There was derisive laughter in France and bitter sorrow in England. In the French Ministry of Marine, there was more confidence; in the English Admiralty in London, a grimmer determination. At Spithead, where the Fleet lay at anchor, the officers and seamen stood aghast and angry. Weakened gravely by the loss of a sail of the line, when her mates needed her so sorely, they speculated as to the power of the French and Spanish squadrons, pounding heavily at the Rock of Gibraltar. Tighten your belt and say what you will, men of the King’s Navy, 100 good brass guns are sunk in 12 fathoms of water.
As dawn broke on the anchored English Fleet in Spithead on that fateful August day in 1782, there could be heard the shrill pipes of the boatswains and the drum beats of the Royal Marines, rousing all hands and their women from sleep in their canvas hammocks on gun, main, and berth decks. “Show a leg, you seamen; show a leg or a ‘purser’s stocking.’” The women, no less than the seamen and marines in the ships of the Royal Navy, got turned out—life in the ships, never suspended even at night, got under way for a full due at 5:30 in the morning.
Within 48 hours, the women would be put out of the ships, their port privileges having been ended, and the signal “Up anchor” would be flying from the yardarm of the fleet flagship. But meantime, the seamen would be laboring aloft and below decks. Right away, more sea fighting was to be done and the shot rooms and powder magazines must be filled; plenty of good round shot for England’s enemies and black powder in kegs to put authority behind these shots. Strong canvas sails needed bending and new rigging rove and stays freshly tarred down and set up, against the time the enemy might put shot through the shrouds.
Hardtack and salt beef, brined in great barrels, required replenishment and the water barrels in the holds had to be filled—none of this, however, for taking baths —though the fighting might go on for months. Pulling boats, bearing fleet officers, moved hither and yon, propelled by the measured strokes of oaken oars. Soon the seamen’s womenfolk would say their good-bys, while the hard-faced bumboat men and women begged the sailors to pay up for gewgaws they owed for but didn’t need.
On board the Royal George, 100-gun ship of the line, Captain John Waghorn, serving as flagship for old Admiral Kempenfelt, flying his blue flag at the mizzenmast, the boatswains put extra vehemence and some petulance to their “show a leg or a purser’s stocking.” The three-decker was leaking again, this time in a sea water valve, some 3 feet below the starboard water line. This must be raised clear of the water so that the shipwrights could get at the leak and patch it. To do this, the Royal George must be heeled down on the port side.
“Clear the decks,” sang out the boatswains. “Stand by to run your port guns all the way out. Haul starboard guns in to the fore-and-aft line.” When the heavy weights of guns had thus been moved, the port side would go down in the water and the starboard side rise up.
“Careen ship,” the order had come from the poop to the forecastle. “Put her on a parliament heel. Shipwrights stand by to go over the side.”
Leaking again was the Royal George and worried looks on the faces of the women and children. Something told them that all was not well and they asked questions. To these, the seamen lied, “She ain’t rotten and she ain’t going to sink.” To themselves, they prayed that the latter might be a true prophecy. What did it matter, they growled, that a ship of the Royal Navy was weak from having decayed ribs and planking? Couldn’t her brass guns still fire round shot at the enemy? The leaks could be patched again—they hadn’t yet got so bad as to wet the powder in her magazines. Until then . . .
From the Admiralty in London had come the urgent order to the Fleet under the command of Admiral Lord Howe to “Proceed with all dispatch to the relief of Gibraltar.” Within two days, if all went well, they would be making sail, the Royal George and her mates in the prescribed order of sailing.
Anchored near the Royal George in Spit- head where The Solent flows east and west into the North Sea were the Magnamine, flagship of Admiral Lord Howe, the illustrious Victory, the Vanguard, Majestic, Betterophon, and Audacious, all being urgently made ready for the sea fighting at the Straits. Their crews, having breakfasted, took scant notice as the Royal George, her poop and forecastle unusually high above water, was careened down to port. Slowly she was heeled, “handsomely,” as her carpenter had requested the officer of the watch to shift the weights of guns athwartship. After all, it was a routine performance in the days of many ships and few dry docks where vessels could be repaired below the water line.
Alongside had come the harbor barge Lark, bearing casks of grog for officers and crew. Those not engaged in slinging the casks and hoisting them eagerly on board with tackle rigged to the main yard, for stowing in the spirit room, congregated to port, thus increasing the heel. Little they suspected then that none would ever “splice the main brace” with this rum.
Presently the lowered port side alarmed the carpenter and the experienced seamen. Before the load of rum heeled the vessel farther, the sills of the lowered gun ports had been level with the water, now becoming choppier from the rising westerly wind. Sea water, a little at first, poured in through the open ports and, running down to the holds, drove out the rats. “She can’t bear it,” the carpenter reported to the officer of the watch, known to the crew as “Jib and Foresail Jack.” “Request that the vessel be righted.”
