Here’s the latest breaking news from the War of 1812

ANNAPOLIS, MD. — Our live, up-to-the-century, Action News coverage of the War of 1812 continues.

We join the belligerents just before Upper and Lower Canada Day, 1813 and find Britons, militiamen, Loyalists, Frenchmen and Indians preparing to defend against a daring, all-out, top secret, midnight maritime Yankee assault on Britain’s inland armada at its home port of Kingston, in the province of not-yet-called-Ontario.

A year into the conflict, American hunger for the conquest of British North America remains ravenous, as predicted by Virginia Congressman John Randolph, the opium addict and descendent of Pocahontas who observed that “Gentlemen from the North have been taken up to some high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of the earth; and Canada seems tempting in their sight.”

Those Gentlemen may have been right. In the words of Major General Sir Isaac Brock, who at this point in the war is dead, “a large part” of the Upper Canadian population “are either indifferent to what is passing, or so completely American as to rejoice in the prospects of a change of governments.”

And even Commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo, who is alive in June 1813 and commanding the British fleet at Kingston, agrees that “If the Americans are determined to attack Canada, it would be in vain the General should flatter himself with the hopes of making an effectual defence of the open Country, unless powerfully assisted by Home.”

Home, however, being busy with Napoleon Bonaparte, couldn’t care less.

It has been two months since American raiders came ashore at Hogtown and incinerated the public buildings. However, as Captain Walter P. Rybka will write, delicately, in the Spring 2012 issue of Sea History, “The American success was marred by some indiscipline and looting.”

Now, at American headquarters in Sackets Harbor, New York, just 30 miles south of Kingston, Commodore Isaac Chauncey is ready for another sortie, but Chauncey’s brain trust, as we shall see, is not.

Chauncey’s second-incommand, Edward Trenchard, cool-headed veteran of the bombardment of Tripoli during America’s very first war on Islam, nine years earlier, has been declared insane with “lake fever” and strapped into a straitjacket.

And that’s not all: an American historian named Charles Brodine will report at a bicentennial academic conference entitled “From Enemies to Allies,” here at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, two centuries from now, that “most of Chauncey’s junior officers were drunks.”

The daring, all-out, top secret, midnight maritime Yankee assault on Kingston never happens. Instead, Chauncey harasses British fortifications on the Niagara River, creeps up on Burlington, Ont., and then retreats because he is afraid his fleet will run aground. Yeo, meantime, strikes at Sackets Harbor and makes off with 500 barrels of flour and pork.

Still to come on Action News in the summer and autumn of 1813: The naval engagement on Lake Ontario in which two American schooners capsize in a rainstorm in the middle of the night while the captains of the U.S. galleons Growler and Julia steer in the wrong direction and get captured; The shocking American annihilation of the British fleet on Lake Erie, and … The Battle of Crysler’s Farm, in which American land forces — spirited across the St. Lawrence River under the command of General James Wilkinson, who is confined to his barge during the skirmish by “lake fever” and stoned on laudanum — is repelled by a much smaller force of Britons, Indians and Canadians.

For the next 200 years, historians north of the St. Lawrence will dine out on Crysler’s Farm as “the battle that forged a nation.” But then they will come to that powwow in Annapolis in 2013 and learn from Andrew Lambert, professor of Naval History at King’s College London, that “Canadians are missing the point.”

“Canada exists,” according to Dr. Lambert, “because, after the American Civil War, the balance of power in North America had shifted and Britain thought it would be a good idea to give Canada responsibility for the defence of its own land. Britain was not an empire of the land; it was an empire of the sea. At that point, Canada wasn’t worth the cost of having to defeat the Americans.”

In fact, Prof. Lambert explains (with the same imperious certitude that pissed off the Americans so much that they started the war in the first place), the Battle of Borodino over Labour Day weekend of 1812, just west of Moscow, was far more important to Canada’s creation than anything that ever happened on this side of the Atlantic.

At Borodino, the Czarist and Napoleonic armies inflicted more casualties on each other in a few hours than all the British, American, Canadian, and First Nations fighters put together suffered during the entire three-year War of 1812. And the overextended French legions reached the breaking point that would lead to Waterloo and to Britain’s ability to shift its attention, finally, to that troublesome little skirmish in the North American wilderness.

Canada’s national anthem, then, should be Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Cue the cannon and the church bells, and remember: you saw it first right here, on Action News.