HMS Ontario, sank in 1780 FOUND

Deep in Lake Ontario, two-man team finds 228-year-old shipwreck almost perfectly intact

Jun 14, 2008 04:30 AM

Bill Taylor
Feature Writer

A British warship that sank in Lake Ontario 228 years ago during the War of Independence has been found almost intact by two shipwreck hunters.

"This is the Holy Grail of Great Lakes wrecks," says Jim Kennard who, with his partner Dan Scoville, discovered the 22-gun brig-sloop HMS Ontario in deep water "somewhere" between Niagara and Rochester. "There's nothing more significant than this one."

"It's the oldest confirmed shipwreck in the lakes," Scoville adds. "And very few warships went down. The Ontario is so complete, the two masts are in place and there's still glass in some of its windows."

The ship was a few hours into a voyage from Fort Niagara on Oct. 31, 1780, when it foundered in a sudden, violent storm. There were no survivors. Built at Carleton Island, where Lake Ontario meets the St. Lawrence, it was launched the previous May and may never have fired its guns in anger. It spent the summer ferrying troops and supplies around the lake. Its captain, James Andrews, was also commodore of the lake squadron of ships.

Legend had it that the Ontario was carrying a small fortune in gold as a year's pay for the British garrison at Fort Haldimand on Carleton Island. Kennard scoffs at this.

"The only money would have been in the pockets of the people on board," he says in a phone interview from Rochester, where both men live. "That's not the way the garrison's pay travelled."

The ship was also widely believed to have been only about eight kilometres from its first port of call, Oswego, N.Y., when it sank.

"We're not saying exactly where it is," Kennard says. "It's a British war grave and we want to make sure it remains undisturbed. But it's nowhere near Oswego."

HMS Ontario, 24.5 metres long with masts about the same height, went down with some 120 men, women and children on board. Only six bodies were ever found.

Kennard, 64, and Scoville, 35, searched for the ship for three years, covering about 500 square kilometres, though Kennard first went looking for it 35 years ago.

"But without GPS and other technology ... even now, it was a long, boring task, back and forth with a scanner," he says. "Worse than mowing a lawn."

Scoville is a highly skilled "technical diver" and Kennard is an electronics engineer. He figures in the past 35 years he's found about 200 wrecks. He and Scoville have been working together for six years and have tens of thousands of dollars invested in their equipment.

"It's a hobby and hobbies can be expensive," says Kennard. "But when you find something like this, you forget the expense, you forget the boredom. It's ... whoa!"

HMS Ontario lies in an area where the water reaches depths of more than 150 metres and there's no visible light. The team found the ship with a sonar scanner and confirmed its identity last week using a remote-controlled submersible which shot what Kennard calls "really excellent video. We compared Admiralty drawings of the ship with the pictures and we have a book, Legend of the Lake, that details every deck and where things are. Everything is there. There's no doubt this is the Ontario."

The ship's wreck is sitting in mud at a 45-degree angle, he says. "It's a beautiful ship. There are two crow's nests on each of the masts. One even has some of the railing left around it. None of the spars are attached; they've fallen on the deck. There are a couple of anchors, one still on the ship.

"Eight of the 22 guns were on the deck. Some are still in place. You can't see the others because the gun ports are closed. It's hard even to see the ports because the hull has a lot of mussels on it. The most prominent parts of the ship are the quarter galleries, a sort of windowed balcony, one at each side of the stern. That was the captain's quarters."

Kennard isn't sure why HMS Ontario wasn't more severely damaged. "Who knows what happened? It was a pretty bad storm. Perhaps they were trying to get the ship turned around ... it goes on its side, takes in water, the hatches come off and it fills... It doesn't look as if it went down bow or stern first. It probably settled upright. There could have been trapped air between decks that would have helped the buoyancy. It probably went down quite gently."

He likens using a sonar scanner to "watching your computer screen wallpaper for 10 or 12 hours. You're ready to change your hobby at that point. You start doubting yourself.

"We realized at the end of May that this was probably the Ontario. We were 99 per cent sure. Then the weather turned against us and we were waiting, chomping at the bit."

When they were able to send down the submersible, "finally, last Saturday night, we just went crazy. The video images are so clear. "

Kennard hopes to interest a TV company in a documentary. "Then I don't think we'll ever go back. That's our philosophy. It's a grave and we're the guardians. We don't want to lead other people to it."

What's next for the team?

"There are a few other wrecks in the lake that we'd like to find," he says. "But we generally don't tell people what we're looking for or they start looking for us."

Scoville fears that whatever their next discovery, it'll be an anticlimax.

"I've only been doing this for a few years," he says. "It's kind of sad that this is probably the pinnacle of my search career already."