HMS Captain: Victorian Catastrophe

The story of HMS Captain is one of the most shocking in naval history. Laid down in 1867 and, unusually, partly funded by the public, she was one of the most innovative warships ever constructed.

She had a very low freeboard and two enormous rotating armoured gun turrets situated very close to the waterline in between the upper and lower decks. Turret ships were not a new invention but, hitherto, had only been used for coastal work: they were essentially floating iron rafts with an enormous rotating gun. With HMS Captain, for the first time we see that principle applied to a fully-rigged ocean going ship equipped with steam a engine and made of iron.

The designer, Captain Cowper Phipps Coles wanted a high-tech man-of-war which could go anywhere and sink anything. As with all turret ships, she was designed with a low freeboard but ended up with a lower freeboard than originally planned, and the vessel’s high centre of gravity made her dangerously unstable.

On the night of 6 September 1870, Captain was part of a combined fleet of the Channel and Mediterranean Squadrons of the Royal Navy, on manoeuvres in a diplomatic show of force, when a fierce gale knocked her down before the crew could cut loose her sails. Nearly the entire crew of some 500 officers and men went down with the ship, including her celebrated designer. Only eighteen men survived.

More English sailors were lost aboard HMS Captain than at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) or at sea during the entire Crimean War (1853-55).

The loss of the Captain was a national catastrophe, touching Queen Victoria personally, and memorialised at St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.

The University of Wolverhampton have recently launched a project to find her wreck. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Howard Fuller, the man behind the new project.

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