HMS Apollo (1799) - Fate

Fate

On 26 March 1804, she sailed from Cork with a convoy of sixty-seven merchantmen, accompanied by HMS Carysfort, immediately encountering a strong gale. At 3:30 in the morning of 2 April Apollo unexpectedly ran aground when their calculations showed them well offshore. In the morning Apollo discovered that she had run aground about nine miles south of Cape Mondego on the coast of Portugal. Twenty-five or six of the vessels in the convoy, traveling closely behind due to the low visibility and bad weather, were also wrecked. Next day some more vessels wrecked. In all, 29 vessels ran aground.

All the boats of the frigate were destroyed, and it took two days to transfer Apollo's crew to land. Sixty-two officers and men died; around twenty of the crew died in the first few hours, but most perished of exposure waiting to be rescued. The number of dead in the merchant vessels is not known, but the Naval Chronicle reported that "dead bodies were every day floating ashore, and pieces of wreck covered the beach upwards of ten miles."

Carysfort had shifted course on the evening of 1 April and so escaped grounding. She gathered the 38 surviving vessels and proceeded with the convoy.

At the time, accounts blamed strong currents. Later it was discovered that Apollo had taken on board an iron tank, but that no one had adjusted her compass for the influence of this large magnetic mass. Consequently, a small error in direction accumulated over the course of the five days; at the time Apollo struck Dixon thought she was forty or so miles out to sea. Because the convoy had endured bad weather since leaving Cork, no one had taken sightings that would have enabled them to correct their estimates of their position. Instead, they had relied on an approximately known speed and a biased heading for their estimate.