Wreck of the Grosvenor

The Wreck of the Grosvenor, an East Indiaman, occurred on 4 August 1782 on the Pondoland coast of South Africa, north of the mouth of the Umzimvubu River. The shipwreck was close to the place where the Portuguese ship, São João, had gone down more than two centuries earlier on 8 June 1552. The Grosvenor was a three-masted ship of 729 tons on her return voyage to England when she was wrecked, carrying a crew of 132 and 18 passengers (12 adults and 6 children), and a cargo valued at £75,000. Of the 123 survivors, only 18 reached Cape Town and were repatriated, the remainder dying of their privations or being killed by, or joining with, Bantu tribes. Four survivors, Robert Price, Thomas Lewis, John Warmington, and Barney Larey, eventually got back to England.

The Grosvenor had left Madras in March 1782 under the command of Captain John Coxon, falling in with Admiral Hughes' fleet. On 13 June 1782, she set sail for England from Trincomalee in Ceylon.

Sailing west near the Cape coast at 1 am and while adjusting the sails to ride out a gale, the crew noticed lights to the west, but dismissed them as something akin to the northern lights. When the lights presently disappeared, they were given no further thought. As it turned out, the lights were grassfires burning on a headland directly on their course, and their disappearance was due to their being hidden by the brow of the hill. At 4 am, Thomas Lewis reported that he thought he could see land, but the idea was rejected by the commanding officer of the watch, Thomas Beale, as everyone on board was certain that they were at least 200 miles (320 km) out to sea. The quartermaster Mixon, after some hesitation, alerted the captain, who instantly came on deck. He attempted to club haul the ship, but this failed, and the vessel ran aground on the rocks. In the darkness, the crew firmly believed that as they were a long way from land, they had struck an uncharted island or reef. With a change in the wind direction, the captain felt that they could refloat the Grosvenor and run her aground in some more convenient place. A fortuitous change in the wind allowed the stern section of the ship, where most of the passengers were trapped, to be hauled into a sheltered inlet. Seventeen of the passengers and ninety-one of the crew survived the initial disaster.

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