San Marcos in 1911 (to free the name Texas for a future battleship) and was designated a target ship.
In March of 1911, the San Marcos was anchored in the Chesapeake Bay near Tangier Island, VA, and subjected to shelling tests. She sank on March 22, 1911 in about 30 feet of water with a large portion of the vessel projecting above the water line. The remains of the wreck continued to act as a static target for the Navy through the end of World War II.
By the 1950s it was determined that the San Marcos had become a threat to navigation and was mostly destroyed in 1959. But not before she claimed the freight vessel Lexington. In the winter of 1940, a large portion of the Chesapeake Bay was frozen over and with many buoys encrusted with ice, navigation was severely limited. A lighted buoy had previously marked the wreck of the San Marcos, and in 1940, it was situated about 500 feet from the wreck in a southerly direction. But with the damaging ice that winter, the lighted buoy was removed and replaced with an unlighted buoy.
A “Notice to Mariners” was issued, but unfortunately the notice never came to the attention of the Lexington, a diesel-motored freighter about 120 feet long. On March 27, 1940, the Lexington proceeded southerly through Tangier Sound from Crisfield to Onancock. After taking aboard a cargo of canned goods, she set out for Baltimore around 6:15 p.m. There is evidence that the engines were “stepped up a bit” due to the ship’s heavy load and the captain’s desire to reach Baltimore on time.
According to the 1944 court case Baltimore, Crisfield & Onancock Line, Inc. v. United States, the captain of the Lexington testified that he expected to see a light on the buoy at the San Marcos wreck and was not aware that the buoy was unlighted. He had a set a course that he believed would allow them to pass 500 yards southerly of the spot but visibility was poor that night. The captain reached a point where he believed had taken them past the San Marcos when suddenly the Lexington rammed full speed into the wreck and stuck there.
In only 30 minutes the Lexington sank completely below the water. The captain and crew were able to lower a lifeboat and were safely picked up the next morning, but the vessel and all of her cargo were a total loss.
In the end the court ruled that the San Marcos “had lost its character as a public vessel,” and thus the United States was not liable for the wreck. The other two Bay target ships were the ex-Indiana and the Alabama, also sunk near Tangier Island, VA. Both were eventually scrapped. Anything that might remain of the three ships lies buried beneath the mud of the Chesapeake Bay.
Today this area is known as a fishing hotspot. For tips on fishing in the area, check out FishTalk's article: Dynamite Fishing: Fishing at the Target Ships and Nearby Reefs.