Through Water, Ice & Fire: Schooner Nancy of the War of 1812 (review)

Professor Barry Gough contended in his Fighting Sail on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay (Naval Institute Press, 2002) that the struggles for the upper Great Lakes were a long-ignored and underrated key to the strategic understanding of the War of 1812. With Through Water, Fire & Ice he revises and expands the portion of the earlier book focusing on the career of the schooner Nancy whose officers and crew demonstrated bravado, intrepidity, and skill to assist in maintaining the British hold on Mackinac Island and hence the control of Lakes Huron, Superior and Michigan in 1813 and 1814.

This was a big role for a very small schooner. The Nancy served as a supply vessel for the North West Company, a fur trading firm operating in the upper Great Lakes before the War of 1812. Captained by Alexander Mackintosh she became a chartered supply ship for the British Army between Lake Erie and Sault Ste. Marie. After the defeat of the Royal Navy in the Battle of Lake Erie (10 September 1813), she was the only armed British vessel on the upper Great Lakes.

Her first taste of fame came when Captain Mackintosh refused to surrender her to American militiamen as she sought to escape from the St. Clair River in October 1813. For the next several months (except for a winter laid up at Sault Ste. Marie) she bravely endured Lake Huron's storms and rocky lee shores to keep British forces at Mackinac and elsewhere supplied.

In the spring of 1814 the Nancy was officially transferred to the Royal Navy and Lieutenant Miller Worsley, RN, commanded her with Mackintosh as his sailing master. Finally cornered by an American squadron along the shores of the Nottawasaga River, she met a defiant but fiery end, 14 August 1814. Lt. Worsley and her crew escaped and through surprise and ruse captured two U.S. Navy schooners left to interdict the Lake Huron supply line. Thus, by the war's end, the British controlled the three upper Great Lakes; but the Americans could have reclaimed superiority had they sent their Lake Erie squadron northward.

Thanks to the survival of Mackintosh's log and to the discovery of the remains of the gallant little schooner in 1927, she and her crew have become iconic symbols of Canadian defiance against the leviathan to the south. Today the Nancy Island Historic Site at Wasaga Beach, Ontario commemorates this little-known episode.

Like most Canadians, Gough exaggerates the importance of the actions of the Nancy and her crew. He ignores that her support of British conquests from Prairie du Chien to Mackinac Island were lost in the Treaty of Ghent. But Gough is correct when he argues that the British-Canadian-Indian actions in this region constituted a gigantic economy-of-force measure that tied down American forces that might have been more strategically useful in other areas.