by Chad Fraser
Many Provincial Marine vessels were also badly in need of repair. On Lake Erie, the Marine boasted only two seaworthy warships of any real strength, with barely enough men to sail them: the Queen Charlotte, built in 1809, and the Lady Prevost, newly launched in 1811. Both were stationed at Fort Malden. The smaller General Hunter was also available, but it was only lightly armed. The rest of the force consisted of two small merchant vessels that Amherstburg’s master shipwright, William Bell, had been converting into warships: the Chippewa and the Little Belt, with only two guns each.
Fortunately for the British, Prevost was a born administrator, and moved quickly to streamline the rickety Marine. He sacked its elderly commodore and two of its captains, and reduced the ranks of many of its officers in light of their meagre battle experience. Prevost also placed responsibility for the Marine where it more properly belonged: under Royal Navy Commodore James Yeo, who was responsible for all Navy operations on the Great Lakes. He also started a shipbuilding program, which on Lake Erie meant adding the construction of the HMS Detroit to William Bell’s workload. Soon to become the Lake Erie fleet’s flagship, the Detroit was capable of carrying twenty guns, a powerful vessel for the Great Lakes at the time.
The village of Amherstburg had grown into a bustling community by 1812. The town’s inhabitants were mainly shipwrights, carpenters, and other tradesmen serving the Provincial Marine dockyard and Fort Malden.
The fort had been built by the government of Upper Canada in 1796, mainly to defend the southern frontier against the American expansion that had been surging in the wake of the revolutionary war. But, like the flotilla of Provincial Marine vessels moored there, it was also considerably run down by the time the war began. This was a situation that Prevost, his hands already full dealing with myriad political and military problems, was working to rectify as the situation between Great Britain and the United States grew ever more grave. Fort Malden was also the headquarters of the British Indian Department, and British officers and their Native allies could often be seen walking its grounds.
Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Procter was Fort Malden’s commander. Known as an energetic, resourceful officer, he had taken command just prior to Brock’s victory at Detroit. A surgeon’s son, Procter had served briefly near New York during the revolutionary war, and was respected by his men and his superiors; Brock himself once praised Procter’s “indefatigable industry,” and it was this quality in particular that would soon be put to the test at the notoriously under-provisioned Fort Malden.
An Unlikely Shipyard
Across Lake Erie, the Americans, with no armed ships capable of challenging the British, were racing to get their own fleet on the water. In October 1812, Sailing Master Daniel Dobbins chose Presque Isle Bay, at Erie, Pennsylvania, almost directly across from the British supply depot at Long Point, as the site of the American base on the lake, and quickly got down to the business of turning it into a functioning shipyard. Dobbins had been at Detroit with Hull and, interestingly, had managed to negotiate his release through a British colonel named Nichols, who was an old acquaintance. Such “paroles” were not uncommon during this period, and, upon his release, Dobbins crossed Lake Erie in an open boat along with several of the men from Fort Detroit before finally making his way to Presque Isle.
Dobbins’s choice for the site of the U.S. base was not without controversy. At the mouth of the harbour was a sandbar that reduced the water’s depth to a mere 2.5 metres, insufficient to allow a fully armed warship to pass over. Dobbins was sharply upbraided by Captain Jesse Elliott, the Navy commander responsible for the region, who wrote to Dobbins that it appeared to him “utterly impossible to build gun boats at Presque Isle. There is not enough water on the bar to get them into the lake. Should there be water, the place is at all times open to the attacks of the enemy . . . I have no further communication to make on the subject.” But Dobbins vigorously defended his choice, responding, “There is a sufficiency of water to let them [the U.S. fleet] into the lake, but not a sufficiency to let heavy armed vessels of the enemy into the bay to destroy them. The bay is large and spacious, and completely landlocked, except at the entrance.” It was soon to be a moot point: when Commodore Isaac Chauncey, commander of all U.S. Navy operations on the Great Lakes, arrived to inspect the operation at Erie in January 1813, he approved of Dobbins’s work and ordered him to “get out timber, and prepare for the building of two sloops of war.” These were in addition to two gunboats that Dobbins was already building at the time. Shortly after his visit, Chauncey sent Dobbins plans for two more warships, bringing the emerging Lake Erie flotilla to a total of six vessels.
