The True Story of Toronto's Island Ghost

They say that on some dark nights, as an eerie mist creeps over the Toronto islands, you can still hear him moaning somewhere in the distance. On others, you might hear him walking up the steps of the old lighthouse, even though there's no one there — or see a ghostly light shining up top, even when the lantern isn't lit. Sometimes, you might find his fresh blood spilled on those old wooden stairs. Or even catch a glimpse of him yourself: a spectre stalking through the undergrowth, or wandering the paths around the lighthouse, bloodied and beaten, his arms missing. They say he's the ghost of Toronto's first lightkeeper and that he's searching for the pieces of his body that were hacked off more than two hundred years ago and buried somewhere in the sand.

The story of John Paul Radelmüller came to a bloody end in Toronto, but it began more than six thousand kilometers away — in the royal courts of Europe.

He was born in Bavaria — which is part of Germany now — in the town of Anspach, not far from Frankfurt. This was in the middle of the 1700s. Back then, the British royal family were all from Germany. King George II had been born in Hanover; Queen Caroline came from the very same town where Radelmüller grew up. And even though they were ruling England, the royal family kept close ties to their homeland. Many of their servants were German, too.

That's how Radelmüller ended up in England. He was a teenager when he got a job as a royal servant during the reign of "Mad" King George III: he attended to the king's younger brother, Prince William. But as luxurious as the royal quarters were, it can't have been an entirely easy life. The king was suffering from bouts of severe mental illness and frequently clashed with the prince. At the same time, the prince's son was such a jerk that even members of his own family called him "The Contagion". After sixteen years serving the prince, Radelmüller finally quit. He headed back home to Bavaria to become a farmer. 

But this was 1798. The French Revolution had plunged Europe into decades of chaos and war. Radelmüller's farm was caught right in the middle. He was forced to flee, becoming a refugee. Knowing he would be welcome back in England, he returned to the royal court.

Prince Edward

This time, he served as a porter to one of the "mad" king's sons: Prince Edward. The Prince Edward. The father of Queen Victoria. The guy Prince Edward Island and Prince Edward County are named after.

Edward was a huuuuuge fan of Canada. In fact, he's the very first person who ever used the word "Canadians" to refer to both anglophones and francophones. By the time Radelmüller joined his staff, the prince had already spent years living in Québec and in Nova Scotia; he was only back home in England to recover after falling off his horse. Soon, he headed back across the Atlantic to Halifax. And his new porter went with him.

It didn't take long for Radelmüller to fall in love with Canada, too. When Prince Edward fell ill and was forced to return home to Britain, Radelmüller stayed at his side — but he came back to Canada as soon as he got the chance. He landed a gig as a steward for the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia.

Still, he dreamed of becoming a farmer again. Someone had told him the best farmland was far to the west, in the brand new province of Upper Canada. He was determined to make a new life for himself out here on the Canadian frontier. And no one was going to stop him. The Governor was reluctant to let him go — promising to give him letters of recommendation and then holding them hostage at the very last moment, hoping his trusted steward could be convinced to stay on for another year. But Radelmüller's belongings had already been loaded onto a ship ready to set sail. So he left anyway, making the grueling five-week trip up the St. Lawrence in the dead of winter.

Radelmüller arrived in Toronto on New Year's Day in 1804. He knew nobody. He had no job. No land. No letters of introduction. It wouldn't be easy. Our city was still just the tiny little town of York back then. The population was still counted in the hundreds. It had only been ten years since John Graves Simcoe and his British soldiers had first arrived to carve the muddy capital out of the ancient forest towering over the northern shore of Lake Ontario. This was still very much the frontier.

But Radelmüller succeeded anyway. First, he headed north up Yonge Street to Markham, founding a school where he taught English to the Germans who had recently settled there. Before long, he was recognized as their official translator for all government business.  

Soon, there would be an even better opportunity.

