Qualla: Sinking of Rochdale and Prince of Wales

Sinking of Rochdale and Prince of Wales: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. On the morning of 21 November 1807, the residents of Blackrock and Salthill walked down to the shore of Dublin Bay and began to count the bodies. There were soldiers, women and children, sailors. Hundreds of them, washed in on a tide running thick with broken spars and torn baggage. Two troop ships - the brig Rochdale and the packet ship Prince of Wales - had been driven onto the rocks the night before in a gale so violent that the cries of the dying had been heard from a mile inland. Nearly four hundred lives were lost within sight of an urban shore. The catastrophe was so visible, so close, so impossible to look away from, that it changed Irish maritime history.

Image: CC BY-SA 4.0

Sinking of Rochdale and Prince of Wales: A Dangerous Bay

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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. Capt...

Image: CC BY-SA 4.0

Sinking of Rochdale and Prince of Wales: The Prince of Wales

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 h...

Image: CC BY-SA 4.0

Sinking of Rochdale and Prince of Wales: The Rochdale

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

Image: CC BY-SA 4.0

Sinking of Rochdale and Prince of Wales: The Captain's Trial

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ...

Image: CC BY-SA 4.0

Sinking of Rochdale and Prince of Wales: What the Dead Built

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

Image: CC BY-SA 4.0