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.
Read more about this topic: HMS Apollo (1799)
Famous quotes containing the word fate:
“Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his knees will rise—but his creator strolls away. And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End: the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze—nor does this terminate the phrase.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of man.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“O divine art of sublety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible and hence we can hold the enemy’s fate in our hands.”
—Sun Tzu (6th–5th century B.C.)