EXPLORER: Look at that.
JOHN: Oh my word. Good Grief.
That is amazing.
How long is that one?
NARRATOR: Beneath the waters of a Virginia river, a team of explorers is discovering a
hidden battlefield from the war that created the United States.
JOHN: All of a sudden these objects are forming on the screen that we've
never seen before.
This is incredible.
EXPLORER: Cannons right there.
NARRATOR: Right under the nose of modern America.
240 year old war ships litter the riverbank.
JOHN: We had ten wrecks here. Just found an 11th.
What d'you find?
We're working on ships that are the tangible evidence of the event that
led to American Independence.
NARRATOR: These wrecks help us to understand the revolutionary war in a
completely new way.
JAMES: The naval aspect of the America Revolution is absolutely crucial.
It won the war.
NARRATOR: The 13 colonies in America rise up against the British king.
[cannon fire].
But their cause looks hopeless.
SOLDIER: Fire.
NARRATOR: The patriots are a land-based militia and
at a time when sea power counts,
it's Britain's royal navy that rules the waves.
JAMES: The British had command of the seas.
As long as they had such extraordinary naval superiority,
the Americans were never gonna be able to beat them.
NARRATOR: So how do the merchants, farmers, and fishermen of the American
colonies take on the 18th century's greatest maritime super power?
[cannon fire].
SAM: Something inexplicable happens,
a collection of colonies managed to fight and win
a war against the most powerful country in the world.
[cannon fire].
NARRATOR: The struggle for America's waters begins here in Lake Champlain, Vermont.
Can a single barely armed boat explain how the rebels attempt to
prevail against impossible odds?
In the fall of 1776,
15 patriot warships set sail from this stronghold,
Fort Ticonderoga,
on the southern tip of the lake.
ARTHUR: We're on hallowed ground for American history and the fleet on
Lake Champlain should be considered the first American Fleet.
NARRATOR: The fleet is led by a man who will one day betray the revolution,
Benedict Arnold.
His mission: defend these waters against powerful British forces
gathering in the north.
ARTHUR: Benedict Arnold while he was here in the
Champlain valley did heroic things.
Lake Champlain is so significant because it's 120 miles long, north and south.
Think interstate highway at a time when you can invade on it.
Whoever controlled the lake was gonna have the advantage in the war moving forward.
NARRATOR: At this critical point,
the hopes of the revolution depend on
America's first fighting fleet.
But within two months of launching Arnold's navy is in tatters.
ARTHUR: Of the 15 vessels in the American fleet only
four made it back to Fort Ticonderoga.
NARRATOR: What happened.
The fate of most of Arnold's fleet is shrouded in mystery.
Now two centuries later archaeologist Art Cohn is hoping to unlock secrets
hidden beneath the waters of Lake Champlain.
ARTHUR: Where history happens stuff gets left behind.
If there was a vessel that could connect us to that story,
that would be the holy grail of it all.
Are there physical remains that we can see, touch, study,
and enlighten us about what actually happened here.
NARRATOR: Art and his team traced the fleet's route north from Fort Ticonderoga
looking for remnants.
Sonar sweeps the bottom hundreds of feet below.
Clearing the lake sector by sector.
At last they detect something promising.
ARTHUR: Oh yeah.
MAN: Looks like we got something between 15 and 20 meters in size.
ARTHUR: Yeah that's excellent, excellent.
MAN: Alright clear two meters.
NARRATOR: They deploy a remotely operated vehicle and guide it over 200 feet
down to the target.
ARTHUR: It's amazing.
Look how intact that is.
That could be really important for trying to identify which boat this is.
NARRATOR: If this wreck really is a sunken warship from the patriot navy,
it could finally take Art inside the story of their defeat on the lake.
But is it?
Combining Art's scan data and underwater footage,
we can make the waters of Lake Champlain disappear.
The mast of a ship that hasn't seen sunlight for centuries
breaks the surface,
and draining water reveals
a giant rusted cannon pointing forward at the bow,
resting inside a grizzled
54 foot vessel sitting upright on the lake bed.
ARTHUR: It's not broken,
it's not a fragment, it's a completely intact specimen
transported to the present.
NARRATOR: But with only one cannon this simple boat doesn't look like
a weapon of war.
However, as Art studies it,
he spots a row of fixtures sticking up from the rim of the hull.
They're evidence that this ship was once bristling with an
array of ingenious weaponry.
