Original subtitles

We've been out on the river for a month

and found nothing.

Then, all of a sudden, we ran across a target that

sent our charts going crazy.

And my heart went in my throat.

Can you hear me, Wes?

Going down.

One of the divers comes up.

He's joyous.

I think it's a ship timber.

Everybody on deck,

they were jumping and screaming.

But was it a War of 1812 ship?

The War of 1812

is a poorly understood war in American history.

This is the first invasion of

the United States of America.

One of the most humiliating defeats we ever faced.

And yet it was the coalescence of the nation.

But nobody had found anything relating to

the war in our waters, until some, like me,

started unearthing the war's most momentous events.

There was a Fort which is now

completely washed into the sea.

A lost flotilla of American ships that

suicidally confronted the mighty British Navy.

And the idea that my ancestors were pivotal

in that war still remains a revelation.

Three stories hold the key to finally

understanding one astonishing moment.

The burning of the White House.

This would have been Pearl Harbor,

would have been the twin towers.

It was all a mystery.

How was a foreign army able to burn

the capital of the United States?

When I was a child,

my father got me reading science fiction.

The story that really affected me the most was a story about

a cataclysmic event in the far Pacific.

An earthquake that opened up a rent in the Earth's surface.

Into that rent, all of the waters of

the world began to pour.

And what fascinated me was what the rolling back

of the seas revealed.

There were ancient cities,

sunken civilizations.

There were shipwrecks by the thousands.

That was the draw that eventually got me into

exploring the underwater world.

In the mid '60s, I started looking for shipwrecks.

It was extremely exciting because

it was a period of discovery.

I was not a bonafide archaeologist.

There wasn't anybody doing marine archaeology.

I was living on the periphery of Washington DC.

And I was visiting a bookstore and I pulled a book down,

and it changed my life.

The book described the heroic efforts of

a ragtag American naval force,

known as the Chesapeake Flotilla,

to confront the British during the War of 1812.

Most people don't know about the War of 1812 or

what it meant to our country.

So, it struck my heart as something that I had to find

right out there in that river.

A river called the Patuxent, 45 minutes from where I lived.

I love the water.

I love to get out and explore it.

When you're doing survey work,

looking for boat wrecks,

a kayak, to me,

is an ideal way to get out and explore the coastline.

Don called me out of the blue.

I was a young director of a museum,

Calvert Marine Museum.

And he wanted to come by and talk to me about

an underwater cultural resource survey.

He said,

"Wouldn't it be cool if we could find the place where

the Chesapeake Flotilla had been lost?"

It was just like an instantaneous, yes.

So, in 1977,

we began a three-year long survey

of the Patuxent River.

The big question was where to look?

The Patuxent River is a big place, it's over

115 miles long.

And it is an important tributary of the Chesapeake Bay.

It was vital that we narrowed down

our search area.

So, we did a lot of research,

looking at maps, looking at the journals.

Could we work out the final resting place of the flotilla?

The War of 1812 started when the U.S. invaded

British territory in modern day Canada.

By 1814, the British had deployed

a powerful royal naval force to the Chesapeake Bay.

That vast waterway that controlled access to Washington.

So, a veteran American seafarer, Commodore Joshua Barney,

proposed to build a fleet to defend the nation's capital.

The last sighting

of that flotilla was

in the Patuxent River.

If you look at the British record,

that says, above Pig Point,

we could see the American Flotilla.

So that was where we focused

our remote sensing survey.

A MAG survey is where you have

a piece of equipment that measures the magnetic anomalies,

that usually indicates that there's a metal object.

And one day we ran across the target,

an anomaly that sent our charts going crazy.

And my heart went in my throat,

and I knew we had a significant something.

The question mark was, was this one of the ships,

or was it a false anomaly?

One of our hired divers goes down and he comes up.

He's joyous.

"Look, I have a turtle shell."

I says, "Yeah, it's a turtle shell."

"But it's beside a piece of wood sticking out.

