On the afternoon of June 22, 1893, the Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy, then the strongest naval force in the world, was carrying out manoeuvres in calm water off Tripoli, on the coast of what is now Lebanon. At its head in the flagship HMS Victoria stood Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon, a big, clever, domineering man whom the fleet admired and feared. He liked to test his officers with orders they had to work out for themselves. That day he gave one that could not be worked out, because it could not be done.
The Horror
The fleet was steaming in two columns. Victoria led one, and HMS Camperdown, flagship of Tryon’s second-in-command, Rear-Admiral Albert Markham, led the other. The sources agree that the columns were about 1,200 yards apart. Tryon signalled each column to turn inward through 180 degrees, ship after ship, to reverse course. Wikipedia gives the minimum turning circle of these battleships as at least 1,600 yards. The sums did not work. Turn the two lines towards each other in that gap and they would meet.
Officers could see it. Markham hesitated, and Tryon is said to have answered with a signalled rebuke, “What are you waiting for.” That detail rests on one short secondary summary, and the court martial record has not been consulted, so the exact signals and wording are unconfirmed. In the end the fleet obeyed against its own judgement.
Camperdown’s ram struck Victoria on the starboard bow, below the waterline. Victoria had not closed her watertight openings, and she went down quickly. Sources give the time from collision to sinking as anything from about 10 to about 15 minutes. She rolled over, and her propellers were reported still turning as she went. Wikipedia counts 358 dead, including Tryon, while the Naval Institute of Australia gives 353. Both are secondary, and the figure varies from source to source. The executive officer, John Jellicoe, who later commanded the Grand Fleet at Jutland, survived. One source places him sick in his cabin with Malta fever.
The admiral went down with his ship. His last reported words were “It is all my fault.” Wikipedia attributes the remark to him, and the Naval Institute summary says he said on the bridge that it was all his fault. No named witness or precise wording has been confirmed, so treat the quotation as reported, not as certain.
Why he gave the order is not settled. Wikipedia calls it a “bizarre order” and suggests his overbearing personality contributed. Whether he made an arithmetical slip, intended a different manoeuvre or simply refused to be seen to back down is speculation. No source settles it.
The court martial held Tryon responsible, according to the Naval Institute summary, which also says the court noted his standing instruction that a subordinate need not obey an order that endangered his ship. It adds that Markham was reprimanded. Some retellings say the inquiry cleared the officers who obeyed, but the sources do not agree on this, and the verdict itself has not been seen, so this is an open question. Markham is said to have carried the stain of that afternoon for the rest of his career, but that is unverified too.
The Apparition
There is a stranger footnote, and it is legend, not history. The story says that on that same afternoon Lady Tryon was entertaining guests at the family’s London home, and that many of them saw the admiral in full uniform walk through the drawing room at the hour his ship went down. She did not see him herself. It was once told as a classic of Victorian psychical research.
It does not stand up. Even the sources that tell it cannot agree on where the house was: Eaton Square, Eaton Place and Belgrave Square all appear. One site calls it a modern myth, repeated endlessly, and cites no primary witness. No contemporary account of any guest has been found. It is included here as folklore that gathered around a famous disaster, and as evidence of nothing.
The Modern Relic
HMS Victoria is still there, and she is stranger than most wrecks. The diver Christian Francis located her on August 22, 2004, about 140 metres down off Tripoli, with the British diver Mark Ellyatt, after a search that Wikipedia puts at about ten years. She was hard to find partly because she does not lie flat. She stands almost vertically, her bow and roughly 30 metres of hull driven into the mud, her stern with its two propellers pointing towards the surface. A depth sounder reading the seabed misses a wreck shaped like that.
Divers who have reached her describe an upended battleship with her stern at about 77 metres and her wreckage near 140. A rebreather team has dived her on trimix, with permissions from Lebanese and Cypriot officials, and with limited recompression facilities close by. How she is protected as a grave is unconfirmed, so nothing is said here about her legal status.
What lingers is not the scale of the loss, terrible as it was on a clear afternoon with no enemy in sight. It is the obedience. A fleet of experienced officers watched a fatal order given, understood why it was fatal, and carried it out because the man who gave it outranked them. Whatever the court martial finally made of the officers who obeyed, the admiral who gave the order stood on his bridge, by the accounts that survive, and said it was his fault.