Toronto Harbour, 1793

Simcoe had picked this spot as the place to build his city because of the Toronto islands. Back then, they were still connected to the mainland: they were just one big, long, sandy peninsula stretching out from a marsh where the Port Lands are today. The sandbar wouldn't become an island until a big storm created the eastern gap in the 1850s. The peninsula created a natural harbour with only one way in: through the narrow western gap. That entrance would be easy to defend. In fact, Simcoe was so excited that he called the spot Gibraltar Point — named after the rocky fortress at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Simcoe declared that a lighthouse was one of the very first buildings they should build in Toronto. Right there on Gibraltar Point.

About ten years later, construction finally began on the south-west corner of the sandbar. The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse was the very first permanent lighthouse built anywhere on the Great Lakes. It was the first stone building in Toronto. When it opened in 1808, it towered over the beach right next to the water, stretching sixteen meters into the air. That's about five storeys. It would be the tallest building in our city for almost fifty years. At the base, the walls are nearly two meters thick, built of limestone shipped north across the lake from a quarry at Queenston — high on the heights at Niagara, which you can still see from Toronto on a clear day. At the top of the lighthouse, a bright lantern shone out as a beacon to the ships sailing through the dark waters at night. It burned two hundred gallons of sperm whale oil every year.

As Toronto's first lightkeeper, Radelmüller's job was to light the lamp every evening and extinguish it at dawn. Plus, he would be in charge of signaling the city every time a big ship pulled into the harbour. He flew a Union Jack for every vessel arriving from Kingston. And the British Red Ensign for ships sailing north from Niagara. (That's the flag you can see in the painting at the top of this post.)

He lived in a small wooden cabin next to the lighthouse. And soon, he was joined there by his family. A couple of years into his new job, Radelmüller married his wife, Magdalena. The wedding was held at Toronto's first church: St James', a little wooden building at King & Church Streets — the same spot where St. James' Cathedral stands now. Before long, they had a daughter: little Arabella was born.

Detail from a Canada Post stamp

It was a quiet, peaceful life. At least at first. They say Radelmüller even made some extra money on the side by brewing beer in the German style he'd learned to make back home. But it didn't take long for the chaos that had driven him out of Germany to find him far on this side of the Atlantic. The wars sparked by the French Revolution led to the rise of Napoleon. And while the might of the British Empire was distracted by the tiny French Emperor, the Americans seized their opportunity. They invaded Canada. The War of 1812 had begun. Just a few short years after Radelmüller had started his new job as our city's first lightkeeper, Toronto was in the middle of a war zone.

The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse was suddenly even more important. The Great Lakes were a key battleground. Control of Lake Ontario was most important of all. Keeping the British fleet safe from the treacherous shoals near the harbour was an essential job — one lost ship could turn the tide of the entire war. And it seems that Radelmüller was up to the task, playing his vital role far out on his lonely sandbar as the war dragged on for nearly three years.

Tragically, he wouldn't live to see the end of it. On Christmas Eve of 1814, a peace treaty was finally signed. But negotiations were held in Belgium, which meant that it would take weeks for the news to cross the ocean and finally reach Toronto. By the time it did, Radelmüller was already dead. He'd been murdered.

It happened after dark on the second day of 1815. The story of that terrible winter night has been told over and over again, passed down from one generation of Torontonians to the next over the course of the last two hundred years. The details are vague; there are many different versions of the tale. But it goes something like this:

Radelmüller and his family weren't the only ones on the sandbar. Hunters and fishermen used it too. First Nations families occasionally camped nearby. And not far from the lighthouse, there was a new military blockhouse. To this day we still call that spot on the islands "Blockhouse Bay". It was built during the War of 1812, armed with a gun designed to the protect our harbour against the Americans. And it was manned by soldiers from Fort York. They spent most of their time keeping watch and preparing for an attack. But they were also friendly with the lightkeeper. Sometimes, they'd row down Blockhouse Bay to visit the lighthouse and drink some of Radelmüller's beer.

