“The Ship” [<span class="date-1828-1829">1828-29</span>]
“her stern proclaims her
name the royal GEORGE / . . . / to coral banks to pearls to Neptune’s 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).
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).