Good evening SVXA... I thought this was a cool read...
812 Fleet
The War of 1812 gave the U.S. “The Star-Spangled Banner” and made national heroes of two future presidents, William Henry Harrison and Andrew Jackson, but it also inflicted America’s most humiliating defeat – the August 24, 1814 invasion of Washington D.C., during which the Capitol Building, the Treasury Department and the White House all were looted and burned.
On November 24, 1814, three months to the day of that American military disaster, the HMS Fantome and a convoy of “Plunder Ships” bearing spoils from those looted Washington landmarks sank off the coast of Canada near Halifax. Their cargoes of unique American artifacts, including valuables from the White House, Capitol and Treasury, are believed to rest on the ocean floor of Site SBNS-2.
Background of the War of 1812
The origins of the War of 1812 were complex and convoluted. America’s vital overseas trade had been disrupted by the on-again, off-again war between Great Britain and Napoleonic France, with England and Napoleon imposing conflicting blockades on European and colonial ports. More galling to the U.S. was the British warships’ practice of repeatedly seizing American commercial vessels and impressing U.S. sailors into the British Navy. Native American warriors allied with the British also harassed U.S. settlements along the Canadian borders of upper New York State and what later became Michigan.
Calls for war against England to redeem American honor and rid North America of the British by capturing Canada mounted in Congress. Many Southern and Western politicians, led by South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, Kentuckian Henry Clay and Tennessean Felix Grundy, became known as the “War Hawks” and were vocal advocates of combat. Many New Englanders, whose sea-going commerce was the key to the region’s economy, opposed the drive toward war. Although Napoleon had relented in 1810 and dropped his embargo orders, Britain still refused to revoke its blockade.
In June 1812, President James Madison urged a bitterly divided Congress to declare war on Great Britain. It did so by a narrow margin, initiating what some historians have called “the Second American Revolution” to establish U.S. independence from British dominance. (Ironically, the British Parliament actually had rescinded its embargo edicts before Congress voted to declare war – but news of the change had not arrived in time to avoid the conflict.)
American forces, many untested militia, sustained initial defeats against British troops (who were mostly Canadian militia) at Niagara and Detroit. In September 1813, however, a young Navy Captain, Oliver Hazard Perry, defeated a British squadron on Lake Erie, sending the now-famous message to General (and future President) William Henry Harrison, “We have met the enemy and they are ours....” Harrison himself succeeded in reversing the earlier setback at Detroit, forcing British troops to withdraw and then defeating them on the shores of the Thames River. In an unrelated foray into Canada, American forces raided York – today’s Toronto – and put its provincial Parliament building to the torch.
When the British and their European allies temporarily defeated Napoleon early in 1814 and packed him off to Elba, thousands of battle-tested English soldiers and sailors were shipped across the Atlantic to seek a swift, decisive victory – even as an Anglo-American peace conference convened in Ghent, Belgium to hammer out an end to the largely stalemated war. The British expected military triumphs and planned to force a humiliating peace on the U.S.
The Fantome’s Role in the Naval War on the Chesapeake
The British forces featured the largest armada of enemy ships ever to invade American waters. Among these vessels was the Fantome, a two-masted, double-decked, 94-foot-long, 31-foot-wide, 385-ton French-built brig. Launched at the French Naval shipyards at Le Havre in 1808, it had a crew of 74 and ports for 20 heavy carronades, which were two-to-four-foot-long guns half the size of regular cannons and popularly known as “Smashers.” The Fantome had been captured in the mid-Atlantic by British frigates on May 28, 1810 and sent to Halifax. Initially serving in the North Sea and along the Spanish coast, it later became part of the British flotilla conducting operations along America’s northeast coast, including the Chesapeake Bay, as part of the English blockade squadron during the War of 1812. It served under the command of Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn, head of the British naval invasion force.
Prior to 1814, the Fantome’s most significant engagement involved the May 2, 1813 invasion of the Maryland city of Havre-de-Grace, then an important port and battery along the Susquehanna River at the northern end of the Chesapeake. Employing heavy gunfire from the river and Marines from the Fantome armed with muskets, the British drove the residents of Havre-de-Grace into the woods, seized American guns from the battery, destroyed a nearby cannon foundry, made off with a significant amount of flour, and burned many of the city’s buildings and homes.
During August and September of 1814, the Fantome became a dispatch-boat to Cockburn’s flagship, HMS Tonnant, then part of the 50-vessel British invasion of the Chesapeake and its surrounding rivers that resulted in the assault on Washington.
In late August 1814, British forces under Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane sailed up the Patuxent River, landed at Benedict, Maryland, and headed for Washington. Early on August 24, seven thousand American militiamen faced the British invaders at Bladensburg, Maryland, just a few miles outside of the capital. They proved no match for the masters of Napoleon. In a rout that became known as “The Bladensburg Races,” the American forces fled in disarray and 4,000 British troops entered Washington virtually unopposed.