On that cold January night at the very beginning of 1815, two of those soldiers came for a visit. They were called John Henry and John Blowman. At first, everything seemed to be going well. They all drank long into the night. But at some point, Radelmüller decided the soldiers had had enough. He cut them off. And that's went everything went horribly wrong.

CBC Archives

The soldiers were angry; they got violent. One took off his belt, the other grabbed a rock, and together they attacked the lightkeeper. Radelmüller ran, bleeding and afraid, scrambling up the steps of the lighthouse in a desperate bid to escape. But the soldiers followed, relentless. They broke down the door and chased him up the narrow wooden stairs to the very top of the lighthouse. That's where the lightkeeper made his last stand: up there, high above the ground as his flaming beacon shone out across the dark lake. There was a final skirmish. Radelmüller was pushed over the railing and fell to his death. It was over. The lightkeeper lay still.

The two soldiers knew they were in deep trouble. The penalty for murder was death. And so, they worked quickly to cover up their crime. They found an axe and used it to hack the body into pieces, severing the limbs. Then, they buried what was left of John Paul Radelmüller, bit by bit, in a series of shallow graves dug in the frozen sand. Their grisly job finished, they ran. 

That, it seems, was a mistake. It was more than a little suspicious: disappearing the very same night the lightkeeper did. Less than two weeks later, the York Gazette announced their arrest. "From circumstances there is moral proof of [Radelmüller] having been murdered," the paper reported. "If the horrid crime admits of aggravation when the inoffensive and benevolent character of the unfortunate sufferer are considered, his murder will be pronounced most barbarous and inhuman. The parties lost with him are the proposed perpetrators and are in prison."

It took more than two months for the case to come to trial. When it did, the soldiers were acquitted. There was little evidence. No one had ever found the body. There would be no justice for the lightkeeper.

And so, his soul was doomed to haunt his lighthouse for the rest of eternity.

At least, that's what people like to say. The details, as you might imagine, are more than a little bit sketchy — right down to the inconsistent spelling of Radelmüller's name. It's hard to find a single record of anyone who has ever claimed to have actually seen the ghost. Even the story of the murder itself is hard to verify. The tale was passed down from one generation of lightkeepers to the next. The first concrete record of the story seems to have been written down by the Toronto newspaperman and historian John Ross Robertson — but that was a hundred years after the killing took place. It was told to him by another lightkeeper at Gibraltar Point — George Durnan — whose family manned the lighthouse for more than seventy years (from the 1830s right up until 1908). Durnan didn't mention a ghost at all. And Robertson suspected that even the murder had probably never happened. He found no record of the crime in the archives of the York Gazette. "There is no doubt that it has been garnished in the telling," he admitted. "It may be a fairy tale..."

The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, 1900

Decades later, the last of the island lightkeepers — a woman with the awesome name of Dedie Dodds — spoke to the CBC. "There may be a ghost," she told them, but there were plenty of rational explanations for everything. "The cooing of the pigeons is very eerie on a dark night. And the wind howling through the lighthouse gives you the shivers. When the moon is full, it's reflected back from the top of the lighthouse." Just a few months earlier, even she had been momentarily fooled. "It gave me quite a start."

Still, it made for a very good story. And Durnan did claim to have found a piece of related evidence. He said that one day, he went looking for Radelmüller's remains around the spot he'd been told he could find them. There, buried in a shallow grave about a hundred and fifty meters to the west of the lighthouse, he found a coffin. Inside, there was a human jawbone.

It was all more than enough to fuel the legend. By the time Dodds became the lightkeeper in the 1950s, the phantom had become part of the myth — and the grisly tale of the haunted lighthouse had become one of Toronto's most beloved ghost stories. In fact, by the end of that decade, it would earn official recognition. After a century and a half of continuous service, the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse was finally going to be decommissioned. To honour the old building's new life as an historical monument, a new plaque was going to be erected. 

