On the morning of the 8th of September, 1870, English readers, at their breakfast-tables, in railway carriages, and everywhere, were startled with the news that the _Captain_ had foundered, with all hands, in the Bay of Biscay. Six hundred men had been swept into eternity without a moment’s warning. She had been in company with the squadron the night before, and, indeed, had been visited by the admiral, for purposes of inspection, the previous afternoon. The early part of the evening had been fine; later it had become what sailors call “dirty weather;” at midnight the wind rose fast, and soon culminated in a furious gale. At 2.15 in the morning of the 7th a heavy bank of clouds passed off, and the stars came out clear and bright, the moon then setting; but no vessel could be discerned where the _Captain_ had been last observed. At daybreak the squadron was all in sight, but scattered. “_Only ten ships instead of eleven could be discerned, the __‘__Captain__’__ being the missing one._” Later, it appeared that seventeen of the men and the gunner had escaped, and landed at Corbucion, north of Cape Finisterre, on the afternoon of the 7th. _All the men who were saved belonged to the starboard watch_; or, in other words, none escaped except those on deck duty. Every man below, whether soundly sleeping after his day’s work, or tossing sleeplessly in his berth, thinking of home and friends and present peril, or watching the engines, or feeding the furnaces, went down, without the faintest possibility of escaping his doom. Think of this catastrophe, and what it involved! The families and friends of 600 men plunged into mourning, and the scores on scores of wives and children into poverty! In _one_ street of Portsea, thirty wives were made widows by the occurrence.(43) The shock of the news killed one poor woman, then in weak health. Nor were the sad effects confined to the cottages of the poor. The noble-hearted captain of the vessel was a son of Field-Marshal Burgoyne; Captain Coles, her inventor; a son of Mr. Childers, the then First Lord of the Admiralty; the younger son of Lord Northbrook; the third son of Lord Herbert of Lea; and Lord Lewis Gordon, brother of the Marquis of Huntley, were among the victims of that terrible morning. The intelligence arrived during the excitement caused by the defeat and capitulation of Sedan, which, involving, as it did, the deposition of the Emperor and the fate of France, was naturally the great topic of discussion, but for the time it overshadowed even those great events, for it was a national calamity.