HMS Captain
Marker: recorded wreck position (Date not recorded).
Key facts
| Name | HMS Captain | Wikidata label |
|---|---|---|
| Ship type | ironclad warship | Wikidata P31 instance of |
| Cause of loss | Foundered | Keyword match in English Wikipedia lead sentence |
| Nationality / flag | United Kingdom | Wikidata P137 operator → P17 country |
| Operator | Royal Navy | Wikidata P137 operator |
| Sea / ocean | North Atlantic Ocean | Natural Earth marine areas (public domain), point-in-polygon |
| Nearest coast | Spain | Natural Earth (public domain); approx. 30 km from land |
| Position | 42.6150, -9.3900 | Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0) |
About the wreck
HMS Captain was a major warship built for the Royal Navy as a semi-private venture, following a dispute between the designer and the Admiralty. With wrought-iron armour, steam propulsion, and the main battery mounted in rotating armoured turrets, the ship was, at first appearance, quite innovative and formidable. However, poor design and design changes resulted in a vessel that was overweight and ultimately unstable. In terms of seaworthiness she was reported as closely comparable to the higher freeboard turret-ship HMS Monarch, but her reduced freeboard added a sense of "sluggishness". The Captain capsized in heavy seas, only five months after being commissioned, with the loss of nearly 500 lives.
Diving & visiting
There are memorials to the crew in St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, London, and St Anne's church in Portsmouth.
The conclusion of the 1870 Court Martial is engraved on the Memorial to HMS Captain, in the north aisle of St Paul's Cathedral:
In 2021 Dr. Howard Fuller, a Reader in War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, initiated a Find the Captain project. This aims to raise funds in an effort to discover the wreck of the Captain, whose sinking was the worst disaster suffered by the Royal Navy in the 'Pax Britannica' era. In company with a Galician-based documentary company, four wrecks were discovered by multibeam echosounder-scan off Cape Finisterre, Spain on 30 August 2022. The fourth wreck has a general configuration and dimensions closely corresponding with HMS Captain's.
Location
- Recorded position: 42.6150, -9.3900 (Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0); may be approximate)
- Sea / ocean: North Atlantic Ocean
- Nearest coast: Spain
Wreck positions on this site are for interest only and are not for navigation. Many wrecks are war graves or legally protected: never disturb human remains or remove artefacts, and check local law before diving.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article HMS Captain (1869) (revision 1374729759), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section and section(s) “Memorials”, “Hunt for the wreck of HMS Captain”; condensed by selecting paragraphs; citations and formatting removed. No text added. This excerpt is available under the same licence.
Wreck facts from Wikidata (CC0).
Nearby wrecks
- Cason 19 km
- HMS Egret 50 km
- U-535 1943 · 114 km
- U-514 1943 · 117 km
- U-566 1943 · 158 km
- U-1277 1945 · 165 km
Browse more: Europe wrecks · wrecks off Spain · North Atlantic Ocean