But then it was too late. The Royal George could not bear it, as the carpenter had warned. His words, the last he was ever to speak, were soon followed by excited calls for the Royal Marine drummer. “Beat to quarters—right the ship,” went the word. Even as they called, the drummer frantically strove to escape through the starboard ports, now ingloriously jammed by seamen and women, all trapped like the rats in the holds.
In one grave hard by the sea, an admiral; in another near by, a powder boy. Between them a topman, locked in last embrace with a woman; by their sides an anchorman, closely clasping a child. A black marble monument stands over all, upwards of 900 of England’s best naval officers and men and their womenfolk. Inscribed on the marble in letters of gold are these words:
On August 29th, 1782, H.M.S. Royal George, 100 guns, being on the heel, overset and sunk. Nine hundred on board were instantly launched into eternity. Among these was Admiral Kempenfelt, Royal Navy, brave and experienced. Nine days afterwards, many bodies of the unfortunates floated on shore, 35 of whom were buried in one grave near this monument which is erected by the parish of Portsea, England, as a grateful tribute to the memory of a great commander and fellow sufferers.
“Tis not this stone regretted chief thy name
Thy worth and merit shall extend thy fame
Brilliant achievements have thy name imprest
In lasting characters on Albion’s breast.”
Thus a memorial to the officers and men of the Royal George, tear stained it was in the long ago from the weeping of England’s humble seafaring folk.
Nothing quite so gruesome in the history of the Royal Navy has ever before or since been witnessed on the waters of Spit- head, scene of royal naval reviews and mighty fleet concentrations, as the sunken hulk of the once powerful sailing ship of the line Royal George gave up her seamen and their women. Rising to the surface, they drifted, indifferent to high rank, under the gangway of Admiral Lord Howe, Admiral of the Blue, and fouled the anchor cables of his ships of the line and the frigates. The bumboatmen, states Marryat, waxed rich from the silver buckles, watches, and golden guineas they stripped from the floating bodies, before towing them ashore. The crew had just been paid, as their ship was about to “sail foreign.”
On the beach at Portsea, the victims came to rest, excepting those, who, caught in the swift tidal currents of The Solent, were swept out into the North Sea, and were shrouded tenderly in canvas from the Fleet. Even as the funeral dirges echoed along the shore, the survivors told incredulous listeners how the terrible disaster had happened.
Their ship had not sunk like a rock from being capsized, they murmured bitterly. It was true that the Royal George had been heeled down; that was nothing new, she was often in need of this to have her leaky bottom patched. This was rotten and decayed, they said, the ribs of her and the planking. These had become too weak to bear the extra weights of guns that had to be moved over to one side to heel her down. Under the added strain, they let go. Then there was nothing to stop the North Sea from rushing in and filling the ship. All this, they asserted, was known to the Admiralty and to the Royal Dockyard people at Plymouth.
Between times, the survivors told of the death struggle of the Royal George, her officers, seamen, Royal Marines, the women and children. Only one woman was rescued, it was said, and she only because she had caught, more than half drowned, in the mizzen top rigging, projecting a few feet above the water. From there, the captain of a frigate, rowing to the rescue in his gig, took her into his boat. One boy was saved. In the swirling waters, he seized the wool on a sheep, swimming for dear life, and held on until a gentleman picked him up. The lad, knowing no name but Jack, was given a home by a surviving shipmate who christened him Jack Lamb. Captain Waghorn, unable to swim, was held up by one of his seamen. Old Admiral Kempenfelt drowned in his cabin.
The survivors told of conditions in their ship that convinced listeners that the catastrophe was caused by grave weakness in her under body. Her ribs had lost their original strength—wood becomes soft from old age. Hadn’t they waded in her bilges and storerooms in water that leaked in through seams in her sides, enlarged like decayed teeth? On this account, hadn’t the Admiralty ordered her to be dry-docked for repairs at Plymouth that spring and as quickly directed that she be rushed out, almost as weak as before, to rejoin Admiral Lord Howe? “The Fleet needs the Royal George for the attack and the relief of Gibraltar,” it was said, “and she’s strong enough to last out the summer.”
It was a sure enough sign of weakness that the Royal George leaked freely, even when at anchor; almost conclusive proof that the disintegration of her strength-giving timbers had become dangerous. Strong hulled ships might leak, when sailing, from the strains induced by pressures transmitted through her masts while supporting a vast spread of canvas, but the leaks closed up when sail was furled and the anchor was down.
The rotted condition of the Royal George was as commonly known in Lord Howe’s Fleet as it was to the people in the Royal Dockyard in Plymouth where it was said that a man could bury a foot of marlinespike in her under-body planking, so spongy had become the water-soaked oak.
