Toll for the brave!
The brave! that are no more!
All sunk beneath the wave,
Fast by their native shore!
So begins William Cowper’s poem commemorating sinking of one of Georgian England’s most powerful warships. At the time of her launch from Woolwich Dockyard on 18th February 1756, the Royal George was the largest warship in the world, weighing more than 2,000 tons. Named after then serving monarch George II, she had been built to new dimensions laid down by the 1745 Establishment for First Raters, with an armament of 100 cannon, including 28 of the heaviest 42-pounders. On the morning of 29th August 1782, in the midst of England’s war with France and Spain, as well as the War of American Independence, the Royal George and her crew foundered ‘fast by their native shore’; only a mile from Spithead.
Eight hundred of the brave,
Whose courage well was tried,
Had made the vessel heel
And laid her on her side:
The second verse estimates the number on board at the time of her sinking at 800. In fact, the true figure may been closer to 1,200. In addition to crewmen, there were also workmen and traders aboard, as well as many of the sailors’ relatives. One of the reasons for the high number aboard was to avoid desertion by allowing shore leave; in the era of press-ganging, it was likely that if the ship’s crew were allowed to go ashore, many would choose not to return.
Undoubtedly, some of the crew were veterans whose ‘courage’ had been ‘tried’ in battle. Two years earlier the Royal George had taken part in the Battle of Cape St Vincent. This famous ‘moonlight’ engagement between ships under the command of Admiral Rodney and a Spanish fleet had resulted in the capture or destruction of six enemy ships. The Royal George had not suffered any casualties during the engagement, indicating she’d played only a peripheral role. The Royal George had also taken part in the preceding Attack on the Caracas Convoy, in which more than 20 Spanish warships and merchantmen had been captured. Both battles had enabled Rodney to fulfill Admiralty orders to resupply the besieged British garrison on Gibraltar.
Captain Martin Waghorn, the Royal George’s skipper at the time of her loss, had begun his naval career 30 years earlier. However, he had limited fighting experience, having been on half-pay between 1764 and 1780, at which point he’d returned to full service aboard HMS Victory.
The ship’s company ‘had made the vessel heel’ by a simple rearrangement of the ship’s cannon. The starboard guns were rolled to the ship’s centre-line creating the necessary heel to port, thus enabling shipwrights to reach a salt-water cistern pipe on the starboard side of the hull which required maintenance. The advantage of this so-called ‘parliament heel’ was that it enabled the repairs to be made to a ship without the necessary delay of having it placed in dry-dock. At the time of her sinking, the Royal George formed part of a huge relief fleet under the command of Admiral Howe charged with resupplying Gibraltar, which had been under siege from Spanish troops since 1779.
A land-breeze shook the shrouds,
And she was overset;
Down went the Royal George,
With all her crew complete.
Cowper points to the fatal impact of ‘a land-breeze’. However, he ignores several other crucial factors leading to the Royal George being ‘overset’. Firstly, the ship was being heeled on a flood tide, which for an anchored vessel meant that water would have begun to lap over any opened lower gun-ports. Secondly, while the shipwrights were at work on the starboard side, the regular crew continued to take on supplies from the conveniently lowered port side. This included a large consignment of rum barrels being unloaded from an adjacent lighter. This extra weight together with possibly inappropriate storage of the goods caused the hull to begin to fill with water.
At this point the disaster could still have been avoided through prompt human action. A ship’s carpenter working below was supposedly the first to sense the danger. Unfortunately, the officer he chose to warn dismissed his fears with a typical blue-blooded disdain for the lower orders of seamen. That officer, Lieutenant Hollingberry, was evidently appealed to a second time by the same man but once again he curtly ignored his pleas to right the ship. Thus, ‘down went the Royal George’ more through human incompetence than Nature’s inclemency.
Cowper was also incorrect in claiming that she sank ‘with all her crew complete’. Lieutenant Hollingbury and Captain Waghorn were among the 255 to survive the sinking, primarily on account of being on deck at the time the ship foundered. However, nearly all of those crowded below decks perished. Many heads were observed cramming the gun-ports as the ship foundered. In fact, the death toll would likely have been even higher had the ship’s masts and spars not reportedly tangled with the supply-barge alongside, giving those above deck vital seconds to get clear of the rapidly submerging vessel. Rescue boats launched from other warships moored nearby also helped save many who would otherwise have drowned.
Toll for the brave!
Brave Kempenfelt is gone;
His last sea-fight is fought;
His work of glory done.
Cowper’s fourth verse contains the first of three references to the Royal George’s commanding officer, who but for his untimely demise might be bettered remembered today. Rear-admiral Richard Kempenfelt had been born in England in 1718 to a Swedish father. One of his early military experiences as a young lieutenant had been during the so-called War of Jenkin’s Ear, in which he’d taken part in a successful naval assault on the Spanish-held Panamanian port of Portobello. He’d fought in Vice-Admiral George Pocock’s actions with the French off Cuddalore and Negapatam in 1758 during the Seven Year’s War.
Promoted to rear-admiral in 1780, Kempenfelt’s greatest ‘sea-fight’ had taken place the following year at the Second Battle of Ushant. Commanding a force of 13 ships-of-the-line from the deck of HMS Victory, Kempenfelt had contrived to capture 15 French transports carrying more than 1,000 soldiers from under the sails of 19 enemy warships, greatly impeding planned French operations in the West Indies.
In addition to his proven fighting qualities, Kempenfelt was regarded as one of ‘the brains of the [Royal] Navy’, having made important contributions to improving its ‘steadfast fighting laws’, ship-building methods, and flag signalling. To ordinary sailors he was known affectionately as ‘Kempy’.[1]
It was not in the battle;
No tempest gave the shock;
She sprang no fatal leak;
She ran upon no rock:
Cowper’s next verse reminds us of the far more common causes of an 18th century warship’s sinking. Only three weeks after the loss of the Royal George, an Atlantic hurricane would decimate a British fleet returning with French prizes from the Battle of the Saintes, which had been fought the previous April. This ‘shocking tempest’ sank a dozen or more merchant vessels and warships, including the 74-gun HMS Ramillies, and resulted in the deaths of more than 3,500 sailors.
The Royal George ‘ran upon no rock’ though many of her predecessors had. Perhaps the most egregious example of this was the four ships that had been wrecked together off the Scilly Isles in 1707. This incident had drowned upwards of 1,400 seaman, among them Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudesley Shovell. Although improvements in navigation and nautical charts had been made since that time, British warships continued to fall foul of uncharted reefs and submerged rocks.
All too often such ships would be lost due to a combination of the above hostile natural elements; being driven ashore during gales, or being caught in a storm after sustaining battle damage.
[1] Kempenfelt’s respected name would be invoked during the Spithead Mutiny in 1797. ‘In the spirit of Kempenfelt’ was said to be the mutineers’ plea.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 