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The ship on her beam ends with colors flying. The heel was deliberate, routine, and one rum lighter past the margin.

The Royal George was the largest warship in the world when she was launched and still one of the grandest in 1782: a hundred guns, Hawke's own flagship in the great storm chase at Quiberon Bay, 26 years of service in her timbers. On 29 August she lay at anchor at Spithead among the fleet preparing to relieve Gibraltar, and because the war allowed no dockyard time, a minor repair below the waterline was handled the routine way: guns hauled to one side to heel the ship over in the water. It was so routine that the ship stayed open for business. Supply boats worked alongside; and because sailors of the day were rarely allowed ashore, the ship was full of visitors, wives and children come to say goodbye, tradesmen, by later estimates several hundred people who did not belong to the crew. A lighter loading rum was made fast on the low side, adding weight exactly where there was no weight to spare. The heel deepened until the sea stood at the lips of the open lower gunports; the carpenter saw it and twice asked the officer of the watch to right the ship, and was twice waved off. Then the water made the decision. It came through the ports in a sheet; the ship lurched, hung, and went down where she lay, in full view of the anchored fleet, in minutes. Perhaps 900 people drowned, among them some 300 women and children, and Rear-Admiral Richard Kempenfelt, one of the most respected officers in the service, who was writing at his desk when the heel jammed his cabin doors shut. About 230 were pulled from the water. The court martial acquitted every surviving officer and blamed the general state of the ship's timbers, a verdict that spared the routine and satisfied almost nobody. Cowper wrote the poem whose first line became the disaster's name, Toll for the brave, and the nation took the strange comfort it takes in disasters with no villain. The wreck lay in the fleet's front yard for decades until the Deane brothers, working it in the 1830s with their new invention, the diving helmet, made the Royal George the proving ground of hard-hat diving; the Royal Engineers finished the job with gunpowder, and some of her bronze cannon were melted into the base of Nelson's Column. Schetky, marine painter to three monarchs, exhibited the sinking in 1840, timed to the salvage headlines: the great hull on her beam ends with her flags still flying, and the small boats rowing hard toward a disaster that was over before anyone reached it.