Dublin Bay had killed sailors for as long as ships had sailed through it. The harbour itself was accessible only at high tide because of a long sandbar across the entrance, and any vessel caught in a storm before the tide came in had nowhere to go but back into the open sea. Captain Charles Malcolm of the royal yacht put it bluntly: 'The bay of Dublin has perhaps been more fatal to seamen and ships than any in the world, for a ship once caught in it in a gale of wind from ENE to SSE must ride it out at anchors or go on shore, and from the nature of that shore the whole of the crews almost invariably have perished.' The wrecks of at least six hundred vessels lie on the bottom of the bay. The 1767 pier at Dún Laoghaire had silted up almost immediately after construction. By the early nineteenth century, after the union of Britain and Ireland made constant cross-channel travel a political necessity, the problem could no longer be ignored. It took the events of 19-20 November 1807 to finally force a solution.

The packet ship Prince of Wales was a 103-ton sloop built in Parkgate, Cheshire in 1787, and on the afternoon of 19 November she sailed from Dublin under Captain Robert Jones of Liverpool, carrying soldiers of the 97th Regiment bound for the Napoleonic Wars. By the next day she had managed to claw only a few miles down the coast as far as Bray Head before the gale caught her. Her anchors would not hold. Her sails tore to ribbons. She was blown back northward past Dún Laoghaire and finally driven onto the rocks at Blackrock. There was a single longboat on board. Captain Jones, nine seamen, two women travelling with their children, and two soldiers got into it and pushed off into the dark, not knowing how close they were to land. They rowed parallel to a shore they could not see until one of the sailors fell over the side and discovered he could stand. The 120 soldiers of the 97th Regiment did not get into the longboat. Survivors later testified that the ladder from the hold had been withdrawn and the hatches battened down, leaving them locked below deck as the ship broke up. Every one of them drowned. They are buried in Merrion Cemetery.

The brig Rochdale, larger than the Prince of Wales at 135 tons, sailed under Captain Hodgson and was caught in the same storm. Her anchor cables snapped. She was driven northward through the worst of the weather, past Dún Laoghaire, where soldiers on her decks fired their muskets to attract attention. The shots reached land - at Salthill, would-be rescuers had to shelter from the gunfire. Off Blackrock, blue distress lights flared briefly. Then the Rochdale struck the rocks under the Seapoint Martello tower and broke apart. A twelve-foot plank thrown from the shore would have reached her. None was thrown. All 265 people aboard died: officers, ordinary soldiers, 42 women, 29 children. The sea and the rocks worked over the bodies until many could not be recognised. Most were buried in Carrickbrennan Churchyard in Monkstown, where a memorial still names them. Lifeboats existed at Clontarf, Bullock, Howth, Dún Laoghaire and Islandbridge. Not one of them was launched.

Captain Jones of the Prince of Wales was charged with murder. The case hinged on whether he had deliberately abandoned the soldiers in the hold. Two survivors from the 18th Royal Irish testified against him. Anthony McIntyre said the captain had ordered the lifeboat launched and the ladder withdrawn from the hold. Andrew Boyle, speaking through an Irish-language interpreter, gave a different account - the ladder had not been removed, he said, because 'persons below held on to it very tightly.' Jones himself claimed the longboat had been swept off the deck by a wave and he had ordered those still on deck to climb in. The court returned a verdict of 'casual death by shipwreck.' The murder charge was dismissed. Six people were convicted of looting bodies and washed-up baggage and were sent to Kilmainham Gaol. The Regimental Silver Plate of the Queens Own Germans was never recovered.

Public outrage at the disaster moved the long-stalled campaign for a refuge harbour at Dún Laoghaire. Richard Toucher, a Norwegian-born master mariner and shipbroker living in Dublin, had been agitating for years for an 'asylum harbour' - a port where ships caught in Dublin Bay's storms could shelter without ending on the rocks. After 1807 the campaign found the political support it needed. A packet harbour was built at Howth, completed in 1809, but its rocky bottom and shallow draft made it unusable for the larger steam packets introduced from 1819. In 1815 eight Harbour Commissioners were appointed to build a new harbour at Dún Laoghaire. King George IV visited in 1821, departing from the new piers, and renamed the town Kingstown - a name it kept until 1921, when it reverted to Dún Laoghaire. The vast granite arms of the harbour that now shelter the town from Dublin Bay's worst weather were paid for, in a sense, by everyone who drowned that November night within sight of shore. The names on the Carrickbrennan memorial are a reminder of how slowly societies sometimes learn the lessons their sea throws at them.