ARTHUR: Eight hand forged iron brackets indicating
exactly the position of all the swivel guns
that had been mounted there.
They are devastating in close range anti-boarding,
easy to aim,
easy to load and fire and so they would have been indispensable.
NARRATOR: Art also finds anchor points on the side,
for supporting two more heavy cannon.
He's convinced it's a warship from the revolution.
But is it one of Benedict Arnold's?
The surviving cannon and the anchor points for other weapons are key clues pointing
Art towards a type of fighting ship known to be in Arnold's fleet.
ARTHUR: The cannon feature that's a signature, that's,
that's a document that tells us this boat is what
we expected it to be or hoped it would be.
NARRATOR: Art has uncovered an oar and
sail powered patriot gunboat called a gundalow.
ARTHUR: There's no question the gunboat came from Benedict Arnold's fleet.
NARRATOR: A veteran from a forgotten battle for the future of the United States.
Combining details from the wreck with research in revolutionary archives,
Art searches for more clues.
He spots an unusual box roughly fastened to the inside of the hull.
He's never seen anything like it on a gun boat before.
ARTHUR: As I really trained my attention on it,
there was ammunition in the box and I had like
a little explosion go off in my brain saying, "Eureka this is an ammo box".
This is really cool.
NARRATOR: And there's another unfamiliar feature.
On one side of the ship a large notch, Art can't make sense of it.
ARTHUR: And I gotta tell ya cutting down the side of the boat makes you more vulnerable
to you know waves and water but that's what they chose to do.
NARRATOR: As Art tries to work out what's going on, he recognizes something big,
the shape of the hull.
It's a type of ship design used by colonial farmers to carry hay.
ARTHUR: This clearly was a vessel used to travel the rivers and shallow marshes
cutting hay that it could bring back to the farm.
NARRATOR: All of these odd features start to make sense.
ARTHUR: The British navy had years of development of discipline,
and protocol and that couldn't be a greater contrast to what we were looking at.
NARRATOR: The patriot crew is freelancing,
the ammo box is an invention and they cut a
notch because the hull is too tall for their cannon.
ARTHUR: They literally robbed or borrowed as much material as they could find,
hey we've got this cannon,
we've gotta make it work, it doesn't fit in this spot,
do we raise it?
Or do we we cut down the side of the boat.
There wasn't a blueprint, and they were kind of making it up as they went.
NARRATOR: The patriots are going into battle with amateur sailors armed
with scavenged weaponry in a modified hay barge.
Given this information, Art digs into the balance of forces on the lake,
he uncovers that the British deploy a powerful fleet of
more than 30 boats onto the water of Lake Champlain.
On the 11th of October this dominant force attacks Arnold's makeshift fleet of
just 15 near Valcour Island.
Art can now see that the patriots face a hopeless mismatch.
[cannon fire].
ARTHUR: This battle was fought for hours and hours and hours where the
cannoning never stopped they said.
Serving aboard the Valcour Island fleet would have been the worst duty
you could've possibly had.
NARRATOR: With 11 patriot ships and 60 men lost the US navy's first ever battle
ends in defeat.
But the fate of Art's discovered gundalow remains a mystery.
It lies more than two dozen miles south of the battle.
Sitting perfectly upright with no sign of fatal battle damage
and with most of its weapons cleanly removed
so what happened to this mysterious gunboat?
NARRATOR: Down on the shores of Lake Champlain Art Cohn is trying to reconstruct the
final hours of Arnold's sunken gunboat.
A two-year project to rebuild the adapted hay barge is helping him
understand what happened to it.
ARTHUR: Welcome aboard as close a replica as you're ever going to see.
This boat is a warship, it's a battle ship,
it is uh, carrying heavy guns, that was its purpose.
Its purpose was to go to war.
NARRATOR: Art focuses on why the wreck of the gundalow is missing it's weapons.
ARTHUR: Just the firing of the guns and the recoil and the energy that
that produced would have shaken these planks just recently built and
shaken the caulking out of them so they would be leaking and the more they fired,
the more they leaked.
NARRATOR: Somehow the improvised warship survives the battle
but is doomed nonetheless.
ARTHUR: We believe that they jettisoned the heavy guns so that they could lighten the
boat to keep it from sinking but it was leaking
so bad they knew it had to be abandoned
and let go and it sank perfectly straight down to the bottom until it
landed upright with its bow cannon still in place searching for the enemy
and its mast still up.
NARRATOR: One of the few patriot vessels still afloat after the battle.
The gunboat finally goes down.
