Small Arms Artifacts from the Battle of Plattsburgh Bay

Abstract

On September 11, 1814, Captain George Downie of the British Royal Navy sailed a squadron of four ships and a dozen gunboats around Cumberland Head, on the New York shore of Lake Champlain, where Captain Thomas Macdonough of the United States Navy waited to engage him with a comparable naval force. Macdonough won the battle, capturing the four Royal Navy ships and forcing nearby British Army forces to retreat back to Canada. After the victory, the captured British ships were temporarily positioned at Crab Island at the southern end of Plattsburgh Bay to be repaired before their removal to Whitehall, New York. Cleanup of the ships began in transit between the battle site and Crab Island, with debris and damaged equipment being thrown overboard. This jettisoned material remained on the lake bottom for the next century and a half. In the late 1950’s, a man named William ‘Bill’ Leege taught himself to dive with early scuba equipment and began to search Lake Champlain for the battlefield of Plattsburgh Bay. Leege spent the next three decades recovering artifacts from the lake bottom, all the while carefully documenting and retaining artifacts of significance. The artifacts recovered by Bill Leege and his colleagues in the Lake Champlain Archaeological Association (LCAA) were later donated to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes, Vermont, where many of the artifacts were conserved and are currently housed. The majority of small arms artifacts from Plattsburgh Bay and the surrounding area have never been displayed by the Museum, nor have they been analyzed and published in their entirety in any publicly available catalogue. This thesis on the small arms artifacts in the LCAA collection at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum will provide a greater depth of understanding of the reality of naval life and naval warfare on the lake during the War of 1812. It will allow for the comparative study of this collection of arms with other weaponry-related finds from the war and from the period. Historical research on the provenance of these small arms will give a deeper understanding of the nature of trade in small arms, and the accessories necessary for their maintenance and use, at the beginning of the 19th century.