The red ensign flutters upside down from the stern of the British ship-of-the-line HMS Magnificent, signalling her distress as she founders off the Brittany coast in 1804. The 74-gun ‘3rd rater’ had been part of the British blockade of the French fleet at Brest. Her loss exemplifies not only the risk of Atlantic blockade duty in the Nelsonian era but also the astonishing cost inflicted on the Royal Navy in terms of men and ships by hostile natural elements.
A design originating in the French navy, the 74-gun ship-of-the-line was classed in the Royal Navy as a 3rd rate ship, but regarded as having a good balance between firepower and manoeuvrability. Magnificent had been ordered in 1761 during the height of the Seven Years War, following a design by Sir Thomas Slade, the Navy’s chief architect.[1] Commissioned in 1778, she had served in Admiral Rodney’s Caribbean squadron during the American War of Independence. A year before Trafalgar, Magnificent was one of the Royal Navy’s 80 ships-of-the-line tasked with bottling up superior numbers of French and Spanish battleships in their Atlantic and Mediterranean ports.
British blockade tactics had begun as far back as 1793 to counter the First Coalition arising after the French Revolution. During the years of the Revolutionary Wars, the British scored a succession of stunning victories in ship duels as well as fleet actions. These successes are illustrated by the fact that between 1793 and 1812, the British destroyed or captured an estimated 377 French warships while losing less than a dozen of their own to French actions. And yet, over the same period the Royal Navy lost hundreds of ships to non-combat causes. For example, three Artois Class frigates alone were wrecked off the Brittany coast between 1797 and 1799, while HMS Marlborough, a sister of the Magnificent, had been wrecked on Belle-Île during a storm in 1800. Another 3rd rate, HMS Repulse, was lost off the Glenan Islands, between Brest and St. Nazaire, the same year.
William Henry Jervis, the captain of the Magnificent, was the nephew of then Admiral of the Fleet John Jervis. On 25th March, after an aborted attempt to engage enemy vessels sheltering in the Bay of Conquet in worsening weather, Jervis found his ship was unable to clear the nearby headland. Consequently, Magnificent hit an uncharted spur close to the Pierre Noir rocks and began taking on water. The captain ensured a disciplined evacuation of his doomed ship starting with sick and invalid seamen and terminating with its officers and marines. Fortunately, as can be seen in the painting, there were many boats on hand launched from other vessels of the blockade fleet to help rescue the crew. As a result, almost all of the 600 men aboard were saved; quite an achievement if the sea conditions in the painting are to be believed. However, 86 of those rescued had the misfortune to run ashore on the French coast, where they were taken into lengthy captivity as prisoners of war.
Magnificent was one among at least 20 Royal Navy ships that came to grief around the world during 1804, ranging from 12-gun brigs all the way up to 74s. Among the most notable losses was HMS York; a 64-gun third-rater believed to have struck the notorious Bell Rock off Arbroath at the turn of the year. The disappearance of this ship with all hands is said to have prompted the building of its famous lighthouse. April saw the loss of the 4th rate HMS Hindostan in the Mediterranean on route to join Nelson’s blockading fleet at Toulon. Her destruction by fire off the coast of Catalunya was attributed by Nelson to the effects of a gale and ‘wet getting down which causes things to heat’. The Royal Navy store-ship de Ruyter and the sloop Drake were among dozens of maritime victims of the catastrophic Antigua-Charleston Hurricane in September. Two more large British warships were lost in November. The 50-gun HMS Romney ran aground while on blockade duty off the Dutch coast. HMS Venerable, a 74 which had served as Admiral Duncan’s flagship against the Dutch at Camperdown in 1797, sank after striking rocks off Roundham Head in Torbay while trying to put to sea in a gale.
According to naval historians, out of 317 Royal Navy warship losses recorded between the years 1803-15, 223 were judged to be accidental; ships that had been wrecked on uncharted rocks, foundered in heavy seas, or grounded on fatal shoals. Of the thirteen ships-of-the-line (3rd rate and above) lost during this period, eight were to such causes. The destruction of three of these occurred simultaneously in December of 1811 during a great gale that blew across the Baltic and North Sea. The Royal Navy was at the time attempting to escort a large convoy of merchant ships from Denmark to Britain through an area prone to attacks by Danish and Norwegian privateers. Those lost to the elements were the 98-gun HMS St. George and the 74-gun HMS Defence, both wrecked on the coast of Jutland on Christmas Eve, and HMS Hero, another 74 wrecked on the Haak Sands at the mouth of the Texel a day later. These three losses alone resulted in the deaths of approximately 2,000 British seamen, including Rear-Admiral Robert Carthew Reynolds.
The Royal Navy continued to lose major units to combinations of weather and navigational errors into the 20th century, most notably the battleship HMS Montagu, wrecked on Lundy Island in 1906, and the armoured cruiser Argyll, which ran aground on the Bell Rock in 1915.
The Loss of the Magnificent was the work of John Christian Schetky (1778-1874). Edinburgh born but of Transylvanian descent, Shetky was left-handed, like one of his chief influences, the Dutch painter William van de Velde. The painting was completed in 1839 when the artist was employed as Assistant Professor of Civil Drawing at Addiscombe College, the Honourable East India Company’s training school for officers. Described by an Addiscombe pupil as ‘a fine breezy old fellow with gaunt frame, stray white hairs, and clothes thrown on him from at least a mile’, Schetky also earned the sobriquet ‘Sepia Jack’. Previously, he’d worked for 25 years as a drawing professor at Portsmouth Naval College. Schetky formed close and enduring ties with the Royal Family, being appointed ‘Marine Painter in Ordinary’ to William VI in 1830, having tutored the young prince in watercolours. He retained this exulted position in the royal household under Queen Victoria. In addition to The Loss of the Magnificent, the artist also depicted the wrecking of the 3rd rate HMS Anson off Cornwall during a gale in 1807. These works illustrate that during the French Revolutionary era, the Royal Navy had as much to fear from the natural elements as from its ‘natural enemy’, the French.
[1] Also the designer of HMS Victory.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 