Loss
She ran aground on 24 December 1811 off the west coast of Jutland, Denmark. She was under the command of Captain D. Atkins and in the company of St George, under Rear-admiral Robert Carthew Reynolds, and Cressy, when a hurricane and heavy seas came up. St George was jury-rigged and so Atkins refused to leave her without the Admiral's permission. As a result both were wrecked near Ringkøbing. Cressy did not ask for permission and so avoided wrecking.
Defence lost all but 14 of her crew of 597 men and boys, including her captain. St George too lost almost her entire crew, including the admiral. Most of the bodies that came ashore were buried in the sand dunes of Thorsminde, which have been known ever since as "Dead Mens Dunes".
Read more about this topic: HMS Defence (1763)
Famous quotes containing the word loss:
“If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!””
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“Nothing is so important to man as his own state; nothing is so formidable to him as eternity. And thus it is unnatural that there should be men indifferent to the loss of their existence and to the perils of everlasting suffering.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)