Legend of the Lake: The 22-Gun Brig Sloop Ontario 1780

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

On October 31, 1780, a tremendous storm swept unexpectedly across Lake
Ontario. The punishing winds and huge waves were the remnants of a
deadly hurricane that had already claimed scores of ships across the
Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea. Caught in the storm in this
latitude was the pride of the British Provincial Marine, the newly built
His Majesty’s Brig Sloop Ontario. The 22-gun warship had been sailing
toward a rendezvous with a British land force that was returning from a
raiding party. On board were scores of British sailors and soldiers,
more than a dozen American prisoners of war, and a handful of women and
children. The Ontario did not reach its destination and was never heard
of again until the summer of 1995, when an American scuba diver
discovered the nearly intact hull sitting serenely on the bottom of Lake
Ontario.

Shipwrecks have always had a peculiar claim on human imagination. What
makes the story of H.S. Ontario even more alluring are the two question
marks left in the flotsam of disaster. First, with respect to numbers of
lives lost, this event may be the worst accident ever suffered on Lake
Ontario. But no one will ever know, because the Ontario sank during a
war and the British more or less succeeded in hiding the scale of the
tragedy from their enemies, the Americans. Second, the Ontario was a new
ship, built with lake conditions in mind. Even today, naval architects
cannot explain why this state-of-the-art brig sank while older, less
sturdy boats survived the same storm.

A story this enticing deserves a worthy narrator. Arthur Britton Smith,
a retired military officer, an amateur historian, and a boat enthusiast,
provides the curious with highly readable text and demonstrates an
exhaustive knowledge of 18th-century ship construction and military life
in the Lake Ontario region during the American Revolutionary War.
Complementing the text are dozens of period maps, photographs of
artifacts, architectural diagrams, and beautiful full-color paintings of
the Ontario and her sister ships. This is a book for armchair admirals
everywhere.