The waters of Lake Ontario can turn violent in an instant. For three generations, my family has had a cottage on Presqu’ile Point, a spit of land that hooks out into the northeast corner of the lake. When I was a kid, sometimes a nor’easter storm would blow in—and I’d put on a raincoat and go outside to watch the water suddenly become savage. Metre-high waves, slate-grey and terrifying, would smash into the breakwall in front of me, spraying foam high above my head. I’d brace myself against the howling wind and wonder what it’d be like to be out on the cold and furious lake.
It’d be lethal, as history shows. Eastern Lake Ontario is a tomb for scores of ships, many of which went down in precisely these sudden and frenzied squalls. In fact, I’d grown up hearing about a famous wreck that went down in the waters right outside my cottage, shrouded in mystery: the HMS Speedy.
The Speedy sailed from York—present-day Toronto—in October of 1804, aiming to land at the town of Newcastle on Presqu’ile Point, about 75 nautical miles eastward down the coast. There, more than 20 of Upper Canada’s elite political and legal figures would disembark to hold a controversial murder trial for an Anishinaabe man. But they never made it. They ran into a raging nor’easter storm, and after being spotted briefly offshore not far away, the boat vanished.
“It was a huge, huge shock to Upper Canada—the mourning period basically lasted for decades,” says Dan Buchanan, a historian who lives in nearby Brighton, Ont., and who in 2020 published The Wreck of HMS Speedy: The Tragedy That Shook Upper Canada, a deeply researched chronicle of the disaster. “Upper Canada was a small place back then. Everyone knew someone on the Speedy.”
Today, the wreck is a little-told story, but it marks a pivotal moment in Canadian history, throwing into sharp relief the young country’s messy governance, its panicked preparations for the war of 1812, and its increasingly ruthless takeover of Indigenous lands. The sinking of the Speedy reshaped the political geography of southern Ontario.
Almost 220 years to the day of the tragedy, I met up with Buchanan to stroll to the tip of Presqu’ile. He crunched over the round stony shore, an avuncular grey-haired guy with a wry sense of humour. When we reached the edge of the water—where a lighthouse now looms—it was a sunny day, the lake as calm as glass.
“But it’s a graveyard,” he says. Somewhere out there, the Speedy and its inhabitants lie on the lake floor. People have speculated for years, but almost no one knows the precise location of the wreck.
Except for Buchanan himself. He’d like to tell us, but right now he can’t.
The Speedy wasn’t really a passenger ship. It ferried officials around the lake, but the British built it in 1798 mostly for cargo—hauling loads of corn, peas, and treats (such as “four brace and a half of very fine quails,” according to the ship’s manifests) for the elites of York. York was one of Upper Canada’s biggest towns back then, though that’s not saying much: it boasted about 500 inhabitants and a small network of mud-choked roads. Peter Hunter—lieutenant governor for all of Upper Canada—was widely disliked for his imperious, my-way-or-the-highway manner.
Relations with local Indigenous Peoples were mixed. The fur trade was still active, and if traders played fair with the Anishinaabe hunters in the lakes north of York, they enjoyed pretty good relations. The powers that be in York were also keen to keep the peace with the Anishinaabe, particularly the nearby Mississaugas, because America was constantly threatening to invade. York would need their help to beat the Yankees back.
“In 1804, Indigenous Peoples were still considered to be real powers on the continent, and specifically in the Great Lakes region,” says Michael Borsk, a history postdoctorate at the University of Toronto who specializes in Upper Canada in the 19th century.
But there was plenty of friction too. British settlers were increasingly arriving in Upper Canada, and York authorities were surveying the land to parcel it out for these newcomers. The local First Nations had signed treaties for some of that land, but those treaties were riddled with problems. Some weren’t translated into Indigenous languages, and the British described their contents rather deceptively—the Anishinaabe thought they were agreements to share the land, while the British intended to take it over entirely. Meanwhile, some settlers were setting up farms in areas that weren’t under treaty at all, erecting fences that limited how Anishinaabe people could move around.