I think it's a ship timber."

I said Ralph, "We think we got something."

We did some probing to determine

what is the extent of this.

And we were astounded at what we found.

The vessel was under

four to five feet of sediment.

In about six to eight feet of water.

Not too far from the shore.

We realized it was at least 90% intact.

50 to 70 feet long.

We knew we had a vessel.

Now, was it a War of 1812 vessel?

Was it part of Barney's Flotilla?

I've been an artist since childhood because

I was always creating.

The kind of themes that I have been given

to are lost narratives.

The African diaspora, where we come from,

has always been an interest of mine.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York City.

My mother is from Trinidad and my father is from Jamaica.

The idea that any war would have any meaning to me,

is the furthest thing from my mind.

And to then later find out my ancestors were pivotal in

that war, still remains a revelation.

This journey began for me

when my uncle passed in 2007

and I just had this overwhelming feeling of that,

you know, that entire generation,

they're gone.

And that I had to go to their home.

So, in 2008, I went back to Trinidad,

to research my family tree.

My great grandmother's maiden name is Loney.

And I discovered that all the Loneys on that

island descend from one man.

Ezekiel Loney.

I was a DNA descendant of Ezekiel Loney.

But what really blew my mind was the revelation that

my ancestor, Ezekiel, had arrived in Trinidad as

an escaped slave from the USA.

So, upon making this life-changing discovery,

it was an onrush of emotion.

I just had to go to the place where Ezekiel had been enslaved

to understand exactly how he gained his freedom.

Corotoman Plantation was in Virginia.

Approximately 100 miles from Washington DC,

on the west side of the Chesapeake Bay.

In 1812, wheat and corn were grown here.

Today, the only thing left standing is the church.

They have an archive of information on each and

every one of the Africans that they held in bondage.

And I hoped that the plantation's historian could

shed light on Ezekiel's story.

The first document, Tina,

is titled, "A division of the slaves of the court of

a estate into two lots."

That documentation is a Rosetta Stone of information

for what happened here at Corotoman.

This was one of those rare, wonderful ones where they were

shown in family groups.

Right.

First mention of Ezekiel, he was two years old.

We don't know whether he was born there or acquired.

But the question I wanted to answer most of all,

was how Ezekiel escaped.

When the British arrived

in the Chesapeake,

they quickly dominated it, shutting down American shipping.

But they needed additional men.

So, the British issued a proclamation that any person

who made their way to his Majesty's ships,

would be free persons.

This document is dated 2nd of April, 1814.

You have here the letter describing his escape,

on April 18th?

Yes.

What an extraordinary eyewitness account.

Ezekiel Loney was at work, saw three British barges,

and made a decision along with two friends.

"I'm going to follow that boat and go back

to the ship with the British."

I remember thinking what

it meant if they got caught,

knowing that death is right there, waiting for them.

But once they've reconciled that death is better

than enslavement, it's not a problem.

Ezekiel and his companions were immediately freed,

but they had not forgotten those they had left behind.

Just a few days after

the three men left, they led the British back at midnight,

and rounded up 66 more enslaved persons

almost entirely made up of their wives and their children.

Wow. Wow.

That must have been one fate filled night.

I can't imagine.

That was the largest group of slaves

to flee from any Virginia estate to

the British during the War of 1812.

And my ancestor was responsible for that.

I was really interested to see the area

in which he'd escaped from.

It's a really solemn feeling, and I spent a lot of time

wondering whether Ezekiel was seeing through my eyes.

I still get goosebumps from that.

So, what became of Ezekiel Loney next?

The British ships' logs show that he was taken to a place

called Fort Albion, on Tangier Island,

in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.

So, my next question was, what was this place and

why was he taken there?

The shipwreck is like a crime scene.

It demands that

a forensic approach be carried out to analyze it.

It's forensics underwater.

We had christened the vessel the turtle shell wreck,

because that was the first artifact that came up from it.

Can you hear me, Wes?

Go on down.

