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a reconstruction of a historic vessel or an attempt to do so.
Aside from actual building of a model it is also the thrill of tracking the vessel through history and trying to reproduce the model as close to the real ship as possible and leaving room for the "best guess" option. A historic model involves far more than taking a drawing and start building, plans of ships are very general and often the final ship built and the original plans may or may not match. You have to take into account the time and the place the ship was built and the people and circumstances in which the ship was built.
We are all familiar with the movies Matrix, there are a large number of people actually believe we are all living in a computer simulated reality and you will find hundreds of examples on line of references to “a glitch in the Matrix”.
This is the story about the war of 1812 shipwreck the General Hunter where the wreck matches two historical accounts which support two different ships. So we have one shipwreck with a matrix glitch of two historical accounts.
The vessel itself, fashioned out of oak, would have originally measured about 54 feet long at the keel by 18 feet wide at midship, with two masts. Buried in the sand with it were a small cannon, four cannon balls meant for larger cannons, military buttons from the likes of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, parts of a musket, a bayonet, an officer’s walking stick, a wooden deadeye used in the ship’s rigging, and pieces of a shoe. Spread among all that were 194 ceramic shards from plates, cups, saucers, soup bowls and a tankard, along with these artifacts was a small swivel gun lying next to the keel. Stripping the wreck of all the iron it seems odd a swivel gun would have been left behind. The artifacts discovered, and additional research at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., eventually told an epic saga of war and peace. Though outnumbered, the British had sailed with six ships, including General Hunter, to engage their nine American counterparts in September 1813, in a decisive battle for control of the lake. But the wind, which initially favored the British, started shifting almost as soon as the battle began, and after three hours of carnage, the Americans had won the day. General Hunter was now in U.S. hands, and while it’s unclear whether the ship saw further action, what is known is that after the war she served as a transport vessel, her name shortened to Hunter. According to documents that only came to light in 2005, Hunter was sailing from Michilimackinac to Detroit in 1816 when a violent storm on Lake Huron threw the ship off course. Fearing for their lives, the crew of eight opted to “put the helm hard a weather and run her in head foremost” toward the sandy beach of Southampton, according to the crew’s affidavit. Everyone on board survived, including two passengers. In an 1816 letter, a U.S. general reports that two boats were later sent to salvage what they could, then set the wreck on fire. Whatever remained was eventually submerged in sand for the better part of two centuries.
What we have here is the research and actual artifacts that identify the wreck on Southampton beach as the General Hunter. As a standalone research it is solid and supports the identity of the wreck as the General Hunter. History also documents another version of the same General Hunter which will be explored in this thread. The goal here is not to prove one General Hunter or disprove the other or if research was skewed to fit. I am calling it a glitch in research; it is left up to the reader to decide.
The starting point is a site drawing of the wreck. This was brought into CAD and scaled, once scaled measurements can be taken of the drawing
So far so good right?
a glitch is there is a drawing of the General Hunter done by the builder William Bell in 1802ish so when the scaled wreck drawing is placed over the historic drawing there is a glaring problem, the two do not match.
This is where the research story begins and the question attempted to answer is WHY?
Aside from actual building of a model it is also the thrill of tracking the vessel through history and trying to reproduce the model as close to the real ship as possible and leaving room for the "best guess" option. A historic model involves far more than taking a drawing and start building, plans of ships are very general and often the final ship built and the original plans may or may not match. You have to take into account the time and the place the ship was built and the people and circumstances in which the ship was built.
We are all familiar with the movies Matrix, there are a large number of people actually believe we are all living in a computer simulated reality and you will find hundreds of examples on line of references to “a glitch in the Matrix”.
This is the story about the war of 1812 shipwreck the General Hunter where the wreck matches two historical accounts which support two different ships. So we have one shipwreck with a matrix glitch of two historical accounts.
The vessel itself, fashioned out of oak, would have originally measured about 54 feet long at the keel by 18 feet wide at midship, with two masts. Buried in the sand with it were a small cannon, four cannon balls meant for larger cannons, military buttons from the likes of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, parts of a musket, a bayonet, an officer’s walking stick, a wooden deadeye used in the ship’s rigging, and pieces of a shoe. Spread among all that were 194 ceramic shards from plates, cups, saucers, soup bowls and a tankard, along with these artifacts was a small swivel gun lying next to the keel. Stripping the wreck of all the iron it seems odd a swivel gun would have been left behind. The artifacts discovered, and additional research at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., eventually told an epic saga of war and peace. Though outnumbered, the British had sailed with six ships, including General Hunter, to engage their nine American counterparts in September 1813, in a decisive battle for control of the lake. But the wind, which initially favored the British, started shifting almost as soon as the battle began, and after three hours of carnage, the Americans had won the day. General Hunter was now in U.S. hands, and while it’s unclear whether the ship saw further action, what is known is that after the war she served as a transport vessel, her name shortened to Hunter. According to documents that only came to light in 2005, Hunter was sailing from Michilimackinac to Detroit in 1816 when a violent storm on Lake Huron threw the ship off course. Fearing for their lives, the crew of eight opted to “put the helm hard a weather and run her in head foremost” toward the sandy beach of Southampton, according to the crew’s affidavit. Everyone on board survived, including two passengers. In an 1816 letter, a U.S. general reports that two boats were later sent to salvage what they could, then set the wreck on fire. Whatever remained was eventually submerged in sand for the better part of two centuries.
What we have here is the research and actual artifacts that identify the wreck on Southampton beach as the General Hunter. As a standalone research it is solid and supports the identity of the wreck as the General Hunter. History also documents another version of the same General Hunter which will be explored in this thread. The goal here is not to prove one General Hunter or disprove the other or if research was skewed to fit. I am calling it a glitch in research; it is left up to the reader to decide.
The starting point is a site drawing of the wreck. This was brought into CAD and scaled, once scaled measurements can be taken of the drawing
So far so good right?
a glitch is there is a drawing of the General Hunter done by the builder William Bell in 1802ish so when the scaled wreck drawing is placed over the historic drawing there is a glaring problem, the two do not match.
This is where the research story begins and the question attempted to answer is WHY?
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