Dobbins, as he had in locating the naval base, took on the ships’ construction with enthusiasm, and even though the winter of 1813 was brutally cold, he managed to get almost every blacksmith and carpenter on the Ohio frontier involved in the project. Three hundred shipwrights and axemen were working and living in Erie itself, nearly doubling the village’s population. Erie’s citizens took up the cause as well, ransacking the village for every scrap piece of iron and helping bring lumber, canvas for sails, and every other provision imaginable overland along narrow roads and through untracked forests from as far away as Pittsburgh and even Philadelphia.
In early March, the project got a boost with the arrival of Noah Brown, a shipwright from New York, and twenty-five carpenters. As the warships were only being constructed for one purpose — the annihilation of the British presence on Lake Erie — Brown opted for a no-nonsense approach, eschewing all nonessential features so as to get them on the water as quickly as possible. There would be no ornamental features — not so much as a figurehead. As Brown noted to one of the carpenters: “We want no extras — plain work is all that is required; they will only be wanted for one battle; if we win, that is all that is wanted of them; if the enemy is victorious, the work is good enough to be captured.” Chauncey was also putting pressure on Brown, writing him often and urging him to “drive on as fast as possible my dear Sir.”
By mid-March, Dobbins and his crew had laid the keels of the four gunboats and were hard at work on all six vessels. These ships, particularly the twenty-gun behemoths Niagara and Lawrence, would play legendary roles in the coming battle for control of the lake.
Some seven hundred kilometres away, in Newport, Rhode Island, twenty-seven-year-old Oliver Hazard Perry was growing restless. Newly promoted to the rank of master commandant, he had climbed rapidly through the ranks of the fledgling U.S. Navy. The Perry family was well-connected in Navy circles and as a result, when America fell desperately short of sailors upon the eruption of conflict with France in 1799, Oliver’s father was called out of retirement to command the frigate General Greene. Young Oliver, then only twelve years old, excitedly went along, serving as a midshipman on this, his first assignment at sea. Between 1799 and 1802, the General Greene saw relatively little action, but young Perry became thoroughly hooked on life at sea, and by all accounts was a hardworking sailor. His peacetime career path then led him through a series of relatively humdrum tours on four other Navy ships, the most notable being the fabled USS Constitution, before he was assigned his own command, the schooner Revenge, in early 1810.
At twenty-five, and already steeped in a family tradition of shipboard life, Perry was undoubtedly eager to have the chance to prove himself in a command role. But what should have been a very exciting period in the young captain’s life ended up being all too short. During a routine coastal patrol in the summer of 1810, the Revenge hit a reef in Block Island Sound and was completely wrecked. No one was injured, and a subsequent inquiry pinned the entire blame for the incident on the Revenge’s pilot, leaving Perry free of any responsibility. Absolved, but far from satisfied, Perry returned home to Newport. He was there, commanding a small fleet of gunboats — and yet again far from the action — when war came in June 1812.
With the war came a new lease on life for Perry, and in light of his recent troubles, he was determined to make the most of i
t. He wrote to Paul Hamilton, then secretary of the navy, requesting to be reassigned to the Great Lakes, which he correctly reasoned would be at the centre of the action in the coming naval war. He kept in touch with Isaac Chauncey as well, a prudent move, as it turned out. Chauncey was so impressed with Perry’s diligence and enthusiasm that he urged William Jones, who had replaced Hamilton, to give Perry command of the naval force on Lake Erie, a recommendation Jones took in February 1813.
The assignment was a massive one for such a young officer, but if Perry felt overwhelmed, he certainly didn’t show it, immediately dispatching his best officers to Erie before arriving there himself on March 27, 1813.
