Fate
On 9 June 1801 Capel and Meleager were cruising Bahia del Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico when just before midnight lookouts spotted breakers ahead. Even though the helmsman tried to turn her, Meleager ran hard onto a reef. Despite their best efforts, the crew could neither pull Meleager off the reef nor could the pumps keep up with the water coming in. The crew put provisions in the boats and then abandoned ship before she sank. The boats sailed to Vera Cruz. Here, in mid-July, Apollo picked the crew up. The subsequent court martial ruled that the wreck was due to the charts on Meleager being greatly in error with respect to the location of the Triangles Shoal on which she had run aground.
Read more about this topic: HMS Meleager (1785)
Famous quotes containing the word fate:
“I am no Poet here; my pen ‘s the spout,
Where the rain water of my eyes run out,
In pity of that name, whose fate wee see
Thus copied out in griefs Hydrography:
The Muses are not Mer-maids, though upon
His death the Ocean might turn Helicon”
—John Cleveland (1613–1658)
“We are hedged about, we think, by accident and circumstance; now we creep as in a dream, and now again we run, as if there were a fate in it, and all things thwarted or assisted.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is to write, and only to write.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)