Sailors on the Rocks

Famous Royal Navy Shipwrecks

Peter C. Smith

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Maritime
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473882485
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Transporte marítimo

For three hundred years or more the Royal Navy really did Rule the Waves, in the sense that during the numerous wars with our overseas enemies, British fleets and individual ships more often than not emerged victorious from combat. One French Admiral wa

Chapter 1

Wrecked off Rame

The Coronation, 3 September 1691

The sea shanty Spanish Ladies used to be a well-known and loved song in the distant days when I was a schoolboy. It is now banished to the limbo land of ‘political correctness’ whereby it is deemed sinful by the BBC, education authorities and many other worthies to dare to celebrate anything that smacks of English tradition. It is with that banishment in mind that I reproduce the words in full here, and they are relative to our tale.

Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies,

Adieu and farewell to you ladies of Spain,

For we’re under orders for to sail to old England

And we may never see you fair ladies again.

So we’ll rant and we’ll roar like true British sailors,

We’ll range and we’ll roam over all the salt seas,

Until we strike soundings in the Channel of Old England:

From Ushant to Scilly ‘tis thirty-five leagues.

The first land we made, it is called the Dodman,

Next Rame Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight:

And we sailed by Beachy, by Fairlight and Dungeness,

Until we brought to by the South Foreland Light.¹

The children’s author, Arthur Mitchell Ransome, another boyhood favourite, who told splendid yarns that excited and enthralled, but never condescended to, his young audience, is also nowadays probably largely unknown to our schoolchildren, but he put his finger on the nub of these verses back in 1932. He had his fictional character, an old mariner named ‘Peter Duck’, comment that ‘thirty-five leagues’ between the Ushant light and the Isles of Scilly was a nonsense unless they were tacking hard up Channel in the face of a north-east gale and ticking off each of the legs as they sighted them.²

The wars with the Dutch in the seventeenth century marked a time, very much like the present day, when the national defences had been allowed to lapse to a very low ebb indeed by an indifferent and inept government. Britain’s enemies took little time to exploit the situation but their humiliations were added to by the intrusion of nature itself, which, as always, proved master of all. At the time of the Restoration of the Monarchy after the stern and severe restrictions of the Cromwellian Parliament, the renaming of warships was one of the most immediately obvious results of this return to normality. This should not be surprising, as it was aboard the Naseby, the only 1st-rate ship-of-the-line built by the Commonwealth, that King Charles II, accompanied by his brother James, Duke of York, Admiral Sir Edward Montagu and Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Board of Admiralty, embarked on 23 May 1660 at The Hague in Holland. Named in honour of the Parliamentary forces’ most famous victory, this great vessel’s title was the subject of an after-dinner discussion, and, not surprisingly, it was decided that she should become Royal Charles, while the Richard (named after Cromwell’s son – ‘Tumble-down Dick’) became the Royal James and Resolution reverted to Prince Royal. However, the king’s self-indulgence and selfobsession soon reduced the nation’s Navy to a pale shadow of its former self and, when the Dutch sailed up the Medway, all three vessels were captured, burnt or both. Funds which should have gone to the defence of the realm were squandered because of, in the measured words of Thomas Curson Hansard, when recording parliamentary debates, ‘The loose dissipation of the King having still added to his great pecuniary difficulties’. Pepys had been dismissed and few new warships were built in this period. Not until after several wasted years was Pepys reinstated to his former official position by Admiral Edward Russell, 1st Earl of Orford, and matters were taken firmly in hand. With the growing maritime power of France and Holland menacing the nation more and more, and at the constant urging of Pepys and a few others, and against still massive indifference in Parliament, finally, on 23 February 1677, a fleet replacement programme was reluctantly funded, to the tune of £600,000.