As a commander, Perry had a number of attributes that would help him considerably in the months ahead, not the least of which being a great deal of charisma, which certainly made a strong impression on his colleagues at Erie. As Usher Parsons, who would later become the surgeon on Perry’s flagship, the Lawrence, gushed in a speech to the Rhode Island Historical Society, forty years after the Battle of Lake Erie, on February 16, 1852:
Possessed of high-minded moral feeling, he was above the low dissipation and sensuality that many officers of his day were prone to indulge in. His conversation was remarkably free from profanity and indelicacy, and in his domestic character . . . he was a model of every domestic virtue and grace. . . . On the subjects of history and drama he was well read, and had formed opinions that evinced patient thought.
Illustration courtesy of Field-Book of the War of 1812
Oliver Hazard Perry was only twenty-seven years old when he took command of the American fleet on Lake Erie.
Perry also inspired fierce loyalty in his men. In Parsons’s words: “Every germ of merit in his officers was sure to be discovered and encouraged by him, and no opportunity was ever lost of advancing those who performed their duty with cheerfulness and fidelity.”
Matters of defence were Perry’s first priority when he arrived in Erie. Although it had been used as a military post by the French up to 1760, none of those fortifications still stood and, as Daniel Dobbins’s son William wrote in his 1875 book, History of the Battle of Lake Erie, “. . . not a single piece of ordinance remained, and the only thing in the shape of a cannon was a small iron boat howitzer, with which the villagers celebrated the fourth of July.” To rectify the situation, Perry met with Major-General David Mead, the local army commander, who promptly called out the local militia. While the militiamen were poorly armed and almost completely lacking in discipline, their presence provided at least some defence from the British, who routinely sailed across the mouth of the harbour to get a look at what was going on inside.
Through the months of April and May, the construction effort went on at a frenetic pace, and by early July all six of the new ships, the Lawrence and Niagara, as well as the schooners Ariel, Scorpion, Porcupine, and Tigress, were afloat on Presque Isle Bay and in the process of being fitted out.
The new ships were soon joined by the brig Caledonia and the Somers, Ohio, and Amelia, small, armed merchant vessels that Perry had sailed to Erie after he took part in the capture of Fort George at Niagara-on-the-Lake in the spring of 1813. The journey had been far from easy, plagued the whole way by thick fog. Worse, Perry had to relinquish command of the small flotilla only two days out of port after coming down with a severe fever. He quickly returned however, when according to Usher Parsons: “a small boat with two men appeared under the lakeshore. They brought with them intelligence from Erie that the enemy had just appeared there, and was probably in pursuit of us.” To his relief, when Presque Isle came into view there were no British vessels in sight.
In just five short months, Dobbins, Brown, and Perry had managed nothing less than a miracle: they had created a fully armed and functional naval fleet on Lake Erie out of almost nothing. But one challenge remained before they could seriously challenge the British: they needed to get their new warships over Presque Isle’s formidable sandbar.
Procter’s Challenge
At Fort Malden, meanwhile, Henry Procter was growing more and more worried; dark rumours about the budding American fleet had made their way across the lake, terrifying the people of Amherstburg. Procter believed the Americans’ ultimate goal was to combine the strength of their army with that of their new flotilla and launch an amphibious attack on his fort.
Procter’s regulars and militiamen had also been severely tested by frequent border skirmishes over the past year, and his supply line from Long Point was proving troublesome. The constant threat of bad weather on unpredictable Lake Erie, along with the constant worry of enemy attack, reduced the flow of food and supplies to a trickle. As a result, conditions often bordered on starvation for the soldiers, townspeople, and their Native allies, and men and materials were often waylaid at Long Point, delaying the construction and rebuilding of the British fleet.
The dire conditions at Amherstburg were especially difficult for the Native warriors, who were beginning to lose faith in their British friends. As Procter noted in a letter to Robert McDouall, Prevost’s aide-de-camp, on June 16, 1813: “At present they [the Native warriors] are not half fed, and would leave us if they were not warm to the cause. The want of Meat does operate much against us. As does the want of Indian arms and goods.”
