Site Name and Identity

Possible Identity

Borden #

Built

Deposition

Aloha 95

Introduction
Photo Project Sites: an Historical Context

Until the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1958 Kingston played an important role in Great Lakes shipping and maritime commerce; today Great Lakes ship traffic passes by Kingston, south of Wolfe Island. Historically, Kingston’s situation at the confluence of Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and the Great Cataraqui River (after 1832 the southernmost stretch of the Rideau Canal) made it a natural strategic and commercial centre. Although little marine traffic other than yachts and pleasure craft enter the harbour today, there is rich archaeological evidence for the prolific maritime activity during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries; this evidence comes chiefly in the form of shipwrecks, abandoned ships, piers and wharves.

After the capture of Fort Frontenac by the British from the French in 1758, resettlement of the Kingston area did not begin in earnest until the influx of United Empire Loyalists from the United States in the 1780’s. Kingston then began to grow in commercial and strategic importance. Kingston became the base of the Provincial Marine, and Point Frederick the site of the naval dockyard in 1789. The military presence at Kingston grew dramatically during the War of 1812-1814, and in 1813 the Royal Navy took over the base at Point Frederick from the Provincial Marine and initiated a frenetic program of shipbuilding between 1813-1814; remains of at least three Point Frederick-built warships survive at Kingston, including the St. Lawrence and Kingston (ex Prince Regent). These ‘late-model’ warships and others, which saw very little action during the war, were laid-up in Navy Bay for two decades following the war, and during the 1830’s some were broken up completely, and at least two were towed around to Deadman Bay (between Point Henry and Cartwright Point) where they were abandoned (Figure 1a). The largest warship afloat, the St. Lawrence, was auctioned off then towed across to Kingston in 1833 to serve as a storehouse for a large brewery owned by Robert Drummond and later James Morton. There the hull gradually disintegrated and disappeared under shallow water, at the foot of what is now Morton St.. The War of 1812-1814 also resulted in the construction of Fort Henry on Point Henry; the construction of an Ordnance Wharf on the point (along the east side of Navy Bay) is associated with this period of construction, and the wharf undoubtedly served as a funnel for materiel and supplies destined for the fortification.

A stone’s throw from the remains of the St. Lawrence, a large wharf of a different variety from the Fort Henry Ordnance Wharf is still standing. Built as early as the 1830’s it also served Drummond and Morton’s brewery and was used for bringing in raw materials for the business, and shipping out the finished product. This is just one example of the industrial and commercial activity at Kingston during the nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century Kingston was a bustling port and between 1841-1843 served as the capital of the Province of Canada.

Garden Island, three kilometers south of Kingston provided the home for one of Kingston’s most important and diversified businesses between the 1830’s and 1914: the Calvin family timber forwarding, shipbuilding, and towing/salvage enterprise. The backbone of the company’s trade was timber forwarding; "sticks" of timber from around the Great Lakes were brought to the Back Bay of Garden Island for assembly into large rafts which were towed down the St. Lawrence River to Quebec, principally for export to Europe. Many of the company’s schooners and later steamers which brought this timber to Garden Island or towed the rafts were built on Garden Island. Ironically, after they were unfit for service afloat, up to twenty-three vessels were put to work as piers and breakwaters in a marine graveyard in the Back Bay of Garden Island.

Two former Calvin & Co. steamers did not end their days in the shallow water of the Back Bay, but lie in two different deep-water marine graveyards west of Kingston (Figure 1b). The Calvin & Co. side-wheel steamer Cornwall served the company as a salvage tug for a short period, was sold, and circa 1931 was scuttled south of Amherst Island. The other vessel, the screw-propelled tug William Johnston met a similar fate in the 1930’s, but was scuttled in a graveyard southwest of Simcoe Island. At least ten vessels are found in each of the two graveyards and many of them had been removed from shallow-water graveyards in Kingston and Portsmouth harbours in 1925 and 1937. One of the vessels moved to the Amherst Island Graveyard in 1925 was the Mapleglen, a huge, aged, wooden-hulled screw-steamer belonging to Canada Steamship Lines; archaeological and documentary evidence suggests that one of the vessels in the Amherst Island Graveyard is the Mapleglen.

