The White Ship

England's worst maritime disaster took place 900 years ago. By Charles Spencer.

It is precisely nine centuries since the worst maritime disaster – which doubles as one of the greatest royal catastrophes – in English history. The 900th anniversary of the sinking of the White Ship fell on 25 November this year. The greatest twelfth century English historian, William of Malmesbury, wrote: ‘No Ship that ever sailed brought England such Disaster,’ and that assessment of the scale of the tragedy, remarkably, stands to this day.

It was the passenger list of the White Ship that made its loss so uniquely awful. Apart from Henry I’s only legitimate son, William Ætheling, it included two of the king’s natural children, the cream of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy (including eighteen ladies with the rank of countess or above), several of the great generals who had finally brought England complete victory over France, as well as the bureaucrats who controlled Henry’s strict, effective, royal governance.

All of Henry’s achievements – in his two decades on the throne to this point, he had brought peace and security to England, established the Exchequer to oversee the Crown’s revenue, and trounced Louis VI (the girth of the French king resulted in his being known as ‘Louis the Fat’) – had been accomplished with one thing in mind: handing on a secure inheritance to William Ætheling, his heir. But this plan was shattered when the White Ship was wrecked, off the Norman harbour of Barfleur.

Only one man – perhaps the humblest passenger aboard – survived the violent end of the White Ship: he was Berold, a butcher from Rouen who found a place aboard in order to pursue high-ranking debtors as they set off for England. The medieval butcher thus became eyewitness to one of history’s most terrible events.

The White Ship was propelled by oarsmen rendered drunk by the inebriated passengers, who had plied the crew with huge quantities of wine. The ship left Barfleur at a fierce pace, a little before midnight on 25 November 1120. The sea was calm, the wind set fair, but the captain – another whose brain was addled by alcohol – dropped the mainsail too soon; before he was clear of the rocky coast. The helmsman, clearly  confused by the rare speed of his vessel, and also drunk, miscalculated, and steered the White Ship into the great danger a mile out at sea: the Quillebœuf Rock. This giant, jagged, menace was hidden at high tide and now claimed its greatest victim.