The First Nations could complain to the Crown, but they didn’t always get fair treatment by the justice system. In 1796, a British soldier sexually assaulted the sister of Mississauga Chief Wabakinine, and then—when the chief intervened—killed the chief and his wife. Everyone in the colony knew the soldier was guilty, but the authorities in York never prosecuted him. “Justice,” as Buchanan puts it, “was a one-sided coin in Upper Canada.”
In 1803, settler Samuel Cozens killed an Anishinaabe man named Whistling Duck. The Crown investigated and decided that it was self-defence, but as Buchanan notes, they also promised the Mississaugas that there would be some sort of restitution. They never offered any.
The next year, Whistling Duck’s relative Ogetonicut enacted his own retribution. In the spring of 1804, he killed John Sharp, who worked for Moody and William Farewell, two fur-trading brothers. And he didn’t keep the murder a secret either: Ogetonicut was later overheard by others describing what he’d done.
When news of Sharp’s murder arrived in York, the lieutenant governor faced a tricky decision. On one hand, he felt pressure from village residents to crack down and quickly arrest Ogetonicut. But he was also leery of inflaming the Mississaugas, who were still angry that the Crown had never prosecuted the killer of their chief a few years earlier.
The Mississauga chief at the time was a man named Wabbekisheco, and he faced his own agonizing political conundrum. If he turned over Ogetonicut to face a British trial, it’d infuriate his people. But Wabbekisheco also had reasons to cooperate with British authorities. The local Mississauga population had been ravaged by alcoholism and a smallpox epidemic. In just a few decades, their population decreased by more than half. Preserving civil connections to York’s elites was a way for Wabbekisheco to retain a bit of his diminishing bargaining power to bring in goods his people needed and to keep leverage in arguments over land.
“He had a long history of defusing situations—he was really good at that, and he had respect on all sides,” says Buchanan. Plus, Wabbekisheco was—like Britain—worried about the Americans invading, says Cecilia Morgan, a specialist in 19th century Canadian history. “The Mississaugas saw the Crown as a bulwark against American expansionism and American settlers.”
So Wabbekisheco reluctantly handed over Ogetonicut to the authorities, who threw him in jail.
Hunter wanted to keep the trial as low-key as possible, to minimize how much it angered the Mississaugas. Fortunately, the legal code helped him. British law required that murders be tried in the same district where they took place. Hunter sent his surveyor out into the woods to figure out precisely which district John Sharp had been killed in. He calculated that it happened in the district of Newcastle, which was just east of York’s district.
That meant Hunter was—by law—required to hold the trial there, moving things down the lake and away from York.
That’s how the trial wound up being slated right near my cottage. In the early 1800s, British authorities had been planning to make Presqu’ile a major commercial hotspot. The finger’s-crooked shape of the peninsula, jutting a few miles out into Lake Ontario, created a large and calm bay. It had long been regarded as a “port of refuge” for boats that were seeking to escape an oncoming storm.
“There was no other harbour like it between Kingston and York back then,” says Buchanan. So the British had drawn up plans to erect a new district town on Presqu’ile. It’d be called Newcastle. They’d already built a wharf and a three-story courthouse—an unusually huge structure in lo-fi Upper Canada.
There were a lot of folks who had to travel from York to Newcastle. Obviously there was the prisoner, Ogetonicut, but also his translator, George Cowan, a rare member of high society who was fluent in Anishinaabe dialects. Then there was Robert Isaac Dey Gray, the solicitor general (a “bon vivant” who loved swanning about town in York, says Buchanan), and Angus MacDonell, Ogetonicut’s lawyer. There’d also be judge Thomas Cochran, only 27 at the time, and John Fisk, the high constable. (Hunter himself would stay home at York.)
All told, it was a who’s who of Upper Canada elites. The government also paid to send along six copies of the updated statutes of Upper Canada, which had been recently published and needed to be distributed. Given how expensive printing was back then, these were quite valuable documents.
Hunter ordered the Speedy be readied for the trip. This, alas, was easier said than done. It was in dreadful shape. The Speedy had been built six years earlier by the British, who were in such a frantic rush to create a marine service to defend against encroaching Americans that they built their boats out of “green” wood, meaning it had not been properly dried.
“Those boats leaked like sieves,” says Doug Cowie, the manager and curator of the Great Lakes Museum. “Once you submerge the green timber in freshwater, it really begins to deteriorate. They rotted away.”
