HMS Apollo, the fourth ship of the Royal Navy to be named for the Greek god Apollo, was a fifth-rate frigate of 36 guns launched in 1799 and wrecked with heavy loss of life in 1804. The Royal Navy of the United Kingdom is the oldest of the British armed services (and is therefore the Senior Service). ... Lycian Apollo, early Imperial Roman copy of a fourth century Greek original (Louvre Museum) In Greek and Roman mythology, Apollo (Ancient Greek , Apóllōn; or Ἀπέλλων, Apellōn), the ideal of the kouros, was the archer-god of medicine and healing and also a bringer of death-dealing plague; as... In the British Royal Navy, a fifth-rate was a sailing frigate mounting 32 to 40 guns on a single deck. ... For the bird, see Frigatebird. ...

She was built at Deptford in 1799, taking the name Apollo from a fifth-rate of the same name which had been wrecked off Holland in January. She was commissioned in October under Captain Peter Halkett - who had commanded the previous Apollo when she was lost - and posted to the West Indies, cruising there and escorting convoys to Britain. In November of that year, cruising in the Gulf of Mexico, she recaptured the sloop Resolution, of 16 guns, which had been captured by Spain; however, after towing her for two weeks, she was found to be "generally rotten" and had to be sunk. The Apollo took two other prizes around this time. She returned to Portsmouth in March 1802 to be paid off, and was rushed into commission again in October of that year, for service in the Channel under Captain John William Taylor Dixon. She captured a French brig, the Dart, in June 1803.^[1] Deptford is an area of the London Borough of Lewisham, on the south bank of the River Thames in south-east London. ...

In late March 1804 she sailed from Cork with a convoy of sixty-nine merchantmen, accompanied by Carysfort, immediately entering a strong gale. After five days, believing the convoy to be safely far from shore, Apollo ran aground off the Portugese coast in the early morning of April 2; about forty of the vessels in the convoy, travelling closely behind, were also wrecked. All the boats of the frigate were destroyed, and it took two days to bring the crew of the Apollo off the wreck and onto the shore, with sixty officers and men dead as a result.^[2] Around twenty of them had died in the first few hours, but most died of exposure waiting to be rescued; the number dead in the merchant vessels is not known, but contemporary records suggest that it was high. Carysfort and her half of the convoy had shifted course on the evening of the 1st, taking advantage of a change in the wind, and so escaped the fate of their companions.^[1]

It transpired that an iron tank had been shipped on board the Apollo, and her compass had not been adjusted correctly to deal with the disturbances caused by the metal of the tank; the errors accumulated over the course of the voyage, and when she struck the coast she was thought to be some forty miles out to sea.^[3] The convoy had been sailing in consistently heavy weather since leaving Cork, in conditions where taking sightings to correct their position would have been near-impossible; as a result, they could only estimate their position from a known speed and an inaccurate heading. The merchant ships were following behind Apollo, staying close due to the low visibility and the bad weather, and would have been unable to avoid sharing her fate.

References

1. ^ ^a b Sailing ships of the Royal Navy, A4
2. ^ A list of the drowned was published in the Times of May 2nd 1804; it included Captain Dixon and one of his lieutenants.
3. ^ The companion to the British almanac, for the year 1874, p. 53. London, 1875.