I went down and I found this musket flint and

I was almost ready to wet myself in my wetsuit.

We found a small swivel gun shot.

A munitions box.

All these indications that show, yes,

this is a military vessel.

.

It was clear from their manufacture

that these artifacts were from the War of 1812 era.

All right.

This got everybody on deck,

they were jumping and screaming,

and everybody was happy.

We knew we had a vessel from the right period,

but was it one of Barney's Flotilla?

We discovered there was a damaged area.

An area that had been splayed out.

As if the hands of some unseen giant had come down on it.

As if something had exploded.

The historic record shows that

when Barneys Flotilla met the powerful British fleet,

he was outgunned and forced to retreat.

Unfortunately, he gets bottled up in the Patuxent River.

On August 22, 1814, the flotilla had retreated

to just about this spot.

With the British fleet in pursuit and the river

becoming shallower, Barney was trapped.

And ultimately, Barney was ordered to scuttle

the fleet, so the British would

not be able to use those vessels.

Charges were left in each of the ships,

and as the British rounded the bend,

the entire flotilla went up in smoke.

Bom, bom, bom, bom, bom.

Lined up in a line, about a mile and half to two miles long.

The United States Chesapeake Flotilla

ceased to exist.

So, the damaged area of our wreck was compelling evidence

that this was one of the Flotilla.

The question was,

if this was one of Barney's boats,

then which one?

The Chesapeake Bay is one of

the largest estuaries in the world.

It's littered with shipwrecks.

I mean, hundreds and hundreds of shipwrecks.

Including some from the War of 1812.

Several years ago, I got a report from

a colleague on this little place called Tangier Island

out in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.

And he mentioned that there was a War of 1812 Fort at

the bottom of this island called Fort Albion,

which is now completely been washed into the sea.

What caught my imagination is the age-old story of

sunken cities and things now lost to sight,

but that were once important.

John approached me to do a survey of

the southern tip of Tangier Island

whether Fort was once.

Fort Albion was built in 1814, approximately two years after

the beginning of the war.

The British needed a staging area

for their offensive in

the Chesapeake region to control the bay,

attack our commerce, and attack our cities.

The hope was to find some tangible bit of

the Fort itself, to understand better

why the British chose this location.

So, we took some old charts and Geo-referenced them and

came up with a, a more precise location of where we could go

and look for the Fort.

Everything look good?

Everything looks good.

All right.

All right, John you ready?

Yep.

A side scanning sonar sends out these signals that bounce

back off anything that protrudes up above the seabed.

We were looking for anything that would help pinpoint where

the Fort once stood.

But we realized that it was going to be difficult.

Searching for remains out here is

a race against time.

Tangier Island is dramatically affected by

climate change and sea level rise and erosion,

to the point now where,

there are only a few hundred acres left.

There are, are predictions that as early as 2030,

they may have to abandon Tangier Island altogether.

We knew that it was possible that we wouldn't be

to find any true remnants of the Fort due to erosion.

One of the dramatic things in, in

our survey, as we moved around to the east of the island,

the bathometer showed deeper and deeper water.

Man, John, look at this,

where the, uh, bottom drops away.

- Yeah. - That is amazing.

Our sonar revealed a channel

with depths reaching 90 feet,

which was extraordinary because the Chesapeake is

generally a shallow bay.

Eventually you realize we were in the general

area where the British must've anchored their warships.

Some of these ships were huge and so Tangier having this

deep-water area to the east of the island

was an ideal location.

Historic British accounts showed the anchorage

laid just to the east of the base.

So now we can pinpoint exactly where

the Fort should have been.

But our initial scans found no physical remains.

And it became fairly clear the scouring effect of

the daily tidal flow would have eroded the Fort bit by bit,

until there, there just wasn't anything left.

But then we came across something we never expected.

John, it's kind of interesting, that, uh,

that area of harder, uh, sediment.

It looks like we are right over

this area where the pond was.

