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Jobie Turner on Joseph W. Zarzynski: Ghost Fleet Awakened Joseph W. Zarzynski. Ghost Fleet Awakened: Lake George's Sunken Bateaux of 1758. Albany: Excelsior Editions, 2019. Illustrations. 284 pp. $24.95, paper, ISBN 978-1-4384-7672-8. Reviewed by Jobie Turner (Air University) Published on H-War (April, 2021) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University) On July 5, 1758, Major General Abercrombie’s destroy supplies, sink boats, and proceed back to army of sixteen thousand British and colonial sol‐ the south end of Lake George as quickly as pos‐ diers and Native American allies alighted in nine sible. The Battle of Carillon was one of Britain’s hundred craft (boats, bateaux, and canoes) at the worst defeats in the eighteenth century. Eventually south end of Lake George, New York.[1] The vast the British would take the post and rename it armada was the largest military force assembled Ticonderoga, the moniker gaining its infamy in the on the continent by any European power to that next war. With the defeat, the British decided to date. Their destination was Fort Carillon, twenty- abandon their post on the south end of Lake six miles north and a few miles over land. Fort George. Rather than leave their boats to the ele‐ Carillon had been held by the French since the ments and French raiding, Abercrombie directed start of the Seven Years’ War and had vexed the his soldiers to load two hundred craft with rocks British for three years. Most famously, French gen‐ and sink the boats in the lake so they could be eral Louis-Joseph de Montcalm had sailed south in brought up the next summer during campaign sea‐ 1757 and besieged Fort William Henry. It was on son. the ruins of Fort William Henry that the British In Ghost Fleet Awakened, Joseph W. Zarzynski built their camp to prepare for their row up Lake picks up the story two hundred years later. Over George in 1758. the preceding two centuries, bateaux from Aber‐ After one overnight camp, Abercrombie’s crombie’s sinking occasionally washed ashore. troops disembarked and began their movement to Then in the 1960s, with the advent of recreational Fort Carillon. By July 8, 1755, the British were in full scuba gear, civilians began seeing the bateaux on rout, the French and their native allies killing and the bottom of Lake George. In the last half of the wounding more than 1,500 of the British force. In a twentieth century more than forty-seven craft chaotic retreat, Abercrombie ordered the army to were found and the local Lake George community H-Net Reviews built scuba tourism and tours of the boats into the tactical piece right but sometimes obscures the big‐ local economy and lore. In addition, formal sci‐ ger picture. Two or three pages upfront describing entific studies were carried out with Zarzynski a the historical background of the boats and Aber‐ key member of several of them, eventually serving crombie’s mission would have helped frame the as the president of Bateaux Below, a Lake George narrative. The attack on Fort Carillon was not just association dedicated to preserving and educating a minor battle; it was a huge defeat for the largest the public on the boats. army assembled in North America up to that time. Abercombie’s boats are a passion for Zarzyn‐ In addition to the boats at the south end of Lake ski, and with his vast experience, the author dives George, as noted by the limited primary scholar‐ deep into the material, describing the locations of ship of 1758, notably the diary of Caleb Rae, the the boats and the painstaking efforts to locate and British scuttled many boats at the lake’s north end. catalogue them. In doing so, he fills a much-needed Are those boats also still there, or was the water gap in our understanding of eighteenth-century too shallow to keep them entombed in the water? freshwater craft in colonial North America. He me‐ And even more pressing, why did the British fail to ticulously documents the sizes, uses, and various pull up forty-seven of the craft? They were expens‐ construction methods of the boats. To the larger ive, well made, and hard to reproduce. history of the area, this research demonstrates the In the same breath, these critiques of Ghost vibrancy, hard work, and exceptional integration Fleet Awakened are minor and more a case of an of local and imported craftsmen to construct so academic of the time period wanting more ques‐ many well-built vessels. When doing my own re‐ tions answered than a lack of scholarship. As search on eighteenth-century watercraft in the aforementioned, Zarzynski’s depth of research New World just a few years ago, I found that the and description of the physical characteristics of scholarship lacked all the details that Ghost Fleet the boats is a shining addition to the histori‐ provides. Zarzynski’s primary sources and meticu‐ ography of the Seven Years’ War. Zarzynski lous detail will allow future scholars of the period achieves what he sets out to do: to document how to expand what we know about Abercrombie’s ill- these boats still fascinate us more than 260 years fated armada. Before this work, what little was after their sinking. known about eighteenth-century sailing on fresh Note water was confined to niche civilian sailing advoc‐ [1]. Abercrombie is spelled Abercromby (a less ates and public libraries. Zarzynski deserves a gold common variant) in the book under review. medal in research for pulling all the disparate sources and his own personal work together. Most of all, this book is a documentation of all the diffi‐ cult and painstaking work that went into diving into the murky and cold water, pinpointing loca‐ tions, and then transferring that knowledge into the public sphere—via tours, museums, and lec‐ tures. It is also a work that is destined to have a far-reaching audience, especially for those who are interested in underwater archaeology or Lake George in general. Zarzynski’s strength in detail, research, and experience is a double-edged sword. He gets every 2 H-Net Reviews If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at https://networks.h-net.org/h-war Citation: Jobie Turner. Review of Zarzynski, Joseph W. Ghost Fleet Awakened: Lake George's Sunken Bateaux of 1758. H-War, H-Net Reviews. April, 2021. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55121 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3.
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