Carleton Island, 1780?: Schooner Days MLXIV (1064)

by C. H. J. Snider

LAST TIME we sent out an identification S.O.S. several friends responded with the supposition that the unknown port in the wilderness submitted in picture was indeed as we had guessed Amherstburg in its early days - Fort Malden, to be official - shortly after the British naval engagement was moved from Detroit. But no one could shed light on who painted the picture.

Now boot is on the other foot. We know who painted this picture - it is in water color - and we know about when. But we don't know where. The drawing is in Lieut. Francis Hall's Sketch book, which is in the Public Archives of Canada at Ottawa, among several which show Lake Ontario ports - and other harbors, Baltimore among them I believe — shortly after the war of 1812 had ended; probably in 1815.

My guess is that this picture represents the British military and naval establishment at Carleton Island, not as it was in 1815, after the Americans had taken over, but as it was say during the War of Independence, when Fort Haldimand dominated the St. Lawrence. Much in it suggests this. The Fort on the height with the flagpole would be Fort Haldimand, the ship on the stocks perhaps, the fatal snow Ontario, second of the name, built and lost in 1780. The sloop or cutter to the left might be HMS Caldwell, the three vessels moored side by side part of the Provincial Marine fleet of the time, the chimneys and rooftops under the bank the naval commandant's house in the "King's Garden" which supplied the garrison with vegetables. I have seen cannon balls marked with the broad-arrow which were found in that garden. And the wreck in the fore-water, to windward of the sloop, might be the wreck of the French corvette Iroquoise, which was sunk in 1760, after the Conquest, and is still at Carleton Island. A military map of 1810 marks the wreck in the same position.

Hall named all his other sketches, but left nothing to identify this one. What is your opinion?

[Snider's speculation is highly unlikely as in Hall's published account of his travels, he arrived in Kingston via the north channel of the St. Lawrence, made a side trip to the Bay of Quinte and then crossed to Sackett's harbour; returning via Cape Vincent and Wolfe's island without a mention of Carleton Island. If he had stopped long enough to construct the detailed historical scene that Snider proposes, one would expect at least a passing reference to the island by name.]