Indeed, the Speedy had required extensive hull repairs every fall, and even with that maintenance, it was such a leaky mess that sailors had to work bilge pumps below deck whenever the ship was underway. To make matters worse, she was top heavy; her sides had been built two feet higher than normal to accommodate large loads of produce. The sails and rigging were the final insult—tattered by storms and in need of replacement.
The captain of the ship, Thomas Paxton, was keenly aware of its atrocious condition. When Hunter commanded him to sail away with so many important people on board, Paxton was horrified. (As Paxton’s son later put it, his father lectured Hunter on “the utter unworthiness of the vessel to go to sea.”) He was particularly wary of Lake Ontario in October, with its fierce storms.
The captain rebelled. When he met with Hunter in his Parliament offices—the only fancy buildings in York at the time—Paxton flat-out refused to do the trip. Taking so many important passengers on a rotting, tilting, unstable ship, right into the howling start of nor’easter season? No way.
But the governor wouldn’t budge. He was a brusque army guy who looked down on sailors and regarded Paxton, unjustly, as a troublemaker. So he threatened Paxton: either you sail the Speedy or face court-martial. Paxton would be stripped of his job, with no income to support a wife and seven children back in Kingston.
Boxed in, Paxton reluctantly agreed to do the trip, but he no doubt knew he was courting disaster.
On the morning of Sunday, October 7, 1804, 20 people clambered aboard the rickety Speedy. On top of the legal and political figures were John Stegman, York’s chief surveyor, the high constable to accompany Ogetonicut, and Simon Baker, a slave owned by Gray, the solicitor general. Paxton had also loaded a hen-stuffed chicken coop; the trip was slated to take about 24 hours, so his crew would slaughter some hens to prepare meals for the passengers.
The Speedy was not a comfortable ride. Because the hold was full—with the sailors manning the bilge pumps, as well as Ogetonicut, his jailer, and his translator—the other passengers had to ride exposed on the deck. They huddled close beneath blankets against the chilly fall weather and rain, while the ship’s masts “creaked and squawked,” as Buchanan writes.
And the voyage immediately went awry. When the Speedy pushed off from the shore in York, it quickly ran aground on a sandy shoal. It took the captain and his crew several hours to slowly extricate the ship and get it back on course.
And this, as Buchanan notes, caused a critical problem in the schedule. Paxton had figured that if he left York in the early afternoon on Sunday, he’d arrive at Presqu’ile the following afternoon. But now he’d be arriving at dusk, when visibility was terrible. A nighttime arrival would be treacherous. Sailing into Presqu’ile required a sharp eye. The whole bay was clotted with rocky shoals, so the only safe way to enter was via a narrow route on its far eastern side.
Indeed, two witnesses crucial for the trial, Moody Farewell and Eleazar Lockwood, had been sufficiently leery of riding on the Speedy that they’d pre-arranged to paddle to Presqu’ile by canoe. “They knew that the ship was probably the most dangerous thing to travel on in this country at that time,” says Buchanan. And they knew that storms could emerge at a moment’s notice.
Sure enough, on Monday, as the Speedy approached Presqu’ile, a ferocious nor’easter emerged. Winds roared out of the corner of the lake, carrying ice-cold rain. Visibility shrank to mere metres; waves were as violent as those I’d behold, terrified on the shore, when I was a kid.
“You get really wicked storms that make very steep waves,” says Cowie. “They can be very difficult to navigate.”
On the shore of Presqu’ile, the local residents lit a bonfire to make it easier for the Speedy to see the harbour in the storm. But as they peered into the darkness over the water, they couldn’t see anything. The boat had last been spotted earlier that afternoon in Port Hope—two towns over from Presqu’ile—by the canoeing witnesses, Farewell and Lockwood.
But the Speedy never arrived at its destination. By Wednesday, people still held out hope that the ship would somehow straggle into shore. A search party wasn’t realistic—early York didn’t have any ships to spare, nor manpower. After a week went by, it was obvious the Speedy had, somewhere, gone to its doom.