The Ontario Archaeological and Historical Sites Advisory Board decided to include the ghost story as part of the official story of the building. It was the final sentence on the new plaque:

"The mysterious disappearance of its first keeper, J.P. Rademuller, in 1815 and the subsequent discovery nearby of part of a human skeleton enhanced its reputation as a haunted building."

That line sparked a heated battle. The Advisory Board might like it, but the Metro Toronto Parks Committee disagreed. The councillors on the committee were appalled by the idea that such fantastical nonsense was going to be officially recognized. One councillor dismissed the story of Radelmüller's ghost as "a myth... an old wives' tale" unworthy of inclusion on a plaque. "I can't see it would make the place attractive to children," another councillor worried, completely misunderstanding children. Even the Metro Chairman himself, Fred Gardiner, the guy the highway is named after, weighed in. "That," he declared, "would only scare people."

The plaque in 2015 (photo by me)

But the Advisory Board refused to back down. The plaque went up anyway and the story of Radelmüller's ghost was preserved. Today, you can still find it there on the side of the lighthouse, giving the people of Toronto a colourful connection to one of our most interesting — but most easily forgotten — landmarks.

Today, the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse is the oldest lighthouse anywhere on the Great Lakes. Some people consider it to be the oldest in all of Canada. The only older lighthouse is in Nova Scotia — but it's been repaired and renovated so much that even Lighthouse Digest suggests that it might not really count anymore.

For more than two hundred years, our first lighthouse has kept watch over our city. It's the oldest building in Toronto that still stands in the same place where it was originally built. It has borne witness to all of our greatest and more terrible moments. It saw the American invasion during the War of 1812. The raging storm that turned the sandbar into the islands. The Great Fires of 1849 and of 1904. The arrival of the first steamships and of the first trains. It has helped thousands of sailors bring thousands of ships safely into our harbour, carrying countless new Canadians into our city to make this place their home. Once the tallest building in Toronto, the lighthouse has watched our skyline grow into one of the most impressive in the world, topped by one of the tallest buildings humanity has ever built.

It's easy to forget the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, out there alone on the island. The light was turned off long ago. The cottages where the lightkeepers and their families once lived have now all been demolished. The shoreline has evolved, grown with silt, moved more than a hundred meters away. Even with an 1830s extension taking it another few meters into the air, the lighthouse has nearly disappeared among the trees. It has been swallowed up by the same city it helped bring to life.

But the story of the lightkeeper's ghost helps us to remember — to remember not just the history of that building, but of what this place used to be.

Today, the guardian of the lighthouse is a volunteer. His name is Manuel Cappel. He too is from Germany, just like Radelmüller was. He lives on the islands, where he also builds bicycles; he used to run the Rectory Café. Torontonians today ask him the very same question they've been asking the island lightkeepers for generations now: is the lighthouse really haunted?

He gives them the same answer he gives everyone. An answer that couldn't be more true.

"It is," he tells them, "if you want it to be."

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

The story of Toronto's island ghost will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead, coming from Dundurn Press in the fall of 2017.

Edward Butts uncovered much of Radelmüller's true history in his book Murder: Twelve True Stories of Homicide in Canada. You can borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here, or buy it from Dundurn Press here.

The story of the lighthouse and its ghost has been told many, many times. Gary Miedema told it for Spacing. Chris Bateman told it for blogTO. Jordan Pipher told it for the Hogtown Crier. Sarah B. Hood told it for Adventures in Upper Canada. Jacqueline Martinz told it for Torontoist. Wikipedia tells it here. Lighthouse Digest tells it here. Urban Toronto tells it here, with an assist from Heritage Toronto. The Friends of Toronto Islands tell it here. The Toronto & Ontario Ghosts and Hauntings Society tells it here. A TV show called Creepy Canada told their own version of the story, which you can watch on YouTube here. 