Viewing their actions as retaliation for the burning of the Parliament building in York, the British forces broke into the Capitol, held a mock legislative session and “voted” to set it ablaze after taking what they wanted out of it. Then, as the Capitol Building burned, the British headed for other seats of government – including the White House. Only hours earlier, First Lady Dolley Madison had been one of the last major figures to flee the capital, having made sure that a full-length portrait of George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart, had been cut from its frame to save it for future generations of Americans.
Finding that Mrs. Madison had abandoned the White House while her dining table was set and dinner already prepared, the invading soldiers cheerfully raided the wine cellar, sat down, mockingly toasted the President’s health, and ate the dinner. They then ransacked the house and carted off souvenirs before throwing their torches through the windows to set the building afire, rendering it a gutted, roofless wreck. The Treasury Building, Library of Congress and Navy Yard also were set to the torch. Only an improbable, almost Biblical, sudden hurricane and tornado extinguished the fires and drove the British from Washington.
The English forces next headed north to Baltimore – a ship-building city whose swift privateers had so bedeviled British shipping that The Times of London had called it “a nest of pirates.” In contrast to the poor defense of Washington, the militiamen commanded by Baltimore’s Major General Samuel Smith, a veteran of the Revolution, and General John Stricker repulsed British land forces on September 12, killing their commander, Major General Robert Ross, in the process. The sustained, 24-hour effort of British naval forces to bombard Baltimore’s Fort McHenry into submission between September 13 and September 14 similarly was futile. That failed attack, signaled by the sight of the fort’s mammoth 30-by-42 flag still flying, inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Although word of the destruction of Washington had stiffened the position of the British peace negotiators in Ghent, news of Baltimore’s successful repulse of the land-and-sea invaders strengthened the Americans’ hand. A peace treaty – essentially re-establishing the pre-war status quo – was signed on Christmas Eve, 1814. Just as the lapse in arrival of reports about the revocation of the British blockade measures had failed to prevent the war two years earlier, news of the peace agreement did not reach the U.S. in time to prevent one of the war’s most famous battles – Andrew Jackson’s remarkable defense of New Orleans in January 1815.
The Loss of the Fantome
Research has not confirmed whether the Fantome was present during the bombardment of Fort McHenry, but its role as a dispatch-boat to Cockburn’s flagship suggests it may have been there. Sometime after the sacking and burning of Washington, however, the Fantome is known to have convoyed a number of “Plunder Ships” from the entrance of the Potomac River to Castine, Maine. From there it led the convoy to Saint Johns, New Brunswick, from which it departed for Halifax, Nova Scotia. Surviving manifests indicate that among the cargo carried by the Fantome and its convoy were valuables taken from the White House, Capitol and other U.S. government buildings.
On the night of November 24, 1814, while under the command of Lt. Thomas Sykes, the Fantome and at least three of her escorted “Plunder Ships” were lost on a rocky reef near Prospect, Nova Scotia, some 20 miles southwest of Halifax, due to navigational errors during bad weather. Although no lives appear to have been lost, virtually all of the cargo went down with the ships. Only a few small cannon were recovered from a piece of wreckage that washed ashore soon after the ships sank. A large boulder near the Prospect location has the name Fantome inscribed on it, and the body of water in which she sank became known as “Fantome Cove.”
The Fantome Site Today
Like much about the War of 1812, the wreck of the Fantome largely was forgotten – although hundreds of coins from that era were found by local scuba divers, beginning in the 1960s. The bulk of the Washington valuables believed to have been aboard the Fantome herself and the lost “Plunder Ships” has never been recovered.
In 2005, Capt. Robert MacKinnon, president of Artifact Recovery & Conservation, Inc. (ARC), a wholly owned subsidiary of Sovereign Explorations Associates International, Inc. (SVXA), was granted a Provincial Research Permit for the area in and around the Fantome wreck site. Now designated SBNS-2, this site consists of at least four primary wrecks – the Fantome and three “Plunder Ships.” The recent recovery from the site of British military uniform buttons and U.S. coins from the period suggest that ARC is honing in on what may be key artifacts from the War of 1812. Among them could be White House treasures that Dolley Madison forsook to save George Washington’s portrait, and which the British Navy was unable to get safely ashore.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
COMPANY CONTACT:
503 Washington Avenue
Suite 2D
Newtown, PA 18940
Phone: (215) 968-0200
TRANSFER AGENT:
Transfer Online,
317 SW Alder Street
2nd Floor
Portland, OR 97204
Monday through Friday
8am to 4:30pm Pacific Time
Phone: 503.227.2950
FAX: 503.227.6874
February 08, 2008
O/S 34,357,016 shares
https://secure.utah.gov/bes/action/searchresults
WEB SITE:
http://www.sea-int.com/
Pink Sheets: http://www.pinksheets.com/pink/quote/quote.jsp?symbol=SVXA
CHART:
