On the night of December 5th, 1812, the warship HMS Plumper, heavy with a load of gold to pay soldiers, made its way from Halifax to Saint John, during the War of 1812. She never arrived.
Out in the dark of the Bay of Fundy, snow began to fall. At the Plumper’s helm stood her 24-year-old commander, Lt. Josiah Bray, who was completely unfamiliar with the treacherous waters. His sailing instructions to navigate the Bay were, to put it bluntly, ridiculous: sail along the shore in 90-degree zig-zags, going 10 minutes along the shore and 20 minutes to the North, repeating this until he reached Saint John.
As the snow fell harder, visibility was reduced to nothing. Bray zigged when he should have zagged and crashed right into a sheer rock face by Dipper Harbour.
The Plumper sank in only fifteen minutes. Forty-two passengers and crew died in the freezing waters.
Reporting on the story was murky from the start. The earliest news report appeared in the New Brunswick Royal Gazette two days later, but was buried by a much older news story — word had just arrived over the great victory at the Battle of Queenstown Heights. (It had actually happened back in October. News didn’t travel fast in 1812.)
The wreck only got a little snippet. Of the 75 men aboard, the newspaper reported, only 28 had survived. Among the dead was young Lt. Bray. The cargo, — “$36,000 in specie,” meaning money in gold coins instead of paper notes — was lost at the bottom of the sea.
On the other side of the war, though, American papers had a field day. Newspapers as far down as Carolina trumpeted the sinking as some sort of great victory, reporting 400 dead and $70,000 lost. While the lives lost were tragic, the Plumper was a smaller class of ship, and her loss was hardly the major military catastrophe the Americans wished it to be.
And yet, before she met her end in a snowstorm in the Bay of Fundy, the HMS Plumper had a remarkably distinguished and action-packed career.
When the War of 1812 began that March, the Plumper promptly loaded up the wives and children of top officers in Halifax and darted over to England to bring them to safety.
Then she returned to hunt American privateers: basically legalised pirates. Both the United States and the Maritimes Provinces commissioned large numbers of ships to essentially, terrorize civilian and military ships alike, and seizing them and their cargo.
The Plumper was good at hunting privateers.
In a typical action that July, the Plumper had come across four American privateers who took one look at the warship and bolted in four different directions. The Plumper picked one, ironically named Friendship, and ran it down. The Friendship surrendered without a fight.
Boarding her, the Plumper’s crew found a bizarre cargo: 6000 dolls (presumably lifted from some unlucky merchant’s shipment). The crew of the Friendship were arrested but soon released with a very stern warning: go back to privateering and next time you’ll hang. The dolls were loaded up onto the Plumper, while the Friendship herself was deemed worthless and was left at sea, reported Washington D.C.’s Naval Influencer.
Lloyd’s List, the world’s oldest and likely most thorough shipping record, credits the Plumper with capturing six American privateer ships that summer. It also reveals just how ramshackle the privateer fleets often were — three of those little ships carried only a single gun. Some, however, were richer than others. When the Plumper took the American schooner Samuel, she found $5,300 in gold aboard — money meant for American troops.
But if you’re already plotting your next trip to Dipper Harbour to dive the wreck to look for the Plumper’s gold, I have some bad news. It has already been dived. Much of what was aboard the ship — including the anchors — could not be replaced in the Maritimes, so there was immense motive to get all that was there.
The salvage of the Plumper began quickly. The work fell to undersea divers, lowered to the wreck inside a giant diving bell and fed air through a rubber tube running to the surface. A reporter for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper who later donned the diving bell to explore the wreck of the SS Atlantic vividly described early dives: “The air from above, which is furnished through the rubber tube, comes with a hissing sound, producing a strange feeling. I shudder at the thought of being immersed so deeply, and how slight an accident would insure instant destruction. … The waters are very cold, and a chilly feeling creeps over me … Fish were swimming around as I peer into the wreck …”
It worked, though. Salvager George Harrison reported to the Paymaster General on April 28th, 1813, that the salvage of the Plumper had been completed and $32,440 had been recovered. This would not have included just gold, but the ship’s rigging, anchors, cannons, etc, which would have been just as valuable as the cargo.
Historian and former MLA Eric Allaby dived the site in 1973, and reported: “there really wasn’t a lot down there. I found some places where the divers had been working, where they had turned over the rubble.” Noting the currents were strong, Allaby figured that there was probably still gold down there, but it had been scattered and buried by the strong currents.
Yet apparently not only does the search continue, but it can get remarkably vicious.
In 2005, diver Gary Austin told the Telegraph-Journal that he’d been on a protracted dive of the wreck site when, one night when he was away, rival divers turned up with explosives. “Other salvagers dynamited the wreck,” said Austin. The RCMP got involved.
Today, the wreck of the HMS Plumper is listed as a provincial historic site. Sure, most of the gold was hauled up two centuries ago, but the Fundy currents are restless things, and who’s to say that somewhere out in the cold, dark waters beyond Dipper Harbour scattered coins of long-dead soldiers’ pay isn’t still down there, waiting?
