The turret ship HMS Captain capsized during a gale in the Bay of Biscay in September 1870. Its dangerously low freeboard and excessive top weight contributed to the disaster. Nearly 500 people died, including the ship's designer, Captain Cowper Phipps Coles.

The loss prompted elegiac and commemorative poems that questioned the cost of technological ambition and official prestige. It supplied Victorian poets with a modern variation on hubris: an innovative warship destroyed by defects that critics had already identified.