In order to have any chance on Lake Erie, Procter, in the spirit of General Brock, firmly believed that the British had to strike hard at the new American shipyard. He wrote to James Yeo, and to Prevost throughout the spring of 1813, practically begging for reinforcements of both land troops and sailors for the fleet. As the spring wore on, with little substantial response to his pleas, Procter’s tone grew ever more desperate. “I am surprised they have not appeared on this lake,” he wrote of the American fleet in June, “We are well aware of the necessity of dealing the first blow, indeed we owe everything to our having done so.” No doubt Procter was relieved to see Royal Navy Commander Robert Heriot Barclay step onto the dock at Amherstburg on June 6, 1813.
The road that led Barclay to Lake Erie stood in stark contrast to that of Perry, though both were highly ambitious officers and dyed-in-the-wool navy men. Barclay, like Perry, went to sea at the tender age of twelve under the sponsorship of a close relative. In Barclay’s case, it was his uncle who secured him a place aboard the warship Anson. Unlike Perry, however, Barclay’s first tour was marked by treacherous combat. The French Revolution had driven Britain to war with Spain and France, and the Anson played a significant role, taking many French and Spanish vessels as prizes in a number of fierce firefights.
In 1804, none other than Horatio Nelson, Britain’s most celebrated naval commander, assigned Barclay to his own ship, the legendary Victory. This would have been a significant feather in the cap of such a young officer. But he was only there for barely a month before being reassigned to HMS Swiftsure, a ship-of-the-line. It was aboard the Swiftsure that Barclay would take part, on October 21, 1805, in arguably the most significant naval confrontation in Royal Navy history — Trafalgar. The battle, between thirty-three combined Spanish and French vessels, and twenty-seven British ships, was closely fought, but by evening the British had managed to eke out a victory. The cost in lives was staggering, particularly for the vanquished French/Spanish fleet: twenty-two of their vessels had been sunk or taken, with 4,408 seamen killed, compared to 449 British. Nelson, who had been hit by a sniper concealed in the rigging of a French vessel, died while being treated aboard his flagship. “Thank God I have done my duty,” were his reported last words.
Image courtesy of Toronto Reference Library T-15259
Young Robert Heriot Barclay was already a seasoned veteran of naval combat when he arrived on Lake Erie.
If that wasn’t enough, a violent storm hit that night, battering the decrepit fleets even further. At one point, Barclay and some of his crewmates were involved in an attempt to rescue their French brethren, managing to pull 170 from the crippled warship Redoubtable before her hull finally broke up.
After th
e horrors of Trafalgar, Barclay briefly returned home to Scotland before seeking a post on another navy ship, which he obtained with relative ease, quickly returning to sea as a second lieutenant aboard the frigate Diana.
It was while he was aboard the Diana, attacking a French convoy in a small boat, that Barclay suffered a wound that nearly ended his career, and his life, prematurely. In the heat of the fight, a cannonball fired from the bow of a French ship hit Barclay in the left shoulder, smashing the bones in his left arm to pieces. The Diana’s surgeon was left with no choice — Barclay’s arm had to be amputated at the shoulder.
After the Diana returned to Britain in 1809, Barclay again headed home to Scotland to recuperate, but his stay would be a short one: in light of increasing tension between Britain and the United States, young, ambitious officers like Barclay were needed overseas. He was reassigned to Halifax.
Barclay would likely have been elated at this turn of events; being sent to the front lines of a potential war zone surely meant that, after all he had been through, he would finally be rewarded with his own command. It was not to be. There were no suitable ships at Halifax when he arrived, so he instead spent four long, frustrating years on patrol in the Atlantic. He was in Bermuda when he received orders to report to Kingston, Ontario, to take over command of all Royal Navy operations on the Great Lakes. He had only been in the post for ten days, however, when he was abruptly reassigned to Amherstburg. Barclay was not without reservations about his new position at first, noting that “This [Lake Erie] command was offered to Captain [William Howe] Mulcaster, the next in command to Sir James Yeo, who to my personal knowledge declined it in consequence of its ineffectual state and Sir James Yeo refusing to send seamen.” Still, Mulcaster’s experience did not seem to give Barclay pause. He promptly set off for Long Point, where he boarded the Lady Prevost for Amherstburg.