But there's still more to discover and Art is helped by an original
naval inventory from 1776.
ARTHUR: It begins with a return of the fleet belonging to the
United States of America on Lake Champlain
under the command of Brigadier General Arnold
dated October 22nd 1776.
The odds of it being a document that listed
every boat, listed every rig,
and then in a final column the fate of the vessel.
NARRATOR: One ship on the list matches his wreck.
ARTHUR: This boat that we found on the bottom of Lake Champlain,
this boat is the gunboat Spitfire.
NARRATOR: Lost for over 240 years Art has found the Spitfire.
Part of Benedict Arnold's brave but doomed defense of Lake Champlain.
However, the sacrifice on the lake is not in vain.
The battle buys the rebels some valuable time.
Time for a ragtag militia to grow into a formidable army.
[cannon fire].
ARTHUR: Never had there been a fleet large or small that had lived to greater
purpose or died more gloriously than the little fleet on Lake Champlain.
NARRATOR: And over the next two years the
colonists fight the red coats to a standstill.
Each side winning battles from the north east to the deep south.
But on the water the patriots still have little to challenge the Royal Navy.
Lake Ontario, upstate New York.
Can a spectacular wreck on the lake bottom explain how one key American victory was
achieved without a single shot being fired.
As the war develops,
the British use their naval superiority to keep tight control of
the great lakes,
launching the largest warship ever seen on these waters.
80 feet long with ports for 22 heavy cannon.
His Majesty's ship Ontario is so powerful,
patriot forces abandon the region completely.
SAM: The British would have certainly hoped that that ship would have been there to
police the lake, to fly the flag of British royal power for years.
NARRATOR: On October 31st 1780, Halloween,
HMS Ontario sets sail with a detachment of 60 troops.
Heading for the town of Oswego in New York,
but she never arrives.
SAM: How did a ship built by competent British shipwrights go from being
afloat in the middle of a lake to disappearing.
JIM: They find on the shore the hat of the captain, they find the binnacle,
blankets and the compass and that's it.
NARRATOR: Shipwreck hunter Jim Kennard wants finally to work out what happened
and asks deep dive expert Dan Scoville to join the search.
DAN: The lake hides all kinds a secrets and just being able to go look for
one of these secrets and to discover what happened with it,
that's super exciting to me.
NARRATOR: Dan and Jim scour for three years over 200 square miles of the lake
retracing the Ontario's intended route to Oswego
but they find nothing but barren silt and rocks.
Eventually the only place left to look is one of the deepest parts of the lake.
Dan sends his ROV down into the inky black abyss.
Over 500 feet down they find a single wooden longboat
and then in the darkness beyond...
DAN: There was a great big hull right there and I came up the rear of the hull and
that's when I saw the windows across the stern of the ship.
They're still in place after 200 years on the bottom.
There's really no other ships out there that are gonna look quite like that.
This was HMS Ontario.
JIM: And then all of a sudden,
there it is, and all of that grief that you've been going
through it all changes.
NARRATOR: HMS Ontario discovered at last.
One of the best preserved 18th century warships ever found.
So who or what sank her?
The only way to find out is to drain away the deep lake waters
and reveal this revolutionary war masterpiece.
Two masts still stand tall.
A row of arched windows the officer's quarters perfectly intact.
The entire vessel comes into view lying on her side,
with no obvious damage
even the ship's bell is still in place,
the deck and cannon both untouched.
For Jim and Dan the wreck of HMS Ontario is almost too perfect.
DAN: You do wonder what happened.
Why isn't there a big hole, where's the hole?
JIM: This ship everything is there, it's solid it is really solid.
So what really happened?
NARRATOR: On the great lakes Jim Kennard inspects the wreck of HMS Ontario.
There's no clear damage.
She's nearly immaculate.
On closer inspection though not everything is so perfect.
At the stern two huge cannons have broken loose and are jammed up against the tiller.
JIM: That's very unusual.
Those two cannons together weighed about 2000 pounds,
so what caused those cannons to be there.
NARRATOR: Something violent happened here.
But there is absolutely no evidence of battle damage.
Jim decides to check accounts of Halloween night 1780,
looking for something unusual.
He pulls together old diaries,
newspaper articles and ship's logs from all over the American colonies.
But it's an analysis by an expert meteorologist that catches his eye.
Two and a half centuries ago Lake Ontario is hit by a weather bomb.
JIM: Something happened very quickly,
a back door cold front that was from the north east
to the south west.
