![]() ![]() The first is, What exactly happened, and why? The second is, Why did the society-loving Pepys choose to sail on the smaller, half-empty Katherine rather than the duke’s flagship, despite-as he insistently repeated-having been invited by James himself and having friends among its passengers? In Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the “Gloucester, ” his engrossing forensic account of the wreck, Nigel Pickford explores two main questions. The loss of life was mourned as a national tragedy, but it was also the focus of intense political controversy, which centered on animosity toward the Catholic Duke of York: one theory, easily discounted, was that the ship had been sunk deliberately in order to drown him. ![]() The Gloucester was carrying James, Duke of York, the younger brother of King Charles II, to collect his pregnant wife, Mary of Modena, from Edinburgh, and Samuel Pepys watched it sink from aboard the yacht Katherine, in the small flotilla accompanying the royal party. For weeks bloated corpses drifted ashore with the tide. Of the 330 or so on board, roughly 150 drowned. As men rushed on deck the ship was suddenly swept into deep water and sank. It bounced along the ridge, the rudder sheared off, a neighboring plank broke, and water poured into the hold. ![]() Early on the morning of May 6, 1682, the Royal Navy warship Gloucester careered into a large sandbank off the port of Yarmouth. ![]()
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