The captain of the Royal George, though, strange to say, he could not swim, was picked up alive. But out of nearly a thousand men, which was the ship's complement, although some were on leave, and sixty marines had gone ashore that very morning, only a very few were saved. Government allowed five pounds to them for the loss of their things. "I saw the list, and there were but seventy-five."
For several days afterward bodies would suddenly come up to the surface at the spot where the ship had sunk, "forty and fifty at a time. The watermen made a good thing of it; they would take from the men their buckles, money, and watches; then, making fast a rope to their heels, would tow them to land."
The poet who sings of the calamity tells us "no tempest gave the shock," and indeed there was scarcely any breeze at all. The ship was anchored, and had not even a stitch of canvas on her to keep her steady.
Sixty years afterward the interest of this terrible event had by no means died away, and I well remember, as a boy, going on board the ship that was stationed above the scene of the calamity, to see the divers who were still employed upon the wreck. The aspiration of the poet,
"Weigh the vessel up,
Once dreaded by her foes,"
was never realized; but almost everything was taken out of her; and more fancy articles—paper-knives, work-boxes, etc.—affirmed to have been made from her timbers, were sold, I am afraid, than the Royal George, big as she was, could ever have furnished. In country places and at the sea-side in England you may purchase them even now at the bazars—old-fashioned articles, with this tomb-like inscription on them: "This desk" (or letter-weight, or paper-knife) "was made out of the wood of the Royal George, sunk off Spithead in 1782, with eight hundred of her crew."