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{ 187 } Frontier Frigates and a Three-­Decker Wrecks of the Royal Navy’s Lake Ontario Squadron Jonathan Moore Introduction On April 10, 1815, the US Navy schooner Lady of the Lake sailed into Kingston harbor, the Royal Navy’s base on Lake Ontario. On board were Comm. Isaac Chauncey, Maj. Gen. Jacob Brown, and other US officers. A line of warships lay anchored adjacent to the King’s Yard, but rather than resisting the American incursion, they were awaiting inspection by the visitors. At noon the next day, following a tour of the squadron, Chauncey debarked from the British commodore’s colossal flagship St. Lawrence to the sound of a thirteen-­gun salute. The war between Britain and the United States was over, and the day proved to be a remarkably friendly ending to a bitter rivalry.1 Peace abruptly ended the shipbuilding race that for nearly three years had consumed the rival dockyards at Kingston and Sackets Harbor. It was the start of a steady decline in the lake’s naval dockyards and squadrons . Within six months, most of the ships at Kingston would be laid up; in two years they would be in ordinary; in five they would be condemned as rotten; after fifteen they would be half-­ sunk nuisances; and after twenty-­ five years their rotten hulls would be put up for auction and the dockyard closed. The St. Lawrence would be sold off to serve as a cordwood dock in Kingston, and two of the large frigates, Prince Regent and Princess Charlotte, would be abandoned in nearby Hamilton Cove. One hundred years later, local legend would assert that the hulls had been intentionally sunk following the war to be raised again if hostilities resumed. Lying in shallow, silty water, obscured by weeds and winter ice, the bones of these ships from the War of 1812 would be visited by antiquarians, hard-­ hat divers, “frogmen,” and marine archaeologists. “Indefatigable Zeal and Exertions” At the outbreak of the War of 1812, Britain’s naval force on the Great Lakes was the Provincial Marine, an insti7 { 188 } Moore tution loosely modeled upon the Royal Navy but administered by the Quartermaster General’s Department of the British Army.The Provincial Marine’s Lake Ontario dockyard had been established in 1789 at Kingston, a small commercial and military center strategically situated where eastern Lake Ontario meets the headwaters of the upper St. Lawrence River. The yard was situated on a peninsula called Point Frederick, separated from Kingston to the west by the mouth of the Cataraqui River. It was flanked to the east by Navy Bay, which provided an anchorage exposed to the prevailing southwest winds (fig. 7.1). The town, dockyard, and anchorage were overlooked by the high ground of Point Henry to the east. All of this was surrounded by a sparsely populated wilderness penetrated by few roads. During the first year of the war, the Provincial Marine demonstrated a singular lack of effectiveness due to inexperienced officers and inadequate crews. The switch to Royal Navy command of the squadron, which began over the winter of 1812–13, resulted in a radical change in the way the naval war was fought, as well as a dramatic increase in the size and firepower of vessels launched at Kingston. Comm. Sir James Lucas Yeo and the first contingent of Royal Navy officers and sailors took charge of the lake squadrons in May 1813, inheriting a Lake Ontario force that consisted of the sloops of war Wolfe and Royal George, the brig Earl of Moira, the armed schooners Prince Regent and Governor Simcoe, and the unfinished brig Lord Melville. Built of unseasoned timber and armed with carronades mounted on flush decks, these small, shoal-­ drafted vessels could maneuver in shallow, confined waters but were by some accounts dull and leewardly sailers. Not long after his arrival, Commodore Yeo sought the approval of his military superior, Lt. Gen. Sir George Prevost, Commander-­ in-­ Chief of British forces in North America, to build a frigate at Kingston. The need for a “large-­ class” vessel was the result of two events: the launch of the new US corvette General Pike and the loss of the unfinished sloop of war Sir Isaac Brock, burned on the stocks at York by the Americans in April 1813.2 Local conditions also influenced Yeo’s plan to improve his squadron. Despite its relatively small size, Lake Ontario imposed no limitations on the size of vessel Yeo could build; confined...

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