The Young Teazer

"The Young Teazer was a specially-built privateer, hailing from New York; schooner-rigged, sharp, and seaworthy; black-hulled, coppered43 to the bends to keep her clean of sea-growths and barnacles and make her slip through the water. She had a carved alligator, with gaping jaws, for a figurehead. She was large, for her class -- 124 tons measurement, and about seventy-five feet in length; but she was so fine lined that her crew could drive her at a rate of five knots in smooth water, when there was no wind, with her sixteen long sweeps. It was this uncanny ability to move about while other vessels stood stock still or drifted astern in the calms which accounted for her success."44 On June 27th, 1813, the Sir John Sherbrooke, a privateer which we dealt with earlier, was pursuing the Young Teazer not far from the mouth of Halifax Harbour. During the chase, the Teazer had the misfortune to fall in with a British naval ship and was chased into Mahone Bay. The British warship was the 74-gun La Hogue. The wind dropped and the Teazer was obliged to get out her sweeps. La Hogue got her small boats over her sides and they pulled her, in shifts, ever closer to the Teazer. There then occurred a violent explosion which blew the Young Teazer out of the water. Of her thirty-six crew, only seven lived.45 It seems that one of the crew thought that instant death was better than being captured by the British. He threw a burning coal into the powder magazine.46
"At length the stern settled on the bottom, in water twenty five feet deep, but the alligator jaws still gaped defiantly above the tide."47 The Teazer, though in pieces throughout, can yet be found in the picturesque village of Chester.
"The remains of the Teazer was [were] towed into Chester Bay the next day and beached on what is now Meisner's Island. The hull was sold and was used for the foundation of what is now the Rope Loft Restaurant. Part of her keelson was used to make the wooden cross that can be found in St. Stephen's Church, Chester."