It may well be, as the dockyard people had calculated and as the Admiralty had accepted, that the Royal George might have lasted out the summer in action against the enemy, but the facts, as established by a naval court-martial, proved that the cause of her sinking was rotten ribs and planks. These, having little strength, let go and opened her to the sea. The findings of the court, however, were kept an Admiralty secret for 50 years.
This being the case, imagine the utter consternation in the Fleet and in the naval settlements along the Spithead shores on the day following the mass drowning when the London newspapers arrived. Under a broad black line, the following, obtained at the Admiralty, told of the disaster:
London, 29 August, 1782. Yesterday, an express, forwarded by Admiral Lord Howe from the Fleet at Spithead arrived at the Admiralty informing the Board of the melancholy disaster to H.M.S. Royal George with most of her crew which was lost while at anchor at Spithead the preceding day at 10:30 a.m. This unfortunate accident happened when the ship was hove upon a careen in order to have a water-pipe in her cistern repaired, at which juncture, a strong squall from the north northwest came on and her keel lying across the tide current, she suddenly fell on her beam ends and before they could right ship, she filled and sank, her topmasts only at the water’s edge. At the time of the calamitous event, 848 officers and seamen were on board. Of these, only 331 were picked up by boats of the fleet. There were upwards of 200 women and children on board. The Royal George was just 27 years old at the time she was lost, having been launched at Woolwich in 1755. She was built in four years, her keel having been laid in 1751. The naval people say she can be weighed up if the weather proves favorable in the course of a month.
The Royal George could not be weighed up in a month or ever. If this had been possible, gaping holes in her bottom, where strong timbers should have been, would have convinced the Admiralty that certain officials had taken grave risks with one of His Majesty’s naval ships and the lives of her officers and crew.
But rotted timbers and the sight of gaping holes were not needed in evidence at the naval court-martial, composed of admirals in the Fleet, and including the redoubtable Sir John Jervis, to warrant a verdict that the Royal George’s commander, Captain John Waghorn, his officers, and crew were honorably acquitted of all blame for the sinking of the ship and the drowning of 800 men and women on board. Convening on board H.M.S. Warspite 12 days after the catastrophe, the court heard Vice Admiral Millbanke, one of its members, testify as follows:
I do not recall that there was sound timber in the Royal George when she was put in dry dock at Plymouth. I gave her very constant attention and saw her bottom opened up and found her very bad. At this time, I had the honour to command at Plymouth and I asked several of the dock people what they intended to do with her and they said they should be able to make her last out the summer and she was very bad indeed, so much so that they could scarce find fasteners for the repair work she underwent.
Admiral Sir John Jervis, the record of the court states, confirmed what Vice Admiral Millbanke had related respecting the rottenness of the ship’s timbers.
Accordingly, the court concluded:
The court having heard the narrative of the ship’s captain, John Waghorn, and the evidence adduced, and having maturely and deliberately considered the same, it appears to the court that the Royal George was not overheeled and it also appears that the captain and his officers and crew used every exertion to right the ship as soon as the alarm was given of her settling in the water. The court is of the opinion that, from the short space of time between the alarm being given, and the sinking of the ship, that some material part of the ship gave way which can be accounted for by the general state of decay, as appears on the minutes. The court doth therefore adjudge that the captain, officers, and ship’s company be acquitted of all blame and they are hereby acquitted accordingly.
If this solemn verdict had not been kept an Admiralty secret until, as one contemporary historian expressed it, “all persons responsible for the disaster had long since stood before the Bar of Final Judgement,” it is certain that England’s poet, William Cowper, would not have written in the way he did the immortal lines, “The Loss of the Royal George.”
Cowper, it was freely alleged, was taken in by the Admiralty’s explanation that the ship had capsized and sunk through being overheeled negligently by her crew, and that while overheeled, she was struck by a wind squall. In poetical language, Cowper expressed it, “A land breeze shook her shrouds and she was overset.” England, then unaware of the truth, was divided in its judgment—either Cowper was innocent, due to ignorance of the naval mechanics of a “parliament heel,” or he was in sympathy with those in high places who deemed it best for their own naval reputations to let bygones be bygones. In the beginning, a large part of the English public was lulled into uncritical silence by Cowper’s pitying lines, beginning,
Toll for the brave,
The brave who are no more,
All sunk beneath the wave,
Fast by their native shore;
Eight hundred of the brave,
Whose courage well was tried
Had made the vessel heel
And laid her on her side.
A land breeze shook her shrouds,
And she was overset,
Down went the Royal George,
With all her crew complete.
Toward the end of Cowper’s lines, the hand of the Admiralty is upheld by the plea,
Weigh the vessel up,
Once dreaded by her foes,
And mingle with our cup
The tear that England owes.
Her timbers yet are sound,
And she may float again,
Full charged with England’s thunder,
And plough the distant main.
