The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). Frederick Whymper
her porthole-sills on the lower side nearly even with the water. “At about 9 o’clock a.m., or rather before,” stated one of the survivors,50 “we had just finished our breakfast, and the last lighter, with rum on board, had come alongside; this vessel was a sloop of about fifty tons, and belonged to three brothers, who used her to carry things on board the men-of-war. She was lashed to the larboard side of the Royal George, and we were piped to clear the lighter and get the rum out of her, and stow it in the hold. … At first, no danger was apprehended from the ship being on one side, although the water kept dashing in at the portholes at every wave; and there being mice in the lower part of the ship, which were disturbed by the water which dashed in, they were hunted in the water by the men, and there had been a rare game going on.” Their play was soon to be rudely stopped. The carpenter, perceiving that the ship was in great danger, went twice on the deck to ask the lieutenant of the watch to order the ship to be righted; the first time the latter barely answered him, and the second replied, savagely, “If you can manage the ship better than I can, you had better take the command.” In a very short time, he began himself to see the danger, and ordered the drummer to beat to right ship. It was too late—the ship was beginning to sink; a sudden breeze springing upheeled her still more; the guns, shot, and heavy articles generally, and a large part of the men on board, fell irresistibly to the lower side; and the water, forcing itself in at every port, weighed the vessel down still more. She fell on her broadside, with her masts nearly flat on the water, and sank to the bottom immediately. “The officers, in their confusion, made no signal of distress, nor, indeed, could any assistance have availed if they had, after her lower-deck ports were in the water, which forced itself in at every port with fearful velocity.” In going down, the main-yard of the Royal George caught the boom of the rum-lighter and sank her, drowning some of those on board.
At this terrible moment there were nearly 1,200 persons51 on board. Deducting the larger proportion of the watch on deck, about 230, who were mostly saved by running up the rigging, and afterwards taken off by the boats sent for their rescue, and, perhaps, seventy others who managed to scramble out of the ports, &c., the whole of the remainder perished. Admiral Kempenfelt, whose flag-ship it was, and who was then writing in his cabin, and had just before been shaved by the barber, went down with her. The first-captain tried to acquaint him that the ship was sinking, but the heeling over of the ship had so jammed the doors of the cabin that they could not be opened. One young man was saved, as the vessel filled, by the force of the water rushing upwards, and sweeping him bodily before it through a hatchway. In a few seconds, he found himself floating on the surface of the sea, where he was, later, picked up by a boat. A little child was almost miraculously preserved by a sheep, which swam some time, and with which he had doubtless been playing on deck. He held by the fleece till rescued by a gentleman in a wherry. His father and mother were both drowned, and the poor little fellow did not even know their names; all that he knew was that his own name was Jack. His preserver provided for him.
THE WRECK OF THE “ROYAL GEORGE.”
One of the survivors,52 who got through a porthole, looked back and saw the opening “as full of heads as it could cram, all trying to get out. I caught,” said he, “hold of the best bower-anchor, which was just above me, to prevent falling back again into the porthole, and seizing hold of a woman who was trying to get out of the same porthole, I dragged her out.” The same writer says that he saw “all the heads drop back again in at the porthole, for the ship had got so much on her larboard side that the starboard portholes were as upright as if the men had tried to get out of the top of a chimney, with nothing for their legs and feet to act upon.” The sinking of the vessel drew him down to the bottom, but he was enabled afterwards to rise to the surface and swim to one of the great blocks of the ship which had floated off. At the time the ship was sinking, an open barrel of tar stood on deck. When he rose, it was floating on the water like fat, and he got into the middle of it, coming out as black as a negro minstrel!
When this man had got on the block he observed the admiral’s baker in the shrouds of the mizentop-mast, which were above water not far off; and directly after, the poor woman whom he had pulled out of the porthole came rolling by. He called out to the baker to reach out his arm and catch her, which was done. She hung, quite insensible, for some time by her chin over one of the ratlines of the shrouds, but a surf soon washed her off again. She was again rescued shortly after, and life was not extinct; she recovered her senses when taken on board our old friend the Victory, then lying with other large ships near the Royal George. The captain of the latter was saved, but the poor carpenter, who did his best to save the ship, was drowned.
In a few days after the Royal George sank, bodies would come up, thirty or forty at a time. A corpse would rise “so suddenly as to frighten any one.” The watermen, there is no doubt, made a good thing of it; they took from the bodies of the men their buckles, money, and watches, and then made fast a rope to their heels and towed them to land.” The writer of the narrative from which this account is mainly derived says that he “saw them towed into Portsmouth Harbour, in their mutilated condition, in the same manner as rafts of floating timber, and promiscuously (for particularity was scarcely possible) put into carts, which conveyed them to their final sleeping-place, in an excavation prepared for them in Kingstown churchyard, the burial-place belonging to the parish of Portsea.” Many bodies were washed ashore on the Isle of Wight.
Futile attempts were made the following year to raise the wreck, but it was not till 1839–40 that Colonel Pasley proposed, and successfully carried out, the operations for its removal. Wrought-iron cylinders, some of the larger of which contained over a ton each of gunpowder, were lowered and fired by electricity, and the vessel was, by degrees, blown up. Many of the guns, the capstans, and other valuable parts of the wreck were recovered by the divers, and the timbers formed then, and since, a perfect godsend to some of the inhabitants of Portsmouth, who manufactured them into various forms of “relics” of the Royal George. It is said that the sale of these has been so enormous that if they could be collected and stuck together they would form several vessels of the size of the fine old first-rate, large as she was! But something similar has been said of the “wood of the true cross,” and, no doubt, is more than equally libellous.
It is said, by those who descended to the wreck, that its appearance was most beautiful, when seen from about a fathom above the deck. It was covered with seaweeds, shells, starfish, and anemones, while from and around its ports and openings the fish, large and small, swam and played—darting, flashing, and sparkling in the clear green water.
H.M.S. VANGUARD AT SEA.
There is probably no reasonable being in or out of the navy who does not believe that the ironclad is the war-vessel of the immediate future. But that a woeful amount of uncertainty, as thick as the fog in which the Vanguard went down, envelops the subject in many ways, is most certain. The circumstances connected with that great disaster are still in the memory of the public, and were simple and distinct enough. During the last week of August, 1875, the reserve squadron of the Channel Fleet, comprising the Warrior, Achilles, Hector, Iron Duke, and Vanguard, with Vice-Admiral Sir W. Tarleton’s yacht Hawk, had been stationed at Kingstown. At half-past ten on the morning of the 1st of September they got into line for the purpose of proceeding to Queenstown, Cork. Off the Irish lightship, which floats at sea, six miles off Kingstown, the Achilles hoisted her ensign to say farewell—her destination being Liverpool. The sea was moderate, but a fog came on and increased in density every moment. Half an hour after noon, the “look-out” could not distinguish fifty yards ahead, and the officers on the bridge could not see the bowsprit. The ships had been proceeding at the rate of twelve or fourteen knots, but their speed had been reduced when the fog came on, and they were running at not more than half the former speed. The Vanguard watch reported a sail ahead, and the helm was put hard aport to prevent running it down. The Iron Duke was then following close in the wake of the Vanguard, and the action of the latter simply brought them closer, and presented a broadside to the former, which, unaware of any change, had continued her course. The commander of the Iron Duke, Captain Hickley, who was on the bridge at the time, saw