“The Ship” [<span class="date-1828-1829">1828-29</span>]
“her stern proclaims her name the royal GEORGE /
. . . / to coral banks to pearls to Neptunes court”
(MS II, MS III)—During the Tour of 1828,
when the Ruskin family crossed from Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight,
they could see the “place where royal george sunk,” as Ruskin noted in his
Travel Itinerary and Tour Notes [1828].
The wreck from this disaster, which occurred in 1782, remained a danger in the shipping channel until divers were organized in 1839-44 to salvage
remains (Handbook for Travellers in Surrey, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight, 211–12).
In his poem, Ruskin imagines the ship in its prime, her “huge sails” destined to play “a traitor’s part” in the future.
This disaster remained famous throughout the nineteenth century, with accounts framed in terms of nationalistic pride and grief.
An early account, as Helen Viljoen notes, is included in
A Journey from London to the Isle of Wight (1801)
by Thomas Pennant (1726–98). In 17xx,
when crossing to the Isle of Wight, Pennant beheld “the melancholy sight of the top-masts of the Royal George,”
once deemed “the best sailer in the navy,” which, “before she grew old, carried the heaviest metal; . . . the tallest masts and squarest canvas of any English
built ship in the service. She was coveted by every Admiral, and therefore was engaged in more actions than any other.” Pennant attributes the loss to “the zeal of the spirited
Admiral for returning with all possible speed to the service of his country,” leading to reckless navigation that caused the ship to capsize, taking the lives of
“four hundred seamen, and about the same number of women and children, who had taken the opportunity of the inactive state of the ship, to visit their friends”
(Pennant, A Journey from London to the Isle of Wight, 2:154-55).
Blame is also suppressed in a poem by William Cowper (1731–1800),
“On the Loss of the Royal George”, written circa 1782-83 to the tune of a march by Handel,
a popular setting that Ruskin may have heard (Cowper, Poems, ed. Baird and Ryskamp, 2:16–17, 311–12).
This is another gloss.