The gentle Cowper, often unstable emotionally, may have really believed that the Royal George could be “weighed up” and that “her timbers yet are sound,” but the Royal Navy afloat knew that to raise her was an impossibility and that, moreover, her structure having been condemned by an admiral of the Fleet, she was not worth being weighed up. In the end, it was necessary to dispose of the hulk, which was not accomplished until more than half a century later by gunpowder explosions, the task being carried on through five summers.
Whatever may have been Cowper’s intent and motive when he wrote the poem, the effect of it was to give long life to bitter memories that found public expression intermittently for the next 131 years. Relatives of the victims and the generations that came after, smarting to the quick that a poet’s words had deceived England into the belief that those on board the Royal George had drowned because of the negligence and ignorance of her officers and crew, never ceased to plead that the full truth be officially proclaimed. This satisfaction was denied them for half a century, and in the meantime uncounted numbers of English school children had learned to recite the “Loss of the Royal George,” including the lines that rankled most, “A land breeze shook her shrouds, and she was overset,” and “Her timbers yet are sound.” The rottenness of those timbers, as adjudged by the court, never caught up with the poetical fiction, as sung by the poet.
Even as the stonecutters chiseled out the black marble monument to the memory of the victims, Cowper was being roundly keelhauled verbally in the pubs of Portsea, Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Woolwich where men of the Royal Navy gathered and alternately cursed and wept at each retelling of the story of the sinking of the Royal George. “‘Weigh her up’”, they sneered, “‘her timbers yet are sound.’ Just like a bloomin’ poet. ’Ow would Bill Cowper go abaht it to weigh up a ship of the line, ’aving a hundred guns, and sunk in haeighty feet of water. Arsk ’im to write another poem and tell us ’ow.”
If Kipling, instead of Cowper, had made a poem of the sinking, the pubs in England’s naval seaports would not have heard the final judgment of the crews as they drifted back on board ship, “May the ’Ouse of Lords forgive Bill Cowper.”
The Royal George, like the Hesperus, would never have been heard of if she had not been wrecked. Her sinking, it is only fair to believe, profoundly moved Cowper and, like Longfellow, he told the story as he saw it. He expressed England’s grief, made the more poignant from the tragedy taking place on her naval doorstep and intensified by the drowning of Admiral Richard Kempenfelt in the ship’s cabin. “Toll for the brave,” spoke Cowper, “Brave Kempenfelt is gone.”
Kempenfelt, though of Swedish blood, was beloved and admired by all England. Only the year before, he had beaten a French fleet off Ushant, when in command of an inferior squadron of English vessels. Moreover, he was known to be a naval strategist, admired by Nelson who was reported to be at his best when Kempenfelt stood on the quarter-deck by the great Admiral’s side. Then, too, he had just reorganized and made more efficient the signaling system in the English Fleet.
As England saw it, the pity of Kempenfelt’s death was that the end came, not while at sea in battle with the enemy, but in port, his flagship at anchor, while “His fingers held the pen.” Cowper expresses it as England felt:
His sword was in its sheath,
His fingers held the pen,
When Kempenfelt went down,
With twice four hundred men.
Brave Kempenfelt is gone,
His last sea fight is fought,
His work of glory done . . .
It was not in the battle,
No tempest gave the shock,
She sprang no fatal leak,
She ran upon no rock.
Toll for the brave,
But Kempenfelt is gone.
And he and his eight hundred
Shall plough the wave no more.
Even today, 155 years after the sinking, walking sticks and similar souvenirs made from the original wood of the Royal George can be found in England. One of her brass guns stands in the public garden near the naval dockyard in Portsmouth.
Before saying farewell to the Royal George and her valiant officers and crew, let us go back for a brief visit to the church yard in Portsea where her buried victims have long since turned to dust. On that black marble monument can be read:
Reader, with solemn thought survey this grave and reflect on the untimely death of thy fellow mortals; and whilst as a man, as a Briton, and as a patriot, thou readst the melancholy narrative, drop a tear for thy country’s sake.
And read, too, this tribute to a gallant English admiral:
Kempenfelt’s merits as a naval officer were heightened by his deserts as a Christian, nor was he less regarded for his benevolence than esteemed for that kind of good breeding by which a man knows how to adapt himself to the three degrees of character in life, viz.: his superiors, his equals, and those who are beneath him.
Gone might be the Royal George and dead were Kempenfelt and young Lieutenant Waghorn, and the topmen, the waisters, the anchormen, and the holders in her crew. But, the Royal Fleet must sail and the Royal George must be in the order of sailing. Accordingly, one finds in the list of ships in the command of Admiral Lord Howe shortly afterward: ships of the line—Vanguard, Warspite, Majestic, Audacious, Barfleur, Victory, Royal George.