The Lost Expedition and the War of 1812

Parks Canada has announced that their 2010 and 2011 expeditions to the arctic to find the lost shipwrecks of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition will continue in 2012. In 2010, the wreck of one of Franklin's would-be rescuers--the HMS Investigator-- was found by a Parks Canada team.

Captain Sir John Franklin led an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage in two specially-fitted Royal Navy bomb vessels in 1845. When nothing was heard from them in 1847 or 1848, England sent other expeditions to find the lost crews, without success. Partial remains of the expedition indicated that they were trapped in ice packs for two years. A note was discovered that stated Franklin died in 1847. His crew abandoned the ships in 48, and started walking to civilization with boats and sledges in tow. None of the 24 officers and 110 men ever made it back. (wikipedia link)

Interestingly, both Captain Franklin and his ship, the HMS Terror were veterans of the War of 1812. The Terror was built as a bomb ship (a vessel with a specially reinforced hull for supporting large mortars) in 1813, and participated in the bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814.

Franklin himself served aboard the ship of the line HMS Bellerophon, and was the midshipman in charge of signals during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In 1815 he was serving on board the HMS Bedford and was part of the Royal Navy forces that fought at the Battle of New Orleans. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online)

If the shipwrecks are indeed found this year, it would be a time-warp of sorts to an earlier era of arctic exploration. The HMS Terror is not only a historic site for Franklin's lost expedition: it is a missing link to the battle that gave the United States its national anthem.

Wrecks of the Hamilton and Scourge, Lost Warships of the War of 1812.

On August 8, 1813, two American warships were sailing off Fourteen Mile Creek in Lake Ontario. The USS Scourge and USS Hamilton were schooner rigged vessels, converted from merchantmen to join the small US fleet on the lower Great Lakes. Both schooners were heavily armed. The Scourge mounted four 6 pounder and four 4 pounder cannons, while the Hamilton boasted a 32 pounder gun and eight 12 pounder carronades.

Each gun could weigh more than a ton, and all this weight lying on the main deck made the warships top heavy. Even worse, the weather on the Great Lakes is famously fickle, blowing fair one minute and then conjuring vicious squalls and devastating short-wavelength chop the next. On that August day, the two schooners were caught in one of these sudden squalls. Both ships capsized, dragging over eighty men into the cold, deep lake waters with them. Only 16 men survived.

History Road Trip Photos

A few months ago I posted a few pictures from the National Road Museum in Norwich, OH. On the same day trip, I visited the Ohio River Museum and the Campus Martius Museum in Marietta, Ohio. Marietta was the earliest American settlement in the Ohio territory. Founded in 1788, it was named after the then- Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. Many of the structures built by the town's first settlers are still standing.

A wheelwrights shop in the National Road Museum. Note the creepily realistic mannikin.

Blacksmith's shop in same.

A lady tavern keeper serves some hungry guests.

Zane Gray in his study. The noted western writer pioneered the production of silent Western films in the 1910s.

Wheelhouse of the Tell City. It used to stand in someone's yard.

Interior of the wheelhouse. Note the spokes, which could be climbed on to force the tiller--this before steam-assisted steering gear.

A flat boat, the "arks" of the Ohio River that moved families and their livestock and supplies down river to the frontier. General Green Clay's brigade used these craft to move down the Maumee River for an amphibious assault during the Battle of the Rapids, 5 May 1813.

WP Snyder, a steam powered stern-wheeler. Though it looks old, this stern-wheeler was built in 1918 and retired in the 1950s.

Engineers station on the WP Snyder.

Steam engine. Since the stern wheeler was employed pushing barges all year round, there were plenty of pot bellied stoves in all compartments.

Aft steering gear. Just forward at right is one of the heads.

Pilot's eye view of the river. By the 20th Century the Mississippi was no longer the treacherous, wild river it had been to 19th century riverboat men. Much of the equipment is similar to older steam boats.