John Ross Roberton's original version appeared in volume two of his "Landmarks of Toronto" books. You can find in online thanks to Archive.org here. 

The Ontario Catholic Paranormal Research Society (which seeks to either debunk ghost stories, or re-contextualize them as religious events) did their own investigation of the lighthouse. They found no evidence of paranormal activity and raise many of the most convincing doubts about the story of Radelmüller's ghost here.

The Toronto Star talks to the current guardian of the lighthouse, Manuel Cappel, here. And in PDFs, which I think you're able to access if you have a Toronto Public Library card here and here. You can check out the website for his bike-building business here.

The Star also covered the story of the battle over the plaque here. And they talk to Dedie Dodds here.

The CBC talked to Dedie Dodds and a member of the Durnan family in the 1950s. You can watch that video online here. 

The main image is a slightly cropped version of "View of York" which was painted in 1816ish by Robert Irvine. It's on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario and has been featured on their website here. 

The old map of the harbour comes from the awesome Historical Maps of Toronto site here. And the photo of the lighthouse in the year 1900 comes from the Toronto Public Library's digital archives here.

This post is related to dream 25 The Lightkeepers' Daughter Arabella Radelmüller, 1815

The Bloody Burlington Races & The War for Lake Ontario

They appeared out of the darkness, looming above the waves. Ten warships sailing across Lake Ontario, far out in the water south of Toronto. They were first spotted at dawn, as the black September night gave way to the light of day, wooden hulls carving through the waves, sails stretching high into the early morning sky. From each of the ships flew the red, white and blue: fifteen stars and fifteen stripes. The American fleet. This was 1813. Toronto was in the middle of a war zone. And it was going to be a bloody day.

The War of 1812 had been going on for more than a year now. With the might of the British Empire distracted by Napoleon, the American conquest of the Canadian colonies was supposed to be quick and easy. Former President Thomas Jefferson promised that it would be "a mere matter of marching." But the British, Canadian colonists and their First Nations allies resisted the invasion at every turn. It wasn't quick or easy at all.

Back then, Toronto was still just the muddy little frontier town of York. But as the tiny new capital of Upper Canada, our city was caught up in an arms race that might decide the fate of the entire war. The Great Lakes were the most pivotal battleground. Controlling the water meant that you could move your troops and supplies wherever you wanted to — while keeping the enemy from doing the same. Both sides rushed to build the most powerful fleets possible. Some of the biggest warships in the world were being built in the shipyards on either side of Lake Ontario. They had crews of hundreds of men; they bristled with dozens of guns. They turned our lake into the scene of countless horrors. They say that when warships met in battle, the results were so gory that some crews spread sand across their decks in order to keep them from getting too slippery. Others painted them red so all the blood would blend in.

HMS Sir Isaac Brock

Just a few months earlier, shipbuilders in Toronto had been hard at work near the foot of Bay Street hammering together the HMS Sir Isaac Brock (named after the British general who died fighting the Americans at Niagara). She was going to be the second biggest ship on Lake Ontario, giving the British control of the water. But there were spies in Toronto — the Americans knew all about the construction. In April, just before the Brock was ready to set sail, the Americans invaded Toronto, hoping to steal the new ship. They won the battle, but the retreating troops burned the Brock before the invading army could get to her.

Still, the advantage on the Great Lakes was swinging dramatically toward the Americans. In early September, they won a stunning victory on Lake Erie. They captured the entire British fleet on that lake, giving them complete control of it. Now, they just needed Lake Ontario: "the key to the Great Lakes." If they won it, they would be able to pull off their grand plan: ship troops up the St. Lawrence River and besiege Montreal. 

So now, the Americans were sailing back toward Toronto. This time, they weren't coming to capture just one ship; they wanted the entire British fleet.

