Thomas Kemp built her in Baltimore in 1811 as a pilot schooner, a fast and weatherly type that would later evolve into the famous Baltimore Clipper. Her seizure illustrates the strange legal twilight that preceded the War of 1812. Britain's 1807 Orders in Council restricted neutral trade with Napoleonic France, and American merchants considered the restrictions illegitimate. The Royal Navy enforced them anyway, often retroactively. Arrow's hold full of French luxuries was textbook contraband under London's reading of the law, and textbook free trade under Washington's. The frigate Andromache settled the disagreement in the only language that mattered at sea: a boarding party and a prize crew sent to Plymouth. By the time the schooner reached an English port, the political ground beneath her had already shifted again.

Refitted as HMS Whiting, the schooner began a busy career chasing American privateers and recapturing British prizes. In April 1813 she joined Scylla in a 100-mile chase that ended with the capture of the American 8-gun brig Fox, which threw two guns overboard trying to outrun her former countrymen. That July, Whiting recaptured the ship Friends. In October she helped take back the Colin, then the Merryweather, then several other vessels seized by the American privateer True Blooded Yankee. By August 1814 she was under Lieutenant John Little, and by January 1815 she was one of ten British vessels at the Battle of Fort Peter on the Georgia coast, an attack launched after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed but before the US Senate had ratified it. Peace, like war, travelled at the speed of sail.

In 1816 the Admiralty sent Whiting around Land's End to hunt smugglers in the Irish Sea, a duty grimly appropriate for a vessel born as a fast trader. On 15 September a gale chased Lieutenant John Jackson into Padstow harbour on Cornwall's north coast. As he came around Stepper Point the wind died, the tide began to ebb, and the schooner drifted onto the Doom Bar, a notorious shifting sandbank that had wrecked vessels for centuries. When the tide came back in, water came with it. Whiting flooded, settled, and could not be refloated. She was eventually sold for scrap. Eleven years later, when the Navy was asked to move the wreck, the Admiralty declined to take any further interest in her.

In May 2010, ProMare and the Nautical Archaeology Society returned to look for her, helped by pupils from Padstow Primary School. A geophysical survey turned up several promising targets, and divers investigated. One sits just 25 metres from where Whiting is calculated to have settled. But the Doom Bar is restless. Sand drifts over everything, covering the site so completely that nothing can yet be confirmed. The schooner that began life in a Baltimore yard, was seized off the French coast, served the Royal Navy on three coasts, and ended on a Cornish sandbar, remains there still, somewhere under the moving sand, waiting to be found.