Coal fired boilers, amidships. Most of the space on the main deck is taken up by boilers and steam engines.

One of the famous lead plates buried by Celeron de Bienville to lay claim to the Ohio country in 1749.

One of the most interesting artifacts at Campus Martius. Return Jonathan Meigs wore this arm band as a badge of office (like a gorget) as a commissioned officer during the Revolutionary War. Armbands like this are usually associated with Indian leaders.

Chest, hat and sabre belonging to Rufus Putnam as a Revolutionary War officer.

Hawk given by Tecumseh to Thomas Worthington as a gesture of friendship. Worthington entertained both Tecumseh and the men who could be said to have been his mortal enemies, Henry Clay and William Henry Harrison.

Calumet carried by Indian Agent John Johnston when negotiating the removal of the Wyandot Indians, the last organized tribe living in Ohio.

A short musket or musketoon. Interesting because the United States armories did not produce musketoons or carbines until years after the War of 1812.

The Battle of Brownstown

(illustrations from The Robert Lucas Journal published 1906)
In early August of the summer of 1812, Brigadier General William Hull found his invasion of Canada hopelessly bogged down. Although he vastly outnumbered his enemy, the small regular British garrison at Fort Amherstburg (near the mouth of the Detroit River) was holed up in its redoubts, protected on the river side by the guns of the HMS Queen Charlotte and smaller vessels. Hull was further embarrassed when the Wyandot leader Roundhead and his followers joined Tecumseh. Roundhead’s village lay astride Hull’s supply road from Ohio. Hull sent a column of infantry to reach a supply convoy that had arrived in Frenchtown (modern-day Monroe, Michigan). When they tried to cross a stream near Brownstown, the Americans were ambushed by a small force of Indians led by the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. Private Adam Walker, a soldier in the 4th United States Infantry (which took no part in this engagement), recorded what took place:

August 4—Major Van Horn, of Col. Findley’s regiment was detached with 200 men to the river Raisin, for the purpose of escorting a quantity of provisions to the army, which were at that place under the charge of Capt. Brush. He was attacked in the woods of Brownstown by a large body of Indians while his men were partaking of a little refreshment. So sudden and unexpected was the attack that it was impossible to form the men in line of battle, although every exertion was made by the officers for that purpose. In this defeat seven officers and ten privates were killed, and many more wounded—They retreated in great disorder, leaving a part of their killed on the field.

V-2 Rocket captured earth on camera

I found this grainy image posted on Neatorama today. It’s a photo taken from a V-2 rocket, of the Earth’s surface from outer space. What I find fascinating is that it was taken in 1946—a year after the end of World War II. By war’s end, the Germans had developed technology that was capable of spaceflight. Not that they weren’t too preoccupied using it to kill people in London, or that they didn’t use slave labor to build them—or that more of their armies relied on horses and bicycles to move around in 1945 than they had in 1939. The fact that German technology was technically able to reach the edge of Earth’s atmosphere is chilling.

It reminds me of the Paris Gun, a gigantic fixed siege cannon that the Germans built during World War I to bombard Paris. The concept of a terror weapon was similar: there was no way for Parisian civilians to hear the gun or its projectile approaching. The shells would hurtle over the horizon—a 210 pound projectile with a range of over 80 miles—and drop out of nowhere on the city. Supposedly, because the shells climbed nearly out of Earth’s atmosphere and traveled so far, special calculations had to be made to account for the lack of wind resistance and the rotation of the earth. The Paris Gun’s projectiles travelled as high as 25 miles—the highest altitude weapon until the V-2s were test fired decades later.

Unlike the V-2 rockets, the Paris Gun was never captured by the allies. It simply disappeared at the end of the Great War—though it is believed to have been destroyed by the German military along with most of the plans in order to prevent this terrible technology from falling into the wrong hands. By contrast, the V-2s provided the United States and the USSR with the basis for both space exploration and the ultimate terror weapons—intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Put-in-Bay