What made the wreck more mysterious is that very little debris washed ashore. It wasn’t until later in October on the American shore near Oak Orchard Creek, N.Y.,—all the way across the length of Lake Ontario—that a mere few shards were discovered: pieces of the chicken coop and the lantern of the ship’s “binnacle,” the housing for its compass. It was emblazoned with Paxton’s name.
The disappearance of the Speedy stunned Upper Canada. Losing more than 20 residents in a town as small as York meant that nearly everyone knew someone who’d died, including, dreadfully, two children who’d been ushered aboard, a last-minute addition to the roster. “When the sad news reached York, the gloom overspread the Village,” resident George Okill Stuart, 24 years old at the time, later recalled in a letter. “A more distressing and melancholy event has not occurred to this place for many years,” the Upper Canada Gazette wrote. Many blamed Lieutenant Governor Hunter for forcing everyone to sail on such a decrepit ship.
The colony had to suddenly repopulate its elite seats: two elections for the dead politicians, a new judge, a new surveyor. But the biggest effect was that the Crown immediately ditched its plans to make Newcastle a major town of Upper Canada. Presqu’ile Bay now seemed cursed, if not haunted. (The official government reason for repealing Newcastle’s district town status was that its location was “inconvenient.”) Instead, they picked Amherst—later part of Cobourg— one town over, as the county seat.
Newcastle rapidly faded into obscurity. “Property values evaporated overnight and growth stopped,” Buchanan wrote. Those engaged in shipping and fishing remained, but the area didn’t revive until later in the 19th century, when Ontario residents began putting up shacks and cottages so they could enjoy summers on the peninsula. As family lore has it, my cottage was originally a wooden shack for a lock keeper across Presqu’ile Bay, and when it was decommissioned, it was dragged across the winter ice and plunked down on cinderblocks near the very tip of the peninsula.
The Speedy marked a pivotal moment in the expansion of British rule over early Upper Canada. “The characters aboard this ship were there to justify and validate the establishment of a governing body and a judicial system in a new territory,” says Doug Cowie, the museum curator. “They were trying to establish a new British rule of law.”
The tragedy also marked an inflection point in relations between the Crown and the local First Nations. When the War of 1812 came, the lieutenant governor’s calculated attempts to keep peace with the Mississauga people bore fruit. They fought alongside the British and were critical to repelling the American invasion.
The fortunes of the Anishinaabe, on the other hand, quickly worsened. Once the 1812 war ended, the threat from America went away, and so the British no longer needed to rely on Anishinaabe warriors. In the eyes of the Crown, the First Nations were no longer powerful forces to be courted. “They became wards of the state— they were seen as children, destitute children,” says Buchanan. British settlers continued to arrive, taking over more and more territory, driving the Anishinaabe further away from choice land. Upper Canada doubled in population between 1830 and 1840.
The treaties weren’t great to begin with, but the new waves of settlers violated even those terms. They’d block rivers, alternately flooding or damming up Anishinaabe areas.
“The treaties said nothing about waterways or altering the waterway,” but settlers took them over, says Madeleine Whetung, a professor of geography at Toronto Metropolitan University, and an Anishinaabe member of the Curve Lake First Nation. “For a people who primarily make their life along the shoreline, it’s a very significant oversight.” To this day, she notes, “we live with the effects of the Trent-Severn Waterway. It impacts all parts of everyday life.”
The story of the Speedy captivated Canadian writers for decades. But thanks to its gothic qualities—a doomed vessel, piloted by a rueful captain, ferrying a First Nations man to his murder trial—the tale was often garishly embellished. Many retellings were filled with hacky, racist details: one famous account claimed Ogetonicut’s mother stood shoreside as the Speedy left harbour, cursing the ship and its passengers and doing a witch dance over his probable hanging at the end of the trial; in another, the ship sank because Ogetonicut tried to scratch a hole in the hull. (Speedy stories, Buchanan winces, are famous for having “all this kind of crap.”)
But what really adds to the drama is that the location of the wreck of the Speedy has never been publicly revealed.