The man in charge was Commodore Isaac Chauncey. He was from Connecticut, but he first made a name for himself fighting pirates off the coast of Tripoli. Back in April, he'd been in charge of the American ships invading Toronto. Now, he was commanding his fleet from the deck of a brand new flagship: the USS General Pike (named after the American general who'd been blown up at Fort York during the invasion). The Pike sailed at the head of a squadron of ten ships — some towed behind the others for extra firepower. The Americans had bigger guns with longer range than their British counterparts. But their ships were also slower and harder to maneuver.

The British squadron was smaller: just six ships. They were commanded by Commodore Sir James Yeo, an Englishman who had been welcomed to Upper Canada as a hero — one of the rising stars of the most powerful navy on Earth. He sailed aboard his own brand new flagship, the HMS General Wolfe (named after yet another dead general: the guy who had died fighting the French on the Plains of Abraham). She was the sister ship of the burned Brock, built in Kingston at the very same time.

Sir James Lucas Yeo

As dawn broke over Lake Ontario that morning, the Wolfe and the rest of the British fleet were just to the west of Toronto — not far from Port Credit. They spotted the Americans in the distance; they were still about a dozen kilometers away.

The battle got off to a slow start. With all that distance between the two squadrons, Commodore Yeo and his men had enough time to sail over to the harbour at Toronto, sending a small boat ashore with an update. Meanwhile, the Americans patiently stalked their prey: they sailed up to a spot south of the islands (just a sandy peninsula back then) and waited. It wasn't until mid-morning that Yeo turned his squadron around and left Toronto, sailing south out into the middle of the water. The Americans followed, chasing the British into the heart of the lake, the wind in their sails. As the sun rose high into the sky, they were steadily making up ground. It wouldn't be long now. Both fleets shifted into single file lines: battle formation. 

It was Yeo and the British who made the first move. A little after noon, the Wolfe suddenly swung around, heading back toward the Americans, trying to slip by the Pike and open fire on the middle of the enemy line.

Commodore Chauncey and the Americans countered. The Pike began to turn too, trying to cut the Wolfe off, drawing closer and closer and closer... until there were only a few hundred meters between them. But as the great bulk of the American flagship slowly swung around, her formidable bank of guns was still facing in the wrong direction. She was exposed.

The Wolfe opened fire. The British guns roared smoke and iron, cannonballs whizzing through the air between the two ships, smashing into the Pike. One British volley after another tore into her. But slowwwwwwly, the Pike swung around. Now, the might of her firepower was finally facing in the right direction: at the Wolfe. Fourteen American cannons burst to life, a wall of white smoke and fire. Back and forth, the two great flagships thundered. Wood burst into splinters. Sails were ripped and torn. Blood spilled onto the decks. On board the Pike, a mast snapped, toppling into the sails below.

And then: catastrophe for the British. One of the masts on the Wolfe came crashing down, pulling a second mast, sails, rigging and weights down with it — they tumbled onto the deck and then over the side into the water. Without them, the Wolfe was in serious trouble. "It was," writes the historian Robert Malcomson in his book, Lords of the Lake, "the danger Yeo had sought to avoid all summer... disaster."

At that moment, it seemed as if everything was lost. The Pike was closing in, the American sailors were reloading their guns, the end was drawing near. "In the battle for control of Lake Ontario," Malcomson writes, "this instant may have been the most pivotal." The Americans were about to win the battle — and with it, the entire lake. The whole war might follow.

The Royal George (in an earlier battle)

It was the Royal George who saved the day. She was the second ship in the British line — and she had finally turned around too. She rushed into danger, sailing right into the line of fire, putting herself between the Americans and the wounded Wolfe and then slamming on the brakes. She opened fire. Again and again and again, she roared, sending a hail of iron death flying into the Pike, buying enough time for the rest of the fleet to join the fight. Ships on both sides sent volley after volley sailing into the air, smashing into wood and skin and bone. All was smoke and chaos.

Meanwhile, on board the Wolfe, the British crew rushed to recover. They dumped their dead overboard, carried the wounded below deck, cut away at the tangle of debris. And they did it all quickly. Less than fifteen minutes after her masts had tumbled into the water, the Wolfe was ready to go.

