Thirty-three years later, in 1873, a brief article in a Burlington, Vermont newspaper describes the destruction by explosives of a hull identified as Confiance. 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. The Navy Department ordered the hull moved and broken up, and dockyard records indicate that the hull was at least partially dismantled. Confiance was allowed to sink permanently in the Poultney River in 1820 four years later spring flooding washed the hull out of the river and into the main lake channel. The 37-gun Confiance was the first of the five big ships to sink, no doubt the result of the frigate’s unusually hasty construction and poor materials (the commander of the Whitehall navy yard described the frigate’s scantlings as being “of the very worst timber for building ships”). The fate of most of the naval vessels laid up and then abandoned at Whitehall can be traced through documents, maps, and archaeological remains. Here they were allowed to sink to the bottom and finally sold to salvagers in 1825. By the year 1820 the vessels were riddled with rot and the navy moved them into the Poultney River, a tributary of the lake, about one mile north of Whitehall. The five large warships were stripped of most of their equipment, their decks were housed over, and the empty hulls were anchored in a line alongside the main channel. The sloops and four older gunboats were sold out of the service that year, five gunboats were sunk for preservation in the narrow lake channel just below Whitehall, and one gunboat, Allen, was kept in service for several years after the war.
In early 1815 the squadron consisted of five large warships: the former Royal Navy frigate Confiance, the ship Saratoga, the brig Eagle, the schooner Ticonderoga, and the former Royal Navy brig Linnet, five sloops, and ten gunboats. Navy’s squadron, and the British vessels it had captured at the Battle of Plattsburgh Bay, were placed in ordinary at Whitehall, New York, the southern-most limit of navigation on Lake Champlain.
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