The rebuilding of the fleet, ‘The 30 great ships programme’ of 1677, was recognised at the time, without exaggeration, as being, ‘a great undertaking’, and comprised a single 1st-rate, the Britannia, nine 2nd-rates, whose approved displacement of 900 tons was increased to 1,100 tons at the king’s insistence on 17 May, and twenty 3rd-rates, most of them to be built in the King’s shipyards of Deptford and Woolwich in London, and Chatham, Harwich and Portsmouth, under the master shipwright Daniel Furzer, the latter being selected to construct Coronation. King Charles also expressed the wish that the ships were undertaken as a coherent whole class, standardised, taking as the construction matrix not the length of the keel, as hitherto, but by their gun decks, and each new warship had her plans drawn up on vellum by Edmund Dummer.

Each vessel consumed 2,000 oaks and for such a large programme stocks proved scarce. A labour force of one hundred men per ship was also required, and included shipwrights, caulkers, ropemakers, scavelmen (who kept the drainage ditches and dykes of the dockyards clear) and general labourers.

It was not until 1682 that the keel of a new vessel was laid. Even then the money was not available, other than in fits and starts, and it took three further years before the ship, a 90-gun, three-decker ship-of-the-line, built in Navy Board style, was finally launched by Master Shipwright Isaac Betts at Portsmouth Dockyard on 23 May 1685. Coronation was one of nine such vessels constructed and she had a gun-deck of 160 feet 4 inches (48.8696m) which enabled her to carry such a heavy armament. Overall her keel was of 140 feet (42.672m) length with a beam of 44 feet 9 inches (13.6398m), a depth in hold of 18 feet 2 inches (5.5372m) and draught aft of 16 feet 4 inches (4.9784m) and she had a burthen of 1,427 tons. She conformed to the accepted ‘Royalist’ theme naming policy, and this 2nd-rated vessel was christened as Coronation. She lay idle and uncompleted for several more years, again principally due to lack of funding for the necessary fitments to complete her for sea. Her timbers rotted, fungi grew and she lay almost forgotten until the Treasury once more reluctantly supplied the money to see the job finished. Such neglect at Portsmouth, where the Coronation, Ossory and Vanguard were constructed, was blamed by Sir Anthony Deane on lack of maintenance, and the man on the spot, Sir Richard Beach, put it down to lack of ventilation due to laxity in obeying standing orders to open the gun ports every morning and close them every night and, later, shifted the blame to the use of unseasoned timber. With a new keel required before she could be finished, this cheese-paring policy cost more in the long run, but this has continued to be the peacetime norm of Government funding of British defence forces right up to the present day.

Even with an influx of money, it was highly suspected that not all the rotted sections of her hull were totally replaced and that she was not fully sound from the time when she did put to sea. Whether this was the case or not, finally her masting and sails were supplied, and her cannon were brought aboard and emplaced. Designed as a 90-gun ship, she actually carried more than this at the time of her loss – a mixed armament of twenty-two 32-pounder (14.5kg) British demi-cannon on her lower gun deck, twenty-six 17.5-pounder (7.9kg) ordinary culverins on her middle gun deck, with four more on her lower gun deck, twenty-six 9-pounder (6.8kg) British sakers on her upper gun deck, ten 6-pounder (3.8kg) British light sakers on her quarterdeck and a pair of British 3-pounders (1.36kg) in her roundhouse. Her major guns were cast by Thomas Westerne who, with Charles Harvie, leased the John Sackville foundry at Brede, Rother, East Sussex, from 1662 to 1673.

The Coronation was first commissioned on 14 February 1690 under the command of Captain John Munden, as Flagship of Vice-Admiral Sir Ralph Delavall. It was not only her construction that suffered such financial parsimony, however; designed to accommodate a wartime crew of around 660 officers and men, there were insufficient trained men and it was thought she sailed off to war short-handed.

Her only major naval action was the defeat at the Battle of Beachy Head on 30 June 1690 where an Anglo-Dutch Fleet under Admiral Arthur Herbert, Earl of Torrington, was soundly trounced by the numerically far superior French fleet under Admiral Anne-Hilarion de Contentin, Comte de Tourville.