Our scans showed a distinct pattern of sediment

in the seafloor, which seemed to match where a pond was on some

of the old British maps.

The sediments that settled at the bottom of the pond could

have been more compacted than the sandy terrain that the Fort

was built on, which could explain what we were seeing.

And so, by looking at the map of the Fort

and looking at the sonar record,

we could align them,

to pinpoint the location of the Fort's buildings and earthworks.

If Fort Albion were still there today,

the first thing you would see would be a large rise in

the land where they had built earthworks and gun emplacements.

Bastions which would have had cannons that

would have protected the Fort from the seaward side.

There were six barracks for privates,

three buildings for the officers.

A house for the commander.

A parade ground.

The hospital for the sick.

Accounts said that the defensive walls were

around 250 yards long on each side.

It was massive.

When you look at the scale of the Fort,

you ask yourself, what were they doing?

And why would it need to be that big?

We knew the identity of

the turtle shell wreck would

likely only be revealed through interpreting

the tiniest of detail.

And that is the charm of it.

It's a puzzle.

The first key piece of evidence we found was

the surgeon's kit with the surgical equipment there.

There were scalpels, there was a,

a tooth key.

And at the end of it is a little hook,

which the dentist or the surgeon would put in,

behind the tooth that has to be extracted.

Grab it and yank.

Very painful.

And we both thought,

you know, what vessel would have a surgeon's kit?

We knew that the flotilla consisted of

several different types of vessels.

The most prominent of them were gunboats.

The gunboats are shallow vessels,

a very low, narrow vessel, that was rowed and sailed.

And what that meant is that there's

not a whole room on those vessels.

They did not have a lot of compartments.

So that's how we began to think, you know,

based on this medical kit,

it's probably not one of the, the gunboats.

It's, it's got to be one of these other vessels.

And then we also had the flagship,

known as the Scorpion.

Which some people referred to as a block sloop.

And the difference between a block sloop and

the gunboats is deeper draft, larger, broader,

was able to carry more.

So, wouldn't you want your surgeon to maybe be there?

Wouldn't you want your medical kit to be there?

So, we thought maybe for the first time,

this could possibly be the Scorpion.

Could this be the flagship of

the Chesapeake Flotilla?

It was a tantalizing thought,

but the medical kit alone didn't prove anything.

But then we made an extraordinary discovery.

Everybody clean their ears out.

I was mapping the bottom when

I came across this.

We brought it up and it was a moment that,

everybody was excited.

This was something that every sailor

of the era carried, a tin cup for drinking grog.

On one side were initials, C.W.

So, this was a personal cup, and whoever C.W.

was had carved their initials in.

Who is C.W.?

My colleague had found the muster roll in

the National Archives of the Chesapeake Flotilla, 1,000 men.

There was only one C.W.

His name was Caesar Wentworth.

And he was a cook.

And if you look down through the roster list,

he was the cook on board the flagship.

Was this the Scorpion?

At the end of the project,

we knew we had a War of 1812 vessel,

and we knew it was part of the flotilla.

We believed it could be the flagship,

but despite all of our evidence there was something major that

did not fit with this theory.

The big question was, where is the flotilla?

If you read the British account,

it says that they were bow to stern, up the river.

And were all scuttled together,

with the Scorpion at their head.

But it's almost like this vessel seems

to be isolated, it seems to be by itself.

Where are the rest of the vessels?

Where are they?

If this wreck was alone,

then how could it possibly be the Scorpion?

I knew now that my ancestor Ezekiel, had been

taken by the British to Fort Albion on Tangier Island.

So, when it was first brought to my attention that there would be

marine archaeologists looking at this site,

it was very exciting.

This is a side scan sonar mosaic of the bottom.

One of the bright spots may correlate to the pond area that

we see in the British chart.

So, the officers' barracks would have been

located in this area here.

It was actually a huge Fort.

So why do you think that the, uh,

Fort was built, um, so large?

