Following the world wars, the United States Navy consolidated its fleets and “mothballed” its surplus vessels, a form of long term storage that enabled them to be returned to service in the future if required. During the latter half of the twentieth century, many such vessels were in fact returned to service for a time. However, as the decades wound on, the age of most of the vessels, as well as their obsolescence, led many to be scrapped. However, a number of the vessels were legitimately famous for their wartime exploits, well loved by the thousands who crewed them, and also viewed as symbols of the locations whose names they bore. Consequently, a variety of public/private nonprofit groups emerged who received the vessels as deactivated gifts from the United States Government, and created as “museum ships” to preserve the historical artifacts and educate future generations. What follows below is a map of some of the preserved vessels currently on display in the United States.
The United States Navy uses a system of two-letter codes to indicate the vessel type, and the sequential number of that type the vessel is. For example, in the USN code, “CV” designated an aircraft carrier. USS Hornet is a preserved aircraft carrier, designated “CV-12”, indicating the twelfth commissioned aircraft carrier. For a battleship, the code “BB” is used. This map shows preserved aircraft carriers and battleships, and does not include the numerous other ships currently also preserved such as submarines or sailing vessels. To aid identification, each map pin indicates the entire name of the vessel, for example “CV-12 USS Hornet”.
While aircraft carriers draw inspiration from a variety of naming sources, in the United States Navy, battleships are named exclusively after states. Consequently, during their service, these battleships often acquired a symbolic importance for that state specifically. As ships were entereing the process of decommissioning, several of these states (or citizens thereof) spearheaded efforts to have the Navy donate the ships to them as museums. This is why a number of coastal ships feature museum ships named after the state, and also why the vessels are distributed around the coast of the United States.
The included code segment is relatively self-explanatory. A CSV file contains a simple data frame containing the name of each vessel and its latitude and longitude. This is loaded into R, then passed into leaflet to overlay onto the map.
ships <- read.csv("historic_ships.csv", header = TRUE)
r_example_map <- leaflet(ships) %>%
addTiles() %>%
addMarkers(lat = ~Latitude, lng = ~Longitude, popup = ~Vessel)
r_example_mapSources:
The list of museum ships was located on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museum_ships_of_the_United_States_military
The latitude/longitude of the vessels was acquired using Google Maps.