All of the aforementioned sites were positioned deliberately, and strictly speaking they are not ‘shipwrecks’; the true shipwreck sites in the vicinity of Kingston were deposited as a result of disasters. The majority of these sites are of schooners, the workhorses of lake shipping between the late-eighteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. They were generally engaged in shipping small to medium-sized bulk cargoes (e.g. lumber; agricultural produce; coal) on the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River, and in some cases Lake Erie and the Upper Lakes. For instance, the schooners Annie Falconer, Olive Branch, George A. Marsh, William Jamieson, and the schooner-barge Aloha were coal-laden when they were wrecked near Kingston. The largest bulk cargoes were carried by large wooden-hulled screw-steamers, in turn replaced in the early twentieth-century by even larger metal-hulled screw-steamers.

The steamship passenger and package freight business on the Great Lakes was inaugurated by the launch in 1816 of the side-wheel steamship Frontenac at Bath, Ontario, just west of Kingston. If the workhorse of bulk shipping for most of the nineteenth century was the schooner, the side-wheel steamer was the workhorse of the passenger, package, and mail routes during this period. This class of vessel is no better exemplified than by the wreck of the steamer Comet, built at Portsmouth, Ontario, in 1848 and wrecked near Kingston in 1861.

One unique submerged vessel which was neither sail nor steam-propelled is the Munson, a dredge that sank abreast of Lemoine Point (near Collins Bay, Ontario) in 1890 while being towed to Belleville.

One of the most recent shipwreck discoveries in the Kingston area involves yet another Calvin & Co. built tug, the Frontenac, lost while returning from a salvage job on Main Duck Island in 1929. Unlike her sister tug the William Johnston, she was not stripped of machinery and gear before going down, and therefore paints a much richer archaeological picture.

Whatever the nature of the formation of these sites, they present a representative sample of not only the ships which worked in and around Kingston, but also some of the shore-bound facilities required to operate these ships. They include some of the best or only surviving examples of certain classes of ships in the Great Lakes. Indeed, the sites provided a remarkable potential for exploration and study when sport diving at Kingston began.

 

Methodology
Collection of Existing Photographic Images

Two approaches were taken to the collection of existing photographs: (i) advertisements were made at Underwater Canada between 1995-1997, in Diver Magazine and in the O.U.C. Newsletter; (ii) known photographers were contacted personally. P.O.W. members and dive charter boat operators from the area advised on the names of potential donor photographers. It is important to note that thousands of photographs of area wrecks exist in private collections, but most of those collections were not observed. All photographers contacted were willing to allow duplications of their photographs to be made. Generally, the author inspected each photographer’s entire collection and selected images for duplication. Two Hi-8 tapes were donated by Katrin and Steve Cooper, and these contained footage on many of the Photo Project sites.

 

Fieldwork Photography to Collect New Images:
Photographs & Hi-8 Video

Existing photographic collections did not present complete coverage of the sites in the study area selected for photographic recording. Therefore, fieldwork photography was undertaken primarily at sites not frequented by sport diving photographers (i.e. Deadman Bay Graveyard, St. Lawrence, Garden Island Graveyard, Fort Henry Ordnance Wharf). In the cases where extensive photographic recording by sport divers had already taken place (i.e. Comet, George A. Marsh), photography was directed at obtaining records of structural components not always recorded by those sport divers. The collection of photographs in 1996 on all sites (excluding Garden Island) was conducted on an ad hoc basis by J. Moore and D. Ostifichuck, between May and November 1996.

No diving or photography under licence 96-013 was conducted on the site of the Frontenac in 1996. Nevertheless, prints by J. Smith of the site were collected and incorporated into the collection. The location of the site has not been disclosed to the author, although an Archaeological Site Record form has been completed.

Still photography was directed at obtaining both general and detailed images of site features. All of the shallow photography at Garden Island and the Fort Henry Ordnance Wharf was taken using available light. The St. Lawrence and Deadman Bay 1 and 2 were photographed with both available light and artificial light. Artificial light was used on all of the deep sites, and this photography was undertaken on an ad hoc basis between 1995 and 1996. On some deep sites D. Ostifichuck and M. Williams have also mounted cameras on tripods and taken general site photographs with available light. Scale bars were employed during the still photography by J. Moore only on the St. Lawrence. Photographs taken by J. Moore and D. Osticichuck employed Fuji Sensia 100ASA and Sensia 400ASA.