It causes the temperature to drop 30 degrees in an hour or two with
gale force winds of 30 or 40 miles an hour.
NARRATOR: Important evidence but hardly a smoking gun.
Even a storm this intense shouldn't have the power to bring down a warship
built for the open seas.
Jim goes back to inspect the wreck.
In the rigging he spots a small but significant clue,
the pole supporting the smaller forward sails
are stowed but the ones for the main central mast are not.
This likely means that the Ontario's huge main sail is
still up when the storm suddenly hits.
The British crew unused to American conditions are caught
off-guard and unprepared.
JIM: The crew was in the process of getting the sails down but it doesn't
look like they had time to finish that job and in turn everything went wrong.
NARRATOR: For the British sailors their vast billowing sail triggers
a disastrous sequence of events.
First it catches a blast of wind buffeting Ontario right over.
And the loose cannon on the top deck are dramatic evidence of what happens next.
JIM: That ship ended up blown over on its side now the cannon are hanging just
hanging by the ropes and those ropes break.
NARRATOR: The loose cannons slam the tiller hard over.
JIM: Pushing that ship down into the water and down into the water goes it's sails.
NARRATOR: When the huge sails touch water they act like a parachute and
drag the Ontario under.
JIM: Now that ship's not coming back up again and it slips between the waves and
sinks and as it sits on the bottom today it's still on its side.
NARRATOR: The mystery of HMS Ontario is finally solved.
The Royal Navy has come up against an unexpected enemy,
the unpredictable weather of a continental land mass.
And that's not Britain's only problem.
After five years of combat American Resistance and
stretched supply lines are pushing her war machine to the limit.
But the Royal Navy keeps her in the fight landing and
extracting troops along the eastern seaboard at will...
and then here on Virginia's York River
something extraordinary happens.
A sudden decisive change in the balance of naval power leaving behind
an astonishing fleet of ravaged British shipwrecks.
Maritime archaeologist John Broadwater has come to Yorktown the site of the last
major land battle of the American Revolution,
a battle that hinges on control of the York River.
JOHN: The American Revolution was right here in Yorktown.
In many ways the siege of Yorktown can be thought of as much a
maritime battle as it was a land battle.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1781,
Britain's General Cornwallis occupies Yorktown with
8000 redcoats and a fleet of ships.
JOHN: There are troop ships, there are horse carriers,
there are food carriers.
The entire British army has just moved here by sea.
NARRATOR: The rebel colonists led by George Washington see
an opportunity for a decisive battle.
They advance from New York to surround and besiege the British at Yorktown.
But over a dozen Royal Navy ships including Cornwallis's largest
the 44 gun HMS Charon dominates the York river
and there is no patriot navy to challenge the British fleet.
MAN: Cast off.
NARRATOR: But now John Broadwater and his team are uncovering a twist in
the tail of the American Revolution right here under the York river,
an unprecedented massacre of the Royal Navy.
JOHN: There was a terrible disaster here for the British and we have the
evidence out here to prove that.
EXPLORER: Look at that.
EXPLORER 2: Oh my word.
EXPLORER 3: Good grief that is amazing,
how long is that one?
NARRATOR: So far John and his team have detected 11 wrecks under these waters
and they believe they're all from General Cornwallis's fleet of ships.
JOHN: This is literally a graveyard of British ships on both sides of the river,
it's an incredible and unique resource found nowhere else.
NARRATOR: So how could a fleet from
Britain's imperious navy be brought to its knees.
Only a careful inspection of the scattered remains can reveal the answer.
Three wrecks have been picked up on sonar in the northern sector of the river.
John dives on the largest target in the group.
EXPLORER 2: John topside comms check.
NARRATOR: Copper is an unusual find on an 18th century wooden ship.
What do the surprising ruins of the royal navy warship
reveal about the turning point of the battle for Yorktown.
NARRATOR: John Broadwater's team on the York river has
discovered copper in the remains of a revolutionary era British warship.
It's a curious find.
To unravel the mystery of this strange sunken vessel
it's now possible to combine all of the available evidence and
drain the York river and reveal the remains
of a two-century old veteran of Cornwallis's doomed fleet.
The outline of a 140 foot beast embedded in the silt.
Much of the old wooden vessel is missing but the riverbed is hiding more
of the wreck's remains.
Draining the silt reveals the underside of the hull exposing the
remains of copper sheeting.
JOHN: That's awesome.
