HMS St Lawrence (1814)

HMS St Lawrence was a 112-gun first-rate wooden warship of the Royal Navy that served on Lake Ontario during the War of 1812. She was the only Royal Navy ship of the line ever to be launched and operated entirely in fresh water.

Career
The St Lawrence had her keel laid on 12 April 1814, and was launched on 10 September 1814. British naval commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo commissioned her as his flagship, with Captain Frederick Hickey as Flag Captain, in the Kingston Royal Naval Dockyard in Kingston, Upper Canada.

At the time, Lake Ontario was effectively landlocked for any but the smallest vessels, due to shallow water and rapids on the St. Lawrence River downstream and Niagara Falls upstream. As a result, warships operating on Lake Ontario had to be built on site, either in Kingston or in the American naval dockyards at Sackets Harbor, or converted from merchant ships already operating in the lake.

Control of the lake, which was the most important supply route for the British for military operations to the west, had passed back and forth between the Americans and the British over the course of the war. The construction of a first rate ship of the line, in a campaign that had been dominated by sloops and frigates, gave the British uncontested control of the lake during the final months of the war. HMS St Lawrence never saw action, because her presence on the lake deterred the U.S. fleet from setting sail.

After the war in 1815, the ship was decommissioned. In January 1832, the hull was sold to Robert Drummond for £25. Between May and August, the hull was towed out of Navy Bay. It later formed the end of a pier attached to Morton's Brewery in Kingston and was used as a storage facility by the brewery, for cordwood among other materials. Later, it was sunk in 30 ft of water close to shore at 44.22056°N, -76.505°W, and is now a popular diving attraction.

Design and statistics
Master shipbuilder John Dennis and nearly 200 shipwrights built the St Lawrence in under 10 months, although several sources credit master shipwright William Bell as the designer and builder. Unlike sea-going ships of the line, the Saint Lawrence was constructed without a quarterdeck, poop deck or forecastle. Nevertheless, the St Lawrence's 112 guns on three flush decks qualified her as a first rate, larger than Horatio Nelson's flagship HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar nine years earlier.

The St Lawrence measured 2,305 tons burthen. The gundeck's length was 191' 2" and the beam was 52' 6". The crew numbered 700. In way of armaments, she carried thirty-two 32-pounder carronades and two 68-pounder carronades on the upper deck, thirty-six 24-pounder long guns on the middle deck and twenty-eight 32-pounder long guns, four 24-pounder long guns and two 68-pounder carronades on the lower deck.

Model
The Royal Military College of Canada Museum in Kingston, Ontario has a scale model of HMS St Lawrence, built by master modeller Louis Roosen.