Five notable wrecks lie in the Brockville area of the St. Lawrence River. The Muscallonge, a large wooden tugboat built in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1896, was towing the barge Bruce Hudson with the safety tug Ajax on August 15, 1936, when fire broke out in its boiler room near Maitland, east of Brockville. After the barge was cut loose, the burning tug headed for shore while Ajax took the crew aboard, and at 5:30 am an explosion tore the hull apart and the vessel settled in twenty-seven meters of water. The Robert Gaskin, built in Kingston, Ontario, in 1863 by Charles W. Jenkins, had been converted from a double-masted sailing vessel into a cargo barge and in 1889 was working to raise the sunken railway ferry William Armstrong when a pontoon broke free, struck the Gaskin near the bow, and sank it; after unsuccessful salvage efforts, it was abandoned in twenty meters of water off shore. The J. B. King, a forty-three meter wooden drill barge owned by John P. Porter and Sons of St. Catherines, Ontario, was Canada’s biggest drilling barge in 1930 and was deepening the Brockville Narrows when lightning struck during a thunderstorm on June 26, 1930, causing an explosion; the U.S. Revenue cutter Succor recovered only ten of the eleven survivors from a total of forty-three people aboard. The Lillie Parsons, a Great Lakes centerboard schooner launched in Tonawanda, New York, on September 14, 1868, sank off Sparrow Island on August 5, 1877, after a squall shifted its cargo on a voyage to Brockville and drove it onto a rock. The Henry C. Daryaw, a steel-hulled freighter built in France in 1919, struck a shoal near Long Beach west of Brockville on November 21, 1941, and despite salvage attempts slipped and sank to the bottom. These wrecks remain protected marine archaeological sites under the Ontario Heritage Act, and removing or altering artifacts is illegal.