Well, not only did you have to house

the Marines and the British Navy personnel,

but you also had to house all

the formerly enslaved African Americans that were

coming from both Virginia and from Maryland.

And the report say somewhere around

2,000 civilians were transported.

Wow. That's important.

Absolutely.

The numbers started increasing at the Fort

so they would have had to expand the facilities.

Also, as, as far as where Ezekiel might have, uh,

played into the picture, uh,

we know that he was one of the volunteers

for the Colonial Marines.

The Colonial Marines was devised by the British as a way to offer

African Americans the opportunity to become

a fighting unit of the British war machine.

We know from the historical sources that

there were around 300 Colonial Marines.

So, they would have had their quarters

somewhere here in the barracks area.

We know there was a parade field out here,

so he, he would have drilled regularly.

So, what role do you think that

the Colonial Marines, um, played in this, uh, campaign?

These are people that knew the,

the waters in this area, uh.

So, they could pilot ships but in addition to that,

they were, uh, front-line people and

fought with, with great distinction.

In the British musters for

the Colonial Marines,

I could see that Ezekiel was promoted several times.

He's a private.

Then a few months to that, he is a corporal.

And then by the time he leaves, he's a sergeant.

So told me that he was really part of the actions

and the campaigns in this war.

For the British and

the Colonial Marines,

Fort Albion was just a springboard to attack

our cities, and ultimately the capital of Washington.

And the only American naval force that stood in their way,

was Commodore Barney's outgunned flotilla.

My question was, exactly how far was Ezekiel

drawn into the momentous battles that followed?

I started to dive,

because I grew up on the Great Lakes.

This year I mark my 47th year in diving,

so I've been underwater a good portion of my life.

What I really like about it is when you can feel you've got

your buoyancy just right and you actually do feel weightless.

It's as close as you can be to hovering.

With 2012 being the 200th anniversary of

the War of 1812,

the U.S. Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command

and the state of Maryland became very interested in

the idea of returning to the turtle shell wreck.

One of the most important questions is

to try to confirm the identity of the vessel.

Another one was to determine if there were

any other vessels associated, because historical records said

that they were strung out in a line,

all behind the flagship Scorpion.

So, we went out there, and we did hydro-probing, which,

basically we took out a water hose powered by a pump,

and we just use that water jet to probe

the general areas in the river.

Let's just dig this out really quickly,

and let's see if we can find a wreck.

In this stern, we found artifacts similar to

what Don Shomette and Ralph Eshelman recovered.

Two medical items, a pharmaceutical vial and

a pair of surgical scissors.

The artifacts matched things that we knew

Barney should have had on his vessel.

So, all that was really exciting, and it,

and it confirmed that it wasn't just a gunboat.

But then, on one particular dive,

the Navy team recovered something remarkable.

We found still intact a ceramic bottle.

As I excavated this bottle, it still had a cork in it.

And I was just going to expose it enough to film it underwater.

It still had air in it.

And so, it popped up and I luckily caught it in my hand

before it floated away.

Finding an inkwell, it was certainly indicative that there

were activities on this vessel that required literacy,

whether it was the officer in charge,

or it was Joshua Barney himself, writing missives and reports.

It confirmed that it was probably

a major high-status vessel in the flotilla.

I'd say it's a good chance it's the Scorpion.

The only other possible candidate would

be a merchant vessel.

We know a number of merchant vessels were being

protected by the flotilla.

A vessel called the Islet was taken into service to

carry supplies including some of the medical supplies.

So, I think it's still not 100% conclusive.

I'm hopeful it's the Scorpion but not 100%,

not without more archaeology.

We still don't know for sure,

but I still firmly in my mind,

I think it's very likely the Scorpion.

Credit where credit's due,

we owe an enormous debt to Don Shomette.

I felt that there was sufficient evidence,

I really have no doubt that it is in fact the Scorpion.

But it still begs the question of,

where are the rest of the vessels?

Where is the flotilla?

Why didn't we find them?

These questions really stayed in my mind for years.

