HMS Royal George Sinks at Spithead
Poet involved
What happened
HMS Royal George sank while anchored at Spithead near Portsmouth on 29 August 1782. The ship heeled over during maintenance, flooded through its gunports and went down rapidly. Hundreds of sailors, women and children died in one of Britain's worst peacetime naval disasters.
Literary impact
William Cowper commemorated the catastrophe in On the Loss of the Royal George, converting a technical and organisational failure into a national elegy. The poem's tolling movement helped fix the ship in British cultural memory as a monument to sudden collective death.
Source: Wikipedia