But the danger wasn't over yet. Without her full compliment of sails, she was still very vulnerable. The fate of Lake Ontario still hung in the balance. So Commodore Yeo turned the Wolfe around, let the wind fill what was left of her tattered sails, and then raced west as fast as she could go. The rest of the British fleet turned and followed. They headed straight for the end of the lake, toward Burlington Bay, toward safety.

It was a decisive moment for Commodore Chauncey and the Americans. Two of the British ships were momentarily exposed — they could be captured. The Master Commandant of the Pike — a guy called Arthur Sinclair, great-grandfather of the writer Upton Sinclair — begged the Commodore to forget about the Wolfe and take the other ships instead. Capturing even one or two of the British vessels would be a major victory. But Chauncey had a bigger prize in mind. Immortality was within his grasp; he could taste it. This was the day he was going to defeat the entire British fleet on Lake Ontario. He wasn't going to be distracted by a smaller prize. "All or none!" he declared, ordering his fleet to sail west, to chase down the British squadron and defeat them.

The race was on. 

For the next hour and a half, all sixteen ships sailed west as fast they could, speeding across twenty-five kilometers out in the water south of Oakville. As the afternoon wore on, a storm began to gather. The sky darkened. The waves got bigger. The wind picked up, blowing in hard from the east, filling the sails of the ships, pushing them ever-faster as they raced toward the western end of the lake.

From shore — not just along the Canadian beaches, but also far over on the American side — people strained to follow the movements of the distant ships as they jockeyed for position. Some joked that it was like watching a yacht race. And so the battle got its name: The Burlington Races.

USS General Pike

The Wolfe was in rough shape, but she was still fast. And so was the rest of the British fleet. The Americans struggled to keep up. It was only the Pike who managed to stay close enough to keep the British within range of her guns. They echoed out across the lake, blasting away at the British vessels. But the Pike was badly wounded, too. Her masts were damaged. Sails were torn. Rigging was cut to pieces. Some of her guns were so damaged they were completely useless. And she was leaking. The hull had been hit beneath the waves; there was water coming in below deck. The Americans scrambled to pump it out as fast as it was coming in.

"This," Master Commandant Sinclair later remembered, "was the most trying time I ever had in my life."

And then, suddenly, the most deadly moment of the entire battle: one of the big guns near the front of the Pike exploded. The deck was torn apart in an instant. Iron shards flew in all directions, slicing through wood, sails and flesh. The deadly debris was flung all the way back to the stern of the ship. More than twenty American sailors were killed or wounded in the blast.

Still, the Pike sailed on, chasing the British fleet, cannons roaring. But try as they might, the Americans weren't catching up. And they were running out of time. There wasn't much lake left. They were getting closer and closer to Burlington Bay, closer to shore, closer to safety for the British ships.

There are two different stories about what happened next.

The most recent evidence seems to suggest that Commodore Yeo picked a spot to make a stand. He had the British fleet drop anchor near shore — just to the east of Burlington Bay (which we call Hamilton Harbour today). Bunched together with their backs protected by the land, they presented a daunting target. Their cannons were ready. And on shore, there were even more friendly guns nearby.

With the British in such a strong defensive position and the Pike already badly damaged — maybe even in danger of sinking — Commodore Chauncey realized that it was all over. If he fought on, he risked beaching his ships in enemy territory. He'd missed his chance. The American fleet turned and sailed away into the storm.  

HMS Wolfe at Burlington Bay (Peter Rindlisbacher)

But that's not the story we've been told for most of the last two hundred years. In the most famous version of the tale, Commodore Yeo and the British fleet kept sailing straight for Burlington Bay. It was a daring move. The waters at the mouth of the harbour were shallow; the Wolfe would be in danger of running aground, stranded and helpless as the Americans swooped in. But at the very last moment, riding the crest of the storm surge, the Wolfe swept dramatically into the bay and into safety. The Americans had no choice but to turn away. The moment has been immortalized in paintings and textbooks, even on the historical plaque overlooking the bay — until it was updated just a couple of years ago.

