In August 1813, a violent squall on Lake Ontario upset two American armed schooners, the Hamilton and the Scourge, sending them to the bottom. The ships remained forgotten and undisturbed until 1973 when a sophisticated search program organized through the Office of the Chief Archaeologist of the Royal Ontario Museum, assisted by the Canada Centre for Inland Waters, discovered both ships lying 550 meters apart in 88 meters of water, ten kilometers off St. Catharines, Ontario. Acoustic, photographic and television probes have revealed both ships resting upright with hulls and spars remarkably intact. The basic concept for the recovery, conservation, and display of the ships is to reproduce as closely as possible the lake bottom environment that has served to preserve and stabilize the ships in excellent condition for 168 years. It is proposed to keep and display the vessels in tanks of cold, conditioned, fresh water.