HMS Confiance (1814) - Aftermath

Aftermath

Following the battle, the battered American ships and their equally battered prizes, many of which were in danger of sinking, including Confiance, were hastily repaired and the following month taken to the southernmost port on Lake Champlain, Whitehall, New York, where they were to be placed in Ordinary. On the trip down the lake, the passing vessels fired a salute to the battery at Burlington, Vermont. It would be the last time the guns of the fleet, and Confiance would ever fire.

Upon the vessel's arrival at Whitehall, she was taken into the U.S. Navy. After being laid up, the vessel served as Commodore Macdonough's headquarters during the winter of 1814-15. When the war ended, the ships of the ragtag fleet were stripped of their guns, rigging, and equipment, their decks were housed over to protect them from the elements, and the ships were anchored in a line along the main channel below town.

Understandably rot quickly spread through the green-timbered ships, and in 1820 they were towed into the nearby mouth of the Poultney River, known as East Bay, and formally abandoned. At their new moorings, the vessels were allowed to sink; the Confiance was the first of the five larger ships to settle into the river. This was in no small way aided by the fact that, in their haste to finish her, the British had used substandard materials in her construction. The Commander of the Whitehall Navy Yard at the time even commented that her scantlings were "of the very worst timber for building ships." Four years after her initial sinking, spring flooding washed the hull out of the river and into the main lake channel. The Navy Department ordered the hull moved and broken up, and dockyard records indicate that the hull was at least partially dismantled. The destruction must not have been complete, however, for a derelict hull marked "wreck of the Confiance" appears on an 1839 map of Whitehall prepared by the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers. The following year in 1825, the Navy decided to close the Whitehall station and sold all the remaining hulks to salvagers.

This was not to be the last "huzzah" of the Confiance, however. In 1873, after dredging work was being done on the river, the submerged hull of the Confiance, defiant to the last, slid into the deepened channel and blocked it. In view of this problem, Mr. J.J. Holden, a local contractor better known as "Nitroglycerine Jack," was called in to remove the obstacle. After a huge explosion, the only remains of the largest warship ever to sail on Lake Champlain were turned into a limited supply of walking canes, which were sold for a dollar apiece.