Then, one of my team became intrigued by something.

The Patuxent is a meandering river.

The sediment flow in the river has increased over time because

of run-off from poor farming practices.

And what we discovered was that we had overlooked

the evolution of the geology of this river.

We discovered that the river had changed course,

not once, but several times.

There were a number of major storms that literally changed

the course of the Patuxent River.

When I compared historic maps of the river,

suddenly everything clicked.

Today, the west side of where the Scorpion is,

it's all wetland.

But in 1814, this wetland was where

the main river channel flowed.

So, the fleet is in the marsh.

It's in the wetland.

It's highly possible the flotilla

is in the marshy area.

The problem is that in the marshy areas,

the sediment is so deep, that it's too dry for a boat

and too muddy for people to walk over.

So, we have continued to do survey in this area.

Technology has advanced.

So, we've been able to use drones that carry

a magnetometer, and we've had some success in

finding magnetic anomalies.

Hopefully we will eventually solve this mystery

and determine where the other vessels in the flotilla are.

I finally knew my ancestor Ezekiel was aboard

the British flagship HMS Albion when the Royal Navy departed

Tangier Island in July 1814.

He was one of nearly 200 Colonial Marines

supplementing around 4,000 British troops.

Their plan was to destroy Barney's flotilla,

and capture Washington.

As the British advanced up the bay,

Barney engaged them.

They fight a running battle, but he's outgunned.

And Barney is forced to retreat into the Patuxent River.

The British pursued him,

and in August began

landing a huge invasion force.

I wanted to know how far Ezekiel was involved

in this campaign.

So, when I learned that I was going to have an opportunity to

chat with Don, I was excited.

He took me to where the Colonial Marines,

with my ancestor Ezekiel, would have been disembarked.

August 19, 1814, when the British landed,

is the first invasion of the United States of America.

Okay.

Everybody knows 9/11 and

everybody knows December 7th.

Right.

But not many Americans know August 19.

The British had decided to attack the city of Washington.

Their route to the capital ran through the town of Bladensburg.

It's here that the Americans made their stand.

On August 22, Commodore Barney is told to destroy the flotilla

to prevent it being captured.

And the flotilla men are ordered to go to Bladensburg

and join the army and help defend the capital.

The battle of Bladensburg begins on August 24th,

just two days after the flotilla was scuttled.

Commodore Barney is in the center of the American line.

On the other side, Ezekiel is with British marines.

It's bloody.

The British have too many men.

They envelop on either side and

they're shooting down from heights.

Barney is wounded, it turns out mortally.

The American line folds.

The whole American army has fled.

What happened next sent shock waves across the continent.

Once the British had won the battle of Bladensburg,

the army marched into Washington.

The White House has literally just been an hour

or two before evacuated.

When they get to the White House,

the matches were set, and the building was burned.

The fire raged through the night,

completely gutting the interior.

How sure can we be that

Ezekiel was a part of that?

He was on the Albion.

Ezekiel would have marched with the army...

- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. - Almost...

I mean, almost unquestionably.

I can only imagine he wanted to execute

those orders to the best of his ability,

because his eyes were on the prize of becoming free.

I'm extraordinarily proud!

By the time the flames died

the following day, only the great sandstone walls survived.

The burning of the White House was

as symbolic as you could possibly imagine.

Having an outside enemy threatening you,

makes people unite against a common enemy and

forget some of their own differences.

It galvanized the nation.

For the first time,

people instead of referring to themselves of,

"I'm a Pennsylvanian, I'm a Virginian,"

people began to say, "I'm an American."

That's a big turnaround.

2009, my family met at Tangier Island to

celebrate Ezekiel, acknowledging his efforts,

his success, his challenges.

It makes me immensely proud that my ancestor had it within him to

step off a plantation in the middle of a war.

His number was 44, which appears on the musters from

the HMS Albion.

This was a way of, uh, acknowledging that,

we feel you, we know that you were successful.

We're here.

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.