Torrington all along counselled against battle lest undertaken in the most favourable condition and with the maximum strength. He maintained that by keeping the ‘Fleet in being’ until such an opportunity arose, its very presence would restrict and hamper the enemy and negate its aims and ambitions. However, after Queen Mary II, in the absence of King William III, had sought the counsel of Thomas Osborne, Marquess of Carmarthen, and Secretary of State Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, Admiral Russell ordered Torrington to engage. Having notably failed to do so with much vigour, Torrington was flung into the Tower of London as a coward and forced to face a court martial for leaving his Dutch allies, under Admiral Cornelis Evertsen, to do most of the fighting. He was ultimately acquitted of the charges but the king was unimpressed and he was dismissed from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty.

Munden also left the Coronation and became captain of the 3rd-rate Lenox. Although a ‘tarpaulin’ (an officer of humble origins who had come up from the ranks in an age of mainly gentlemen commanders), John later went on to become an admiral. On 29 October 1690 a new officer was appointed to be the second officer to command the Coronation, this worthy being Captain Charles Skelton. He was an experienced mariner having commanded the 3rd-rate Bedford in 1689–90.

Coronation formed part of the Channel Fleet under Russell, who flew his flag aboard the 1st-rate ship-of-the-line Royal Sovereign.³ Russell now adopted the more aggressive policy toward the enemy he had advocated of Torrington and sought to actively blockade their Channel bases. The fleet, having provisioned in Torbay, sailed on 28 August to resume their patrol, in heavy force, seventy major British and Dutch warships accompanied by a host of smaller vessels but while in the vicinity of Ushant on 1 September, an SSE gale began to develop and the fleet tried to run for the safety of Plymouth Sound. In order to avoid the notorious Eddystone Reef, Russell ordered the ships to steer along the southern coast of Cornwall and Devon but, as the wind continued to increase enormously, the fleet was soon in trouble here also. The Rame Peninsula in Cornwall acts as the western bulwark for the major naval port of Plymouth, Devon, and the anchorage of Plymouth Sound. In its centre is Rame Head with the fourteenth-century chapel at its peak. The notorious reef known as the Eddystone Rocks, on which many a vessel foundered down the centuries, is nine miles (14km) to the south but Rame comprises the same unyielding Precambrian metamorphic rock (gneiss) and is just as unforgiving. Penlee Point (Penn Legh) is at the eastern extremity, with Lady Cove to the west and Penlee Cove to the east.

On 3 September 1691 the whole fleet was caught by the now massive gale and many ships sought refuge in Plymouth, but to reach there they had to claw their way around Penlee Point. This proved a hazardous undertaking indeed and many a proud vessel failed to make it in the horrendous conditions prevailing. The 3rd-rate Harwich made a run for safety but was soon in trouble, then was rammed by the 3rd-rate Elizabeth and ended up smashed to matchwood on the rocks at Maker Point; the 3rd-rates Northumberland and Royal Oak both went ashore, but were later refloated; some small vessels foundered in the Hamoaze or went ashore at Cattewater.

Witnessing several ships that attempted to reach Plymouth only to pay the ultimate price, the Coronation herself sought such shelter as she could close to the dangerous headland, putting down her best bower, the heaviest anchor aboard, a five-ton monster 16 feet 6 inches (5m) in length and 8.25 feet (2.5m) across the flukes, and hoping its cable would hold firm. The rocky seabed between Rame Head and Penlee offered little purchase, however, in the prevailing conditions. On such an open, lee shore, this attempt to hold her proved a false hope, the storm was too fierce and it is thought that while her cable was still being paid out water began pouring into her below. This was either due to a leak sprung in her rotten timbers, or because, as one account has it, that the crew had not closed the ship’s gun ports or, according to one historian, that her ports were not caulked.⁴

Another authority claims that she ‘rolled away her masts’.⁵ All her three masts went overboard, thoug...