Benedict Arnold's Lake Champlain Gunboat Is the Last Shipwreck of Its Kind

21.09.2023 - 18:38 / atlasobscura.com / Lake Champlain

When the wooden gunboat Spitfire sailed into battle as part of a flotilla engaging British naval forces on Lake Champlain in 1776, she carried an unlikely crew: ragtag American soldiers with little naval experience, under the command of a swashbuckling patriot and hero, Brigadier General Benedict Arnold. Arnold, still years away from becoming the nation’s most infamous traitor, sacrificed several vessels in what would be called the Battle of Valcour Island, after one of the islands dotting the narrow, deep lake that stretches from Québec south along the New York-Vermont border. The clash ended in defeat for Arnold, but bought valuable time for the Continental Army.

The Spitfire was among the ships lost as Arnold and his men retreated—but it was not the end of the story for the gunboat.

Perfectly preserved in the lake’s cold depths and silty mud for nearly 250 years, the Spitfire is the only remaining intact shipwreck from the American Revolution. But now it’s facing a new fight: Can the Spitfire be raised before a tiny invasive mussel finds and destroys it? Should maritime archaeologists even attempt the ambitious rescue?

Chris Sabick has pondered the Spitfire’s plight for years. As director of research and archaeology at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in the sleepy lakeside resort town of Vergennes, Vermont, Sabick has studied the gunboat for much of his career. He has long believed that the Spitfire should remain where it is. But the lake environment that has protected the Spitfire from decay for so long may soon be changing, thanks to the Quagga mussel. This invasive freshwater pest loves to infest ship hulls, encrusting the delicate beams in as little as five years. Quagga have already overwhelmed many of the shipwrecks in the Great Lakes; the mussels’ eventual appearance in Lake Champlain is almost certain.

All hope is not lost for the Spitfire. With funding from the National Park Service, historians, archaeologists, and other experts are considering an unprecedented recovery effort that could retrieve hundreds of artifacts and even the gunboat itself. But the risks are as high as the potential reward.

“It’s both exciting and intimidating; it’s a big can of worms that we’re opening here,” says Sabick. “It’s going to have just a tremendous amount of information within that hull that is going to shed a lot of new light on the Battle of Valcour Island and on the Revolutionary War as a whole.”

Valcour Island, rocky and oblong, creates a half-mile-wide protected channel between it and the lake’s New York shore. In 1776, a well-armed British flotilla sailing south from Canada encountered the smaller, 15-vessel American fleet, under Arnold’s command, harboring in the protected passage. Although the