Either way, the British fleet had survived.

That night, anchored safely inside the harbour, the tired sailors got to work. In the cold, wind and rain, they rushed to repair the Wolfe and the other battered ships as quickly as possible. The injured men were treated for their wounds. The dead — those who hadn't already been tossed overboard — were sewn up inside their hammocks and buried at sea. The work continued all through the next day and into the following night. One man climbing the mast of the Wolfe lost his footing and tumbled to his death. And still the crews worked: it would be another two days before the fleet was ready to return to the lake.

Of course, there were more terrible, bloody days to come. Thousands of people died on both sides of the war. Others returned home wounded, many deeply scarred by the things they had seen and done. Just a week after the Burlington Races, Tecumseh — the famed leader of the First Nations confederacy — was killed in battle against the Americans. That same day, Commodore Chauncey and his American fleet captured five British ships far on the other side of Lake Ontario. They burned another.

But winter was coming. The sailing season was soon over. The British fleet had survived another year and the Americans still didn't control Lake Ontario. Their invasion up the St. Lawrence River ended in a big defeat. And the very next summer, shipbuilders in Kingston built a new warship that changed everything. It took more than five thousand oak trees, two hundred men and nearly ten months to make the HMS St. Lawrence. She was by far the biggest thing that had ever sailed on the Great Lakes. She boasted more than a hundred guns. Had a crew of seven hundred. She was bigger even than the flagship Admiral Nelson had used to beat Napoleon's navy at Trafalgar. The St. Lawrence was so big and so powerful that she never had to fire a single shot. The Americans just immediately gave up trying. Commodore Chauncey and his fleet were stuck at home for the rest of the war.

It didn't last much longer. On Christmas Eve of 1814, a peace treaty was signed. The War of 1812 was over. The American invasion of Canada had failed.

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Lots of the information in this post comes from the late Robert Malcomson's Lords of Lake. You can find it in the Toronto Public Library here. Or buy it here. He wrote more about the Burlington Races on the War of 1812 website here.

The main image of the battle comes via the Toronto Public Library here, which I turned into a collage with this map of York in the summer of 1813 from the Archives of Ontario. The library also has the image of the Brock here. The Royal George I found via the 4GWAR blog here (which apparently also originally found it thanks to the Toronto Public Library). The images of Sir James Yeo and the Pike come via Wikipedia here and here. And Peter Rindlisbacher's crazy-great painting of the Wolfe sweeping into Burlington Bay comes via Eighteentwelve.ca here. Rindlisbacher has a whole book of paintings of the war, which you can buy here. 

You can read the first-hand reports made by Commodores Yeo and Chaucey in The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, Volume II. You can find it in the Toronto Public Library here. Or buy it here. And I got a little bit more info from The Naval War of 1812 by Robert Gardiner, which you can find in the library here or buy here.

Robert J. Williamson details the battle as we now understand it in this very detailed and informative PDF. William R. Wilson shares more about the HMS Sir Isaac Brock and the naval battles of the Great Lakes on the Historical Narratives of Early Canada site here. Eighteentwelve.ca shares more about the ships of the War of 1812 here. And the war on the lakes here.

The Museums of Burlington share story of the Burlington Races and other Burlington connections to the War of 1812 in this PDF — which also has some great diagrams (reproduced from Lords of the Lake) that might help you make sense of the battle.

Wikipedia has more about Yeo here, Chauncey here, Sinclair here, the Wolfe here, the Pike here, the Brock here, the Royal George here, and the St. Lawrence here. The invaluable Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online has more on Yeo here, too.

The Burlington Gazette covers the story behind the updating of the historical plaque here.

A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 from Dundurn Press Available for pre-order now