One person claims to have found it: the late Ed Burtt, a diver who began hunting around outside Presqu’ile Bay in the late ’80s. In 1990, he discovered a debris field with an anchor, a cannonball, a pipe, eyeglasses, and bright pieces of brass that he thought might be the buttons of military coats. One of his fellow divers, Terry Coons, swam right up to a moss-covered object that looked like a ship’s bell. He even photographed what looked like a chest, which Burt surmised might contain those six copies of the Upper Canada statutes.
Burtt developed a theory of how the Speedy sank. As he figures it, Captain Paxton had decided the weather was too rough for him to safely enter Presqu’ile Bay. So instead, he tried to hole up in a safer harbour further east, Weller’s Bay.
But the storm, however, was so strong it blew the boat back out onto Lake Ontario—where it ran afoul of the area’s treacherous rocky shoals. There’s one particular rock formation that intrigued Burtt: what he called “the Devil’s Horse Block.” It was a long finger of stone that residents of Presqu’ile back in the late 1700s had often warned sailors about, because it jutted up nearly to the surface of the water. Not long after the Speedy went down, sailors who went near that part of the lake claimed they could no longer see the Horse Block. There was just a pile of rubble on the lake bed.
So Burtt figured that the storm forced the Speedy back out on to the lake, where it—in a cataclysmic piece of bad luck—slammed right into the Devil’s Horse Block. The collision tore the ship apart and toppled the rock.
Is that what actually happened? It’s hard to be sure. In the 2010s, Buchanan met Burtt and helped him do several presentations about the Speedy. They’d talk about Burtt’s theory.
“I always couch it in terms of saying this is the possible path of the Speedy and series of events based on Ed Burtt’s information,” says Buchanan. “I’m not going to say it’s true because I don’t know.”
Back in the ’90s, Burtt wanted to retrieve some of the artifacts he found, but he was prohibited because he wasn’t a licensed archaeologist, and, in any case, he’d need government permission. He never got it. The Ontario government didn’t think hunting for the Speedy was a priority. And even after Burtt showed video of artifacts on nearby Dobb’s Bank, some authorities still regarded him as a kook who found nothing serious. He also had a knack for annoying people: he was, as nearly everyone who met him told me, a cantankerous guy who’d go on rants about all the government losers who were holding him back. “Pugilistic,” as Buchanan wryly puts it.
When Burtt died in 2017, his widow gave Buchanan a huge box filled with her late husband’s diving documents. As Buchanan sorted through them, he discovered that Burtt had very carefully documented the GPS coordinates of many of his discoveries.
So Buchanan is now one of a only a few people who now know exactly where that debris field is.
But it’s still unlikely that any remnants of the Speedy will be recovered. In April of 2021, Buchanan met with the chief marine archeologist diver of Parks Canada who, if they got permission, could dive into the wreck. Both the divers and the government officials were intrigued, but decided they already had their hands full with plans to explore the wreck of the Franklin expedition to the Arctic.
So they, too, politely declined. Buchanan knew not to publicize the precise GPS coordinates should they want to explore the wreck in the future—they don’t want amateur treasure hunters going down and taking artifacts. So while Buchanan put a wealth of research into his book The Wreck of HMS Speedy, that’s one thing you won’t find in it: where, exactly, the boat lies.
Though I spent my summers cottaging right next to Presqu’ile Bay, my parents never bought us a canoe or rowboat. It was too expensive, they said, and my mother never liked being on the water. “I prefer dry land,” she’d say, nursing a gin and tonic that sweated in the mid-July heat as she lounged on our back deck and ploughed through Danielle Steel novels.
Me, though? I was mesmerized by the rolling waves, so I’d cajole neighbouring kids who had boats to take me out. Sometimes we’d paddle to the edge of the bay where—if you knew where to look—you could find a shipwreck that went down in 1872. It was only about six feet below the surface. This was not, I was told, a fatal wreck, just a boat that suddenly sprang a leak and sank before they could get it to shore.
Still, it was spooky to behold. My friends and I would pull up to the spot and peer down at the beams of the hull, ghostly and pale, rippled by the surface. We’d paddle back home, looking at the vast expanse of water on the horizon south of us, and, inevitably, thinking about the grim fate of the Speedy. On Lake Ontario, history lies not far beneath the surface.
Frequent contributor Clive Thompson’s most recent book is Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
This story originally appeared in our Sept/Oct ’25 issue.
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