The primary objective of the Hi-8 video recording was to obtain good general coverage of each site. All of the Hi-8 video was taken during the Autumn of 1995, principally on account of the excellent underwater visibility at that time of the year. Some Hi-8 video was taken with the use of 1.0m scale bars (graduated each 0.20m) or a 0.30m scale bar (graduated each 0.20m). The Hi-8 video taken by J. Moore employed a Sony Hi-8 Video CCD-TR101 inside an Amphibico Inc. TR-101 Amphibicam Housing. All video was taken with available light. All tapes were duplicated onto Sony Hi-8MP tapes using Sony Hi-8 decks.

During the fieldwork, no artifacts were either disturbed or raised to the surface.

Image Digitizing to CD-ROM

Hi-8 video stills were created to digitally preserve images from Hi-8 video and make those images much more accessible and viewable via computer. Hi-8 video stills were captured using a Sony Hi-8 Video CCD-TR101 connected to Play Incorporated Snappy Video Snapshot hardware and software. Stills were captured at 640 x 480 image size and were saved in JPEG format (*.jpg). The average file size is about 200KB. Video stills derived from Hi-8 video by Katrin and Steve Cooper were digitized in the same manner, but employing a Sony Hi-8 deck. A selection of colour prints were also digitized, again to make them accessible for viewing via computer. Prints were scanned using a Hewlett-Packard Scanjet 4C and were saved in JPEG format (*.jpg). Average file size is about 500KB. In future, a selection of colour slides will be digitized onto Kodak Photo-CD.

Image Cataloguing, Labelling and Storage

All images were catalogued by J. Moore using the database Microsoft Access Version 7. The catalogue is divided into four categories: Prints (Appendix 1); Colour Slides (Appendix 2); Hi-8 Video Stills (Appendix 3); and Hi-8 Video (Appendix 4). Catalogue numbers for the prints, colour slides, and Hi-8 video stills are formed from the site’s Borden Number and a sequential

number, followed by an "S" (Colour Slide), "P" (Print), or "VS" (Hi-8 Video Still). The majority of sites examined during the P.O.W. Photo Project had not previously been assigned Borden Numbers. Existing catalogues for photographs of Deadman Bay 1 and 2 taken in 1988 by Peter Engelbert were updated. Original slide mounts were removed and replaced with Gepe 7001 glass-less mounts to standardize the collection. These slide mounts were automatically labelled using a Trac Industries A6 Slidetyper at Parks Canada. Slides are stored in Viewpacks Super Archival 24 sleeves.

Both Hi-8 video stills and selected digitized prints were written to CD-ROM in JPEG format (*.jpg). As mentioned above, selected colour slides were digitized on Kodak Photo-CD. Two near-identical sets of images were assembled, one for the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston and the other for Preserve Our Wrecks (Kingston); the former set does not contain images of Deadman Bay 1 and 2 taken by Peter Engelbert in 1988. Where applicable, all original images are in the set held by Preserve Our Wrecks (Kingston).

List of Abbreviations

The names of the following organizations are abbreviated as follows:
P.O.W. Preserve Our Wrecks (Kingston)
S.O.S. Save Ontario Shipwrecks
M.M.G.L.K. Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston

The following abbreviations appear in the footnotes:

D.B.W. Daily British Whig
K.W.S. Kingston Whig-Standard
N.A.C. National Archives of Canada

The following abbreviations are employed in the Appendices ("Dir." column) to indicate the direction of view of photographs. At non-wreck sites (Fort Henry Ordnance Wharf; Morton’s Wharf), wreck sites at which the bow and/or stern are not discernible (Garden Island 13, 14, 21; St. Lawrence), and surface photographs, the following are employed:

N North
E East
S South
W West

The following denote directions relative to the hulls of wreck sites. They are employed only in cases where the bow and/or stern of the wreck are discernible:

A Aft (towards the stern)
F Forward (towards the bow)
P Port (towards the left side of the hull, facing the bow)
St Starboard (towards the right side of the hull, facing the bow).
O Outboard (out from the hull)
Combinations of the above are also employed. For example, "P/F" indicates that the direction of view is towards port and forward; "NE" denotes the direction is northeast. In addition, the notation "---" is employed in the following cases: the direction of view could not be determined; the direction of view is down; the photograph is a "Detail" close-up.