NARRATOR: The wreck has a fast and hydrodynamic copper bottom.
John knows it's rare and cutting edge at the time of the revolution.
JOHN: Copper sheeting was a technological advance that put Britain so far ahead of the
other navies, that's really significant.
NARRATOR: When John looks into General Cornwallis's fleet,
there is only one ship as big as his wreck
fitted with a copper bottom.
It's a major clue that points to the mighty 44 gun HMS Charon,
the primary vessel controlling the York river, for Cornwallis.
JOHN: This clearly had to be Charon, positive ID.
NARRATOR: It's an incredible find, but also puzzling.
The Americans have nothing that can match such a powerful warship
so why does so little of her remain?
JOHN: HMS Charon was very important to Cornwallis,
she was as the largest ship that he had at his disposal,
very powerful and formidable and put him in charge of the sea around him.
NARRATOR: John hopes there could be clues to the ship's fate in
artifacts recovered from the wreck.
WORKER: Here's one piece.
JOHN: Oh yeah.
These are nice examples of Charon's copper sheeting.
You can see this piece is still attached to the wooden hull.
NARRATOR: Then John spots a piece of copper that looks highly unusual.
JOHN: It's gotta be melted copper that used to be piece of nice sheathing
melted into a glob.
Look at all the little holes and bubbles,
it must have just started to boil almost.
To get copper to melt,
well it's over a 1000 degrees centigrade,
it's almost 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.
NARRATOR: Melted copper can mean only one thing.
A fierce fire on board HMS Charon.
Cornwallis's prized ship goes down in an inferno.
JOHN: This must have just been a horribly intense fire,
the frustration that the British must have felt
at losing their largest warship to a tragedy like this.
NARRATOR: But what can possibly have caused this kind of blaze out on the river?
Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff has taken up the investigation
and she thinks it's highly unlikely that the patriot militia had the fire power
to take General Cornwallis's flagship down in a blaze of flames.
MAYA: The best way to think about these 18th century ships of the line is
to think about them as tanks.
They are built to last and withstand a lot.
I think the American shot trying to pick at the Charon wasn't
going to be very effective.
NARRATOR: To take on the HMS Charon, Maya thinks the patriots must have had help.
A powerful ally, now joining the fight against the British.
France.
On August 30th 1781
the French navy blockades the York river.
General Cornwallis and his ships are now trapped at Yorktown.
MAYA: Yorktown is the moment that brought France into the war on the American side.
My enemy's enemy is my friend kind of alliance.
NARRATOR: What did the French have that could possibly have destroyed
the key British ship HMS Charon?
When Maya looks into it she discovers the French send ground forces
to join the siege placing artillery on the banks of the river.
MAYA: The French have very up to date technology to help the
American-French war effort.
NARRATOR: And when she analyses their gunnery,
she discovers they have a very special weapon
in their arsenal.
Portable furnaces that can heat cannonballs until they're red hot.
MAYA: The French have this kind of artillery, it was called Greek fire.
NARRATOR: But could simply heating some cannonballs really be enough to destroy
a top of the line warship?
Maya visits a forge to test the French technology.
MAYA: A red hot cannonball let's see what that does to a piece of wood.
It's obviously gonna burn and it started burning immediately,
but it's taking it a while.
Let's try it out on some sail and see what happens.
It does work.
Wow, that's also spreading incredibly fast.
When it hit sail it really ignited.
NARRATOR: Maya is now convinced that if French hot shot hit the sails
of HMS Charon, it would have sparked an instant inferno.
MAYA: Timbers would have been burning, the spars would have been burning,
the rigging would have been burning, by the time it would have sunk it
would have been in terrible shape.
It totally makes sense why the Karen would have ended up at the bottom of the water.
NARRATOR: The results of the hot shot demo are impressive but Maya digs
for further evidence that might confirm her theory.
She finds a passage in an old diary.
MAYA: So this a first person account of what happened on the night
that the HMS Charon went down by an eye witness.
"A red hot shell from the French battery set fire to the Charon,
a British 44 gun ship enwrapped in a torrent of fire,
which spreading with vivid brightness among the combustible rigging".
It's really an extraordinarily vivid description
of the effectiveness of this French hot shot.
NARRATOR: It's now certain the melted copper sheathing on HMS Charon is evidence of an
unexpected assault by French hot shot artillery.
Could this revelation explain the graveyard of British wrecks John Broadwater has
discovered in the York river.
The team dives the sunken group near the Charon.
JOHN: Diver up.
