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Lake Ontario Maritime Cultural Landscape Survey, Canada
Warships on Lake Ontario

Investigator - Ben Ford, INA Research Associate
Location - New York and Canada
Site - northeastern Lake Ontario
Date - Contact Period to early twentieth century

Highlight - A probing survey conducted in the possible location of a War of 1812 gunboat identified during the 2007 season was not definitive, but greatly reduced the search area for the wreck.

Fieldwork - The Lake Ontario Maritime Cultural Landscape Project completed the survey of three one-kilometer-square blocks along the lake’s shore. Each block was divided into a terrestrial component covered by pedestrian survey and a submerged component surveyed using a side-scan sonar and a magnetometer (both provided by INA). An attempt was made to speak with every property owner within each survey block, as well as local archaeologists and historians, both professional and avocational. The 2008 survey team identified approximately 13 historic and pre-Contact sites, including two pre-Contact camps, two farmsteads, a lime kiln, an early nineteenth-century artifact scatter, four turn-of-the-century docks, a ferry landing, and a schooner that ended its days as a coal barge. We also re-identified Haldimand, a circa 1765, 16-gun British naval [snow]. Haldimand was scuttled at Carleton Island, the British naval station on the lake during the Revolution. This wreck and surrounding features and structures, including Fort Haldimand and the shipyard that produced the recently-found Ontario, has strong potential for an integrated terrestrial and underwater archaeological project.

2011 Update - Over the past year an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and geologists from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, College of Charleston, and the Great Lakes Historical Society explored Black River Bay, Lake Ontario, for the remains of a War of 1812 frigate and gunboat.

Work began in January when archaeologists following up on previous magnetometry and archival studies towed a ground penetrating radar unit (GPR) across the frozen water surface in an attempt to identify the site of a buried 75-foot long gunboat. A promising anomaly was identified under approximately nine feet of sand, and during June a second team of archaeologists returned and excavated a test unit to explore the anomaly. At the same time, a side-scan sonar, magnetometer, and sub-bottom profiler survey was conducted to investigate the rest of the bay in an attempt to identify the remains of the frigate Mohawk.

Unfortunately, both investigations were more successful at ruling out possible wreck locations than in identifying a specific shipwreck. The GPR anomaly turned out to be a series of stones rather than a gunboat; proving in this case that ice-penetrating survey by means of GPR is viable but not nearly as exciting when one does not actually discover a shipwreck. Similarly, after diving on multiple targets in the Black River Bay, it does not appear that Mohawk is located in the bay. What is more, the geologic results suggest that there are few portions of the bay with sufficient soft sediment to conceal the remains of a large ship. A National Geographic Society/Waitt Institute grant provided the principal funds for this project.

Additional Resources