What'd you find?
Look at that. What we got here?
DIVER: You got it?
JOHN: Yeah, looks like a piece of charred wood.
Another good clue.
NARRATOR: Could this be evidence of another victim of French fire?
JOHN: This is close to the Charon,
it's only a few 100 yards away from the Charon it's
got evidence of burning.
NARRATOR: Hot shot clearly scythes into Cornwallis's trapped fleet.
JOHN: This grouping of shipwrecks at Yorktown would not be there had
it not been for the the French.
With every wreck we investigate,
we add one more piece to the puzzle of how they
relate to American Independence.
NARRATOR: But the war's not over yet.
What does this wreck free from any battle damage,
reveal about Britain's last
desperate plans to win the battle of Yorktown.
NARRATOR: In the York River, Virginia,
British ships have been scattered and sunk.
But these are not the only ships downed in the battle.
Just outside General Cornwallis's position at Yorktown
by the southern bank of the river,
a row of sunken vessels sits in an eerily straight line
and assessing his underwater footage
maritime archaeologist John Broadwater is struck by the
excellent condition of one of the wrecks.
JOHN: It was so well preserved it immediately caught our attention.
That's very unusual.
Parts of decks, bulk heading, so many features.
NARRATOR: Why is this pristine ship at the heart of a dense cluster of wrecks?
By stitching the murky underwater footage together we can now reveal this
wreck as never before.
The stumps of two masts break the surface.
A wooden vessel 74 feet long, with a deep hull.
What was this ship?
Inside the hold engraved on the cask two mysterious letters.
John digs back through the logs of the
British fleet at Yorktown.
He discovers the engravings are the letters J-Y and they tally with a
ship captain's name.
JOHN: And this was Joseph Young Husband and his ship was called The Betsy.
NARRATOR: It's an incredible discovery.
The Betsy is a valuable military supply ship.
But why has she sunk with barely a scratch?
On the drained wreck John finds something strange in the bottom of her hull.
JOHN: All of a sudden there's this rectangular opening that looks like it's
actually been chiseled out,
just this one little block, it's really strange.
There's only one thing this could be.
This is definitely what sank The Betsy.
NARRATOR: The purposely cut opening is a scuttle hole that allowed water
to flood the hull.
But why would General Cornwallis deliberately sink his own valuable supply ship?
John uncovers an 18th century painting of the siege of Yorktown that
he believes holds vital clues.
JOHN: Washington and his generals by Charles Wilson Peel.
You can see the generals lined up here but look how much larger the painting
is an how much more it takes in,
and some of the detail is, is, much more interesting.
Over here we have the edge of the York river and Yorktown shoreline and
if we look closely what do we see?
We see masts and yards of sunken ships.
NARRATOR: Comparing the setting of the painting with a map of the York river
reveals a stunning correlation.
JOHN: This is a whole row of ships right along the beach just as we found
in our archaeological evidence and very likely one of these is The Betsy.
NARRATOR: But it's seeing her masts jutting out of the water with the other ships
that is a real revelation for John.
JOHN: The ship's masts and the yards clearly present
a solid barrier that would prevent these French ships
out in the distance from launching troops and small boats and making
attack on the shoreward side of Cornwallis's position.
That really brings out why it was there,
how effective the sinking line was against
the French amphibious assault.
NARRATOR: The glorious fighting ships of the Royal Navy reduced
to the role of a sunken barricade like so much scrap.
JOHN: Now the hole that we found in Betsy, that hole makes perfect sense.
Scuttle the ship blockade the French, protect your position.
NARRATOR: The wreck of Betsy provides the final chapter
for the graveyard of British wrecks,
the Royal Navy once so dominant in these waters,
is now simply cannon fodder
in General Cornwallis's desperate last stand.
JOHN: It's a whole evolving picture of increasing desperation,
increasing loss of resources until the final end.
NARRATOR: After two weeks under siege and with no way to escape by sea,
Cornwallis runs desperately low on food and ammunition.
On October 19th 1781, he surrenders.
JAMES: Everything finally works for Washington just the way he hopes it will.
British troops come out,
they play, "The World turned Upside Down"
because that's exactly what it was for them.
NARRATOR: Yorktown proves to be a decisive victory for the patriots.
Two years later in 1783 the signing of a peace treaty ends the war.
America has won her independence,
and the United States is born.
A nation forged by the sacrifice of the ships and
men revealed in the incredible evidence
deep beneath her now peaceful waters.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.