Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 7 - The Second Battle of the Medway

In 1667, England was in the middle of an austerity programme.    Tax receipts had been hammered by two major disasters, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London of 1666.   One government cut involved laying up the Royal Navy’s great ships, and paying off most of their crews.

Unfortunately, there was a war with the Dutch going on at the time, and at the beginning of June, their commander, Admiral De Ruyter, detached a task force from his fleet with the mission of attacking the pride of the navy  in the Medway.

The English had sunk ships in the river, and stretched a chain across it, and they had guns ashore to stop the progress of the enemy, but unfortunately there was a shortage of gunners, supplies had been pilfered, and the Dutch came on regardless.

 They set three warships alight, and captured and took away two others, including the 82-gun Royal Charles – the pride of the navy, the ship that had brought Charles II back from exile.    It was, considered the diarist John Evelyn, ‘a dishonour never to be wiped off’, and was perhaps Britain’s greatest ever naval humiliation.

Bird strikes and an anniversary

It seems that a bird strike brought down the US Airways passenger jet which the pilot managed to land with such skill on the Hudson river in New York City yesterday. Mercifully no one was killed. America’s Federal Aviation Administration says it received nearly 76,000 reports of bird strikes between 1990 and 2007, and the incidents resulted in a total of 11 deaths. Last November, a Ryanair 737 had to make an emergency landing at one of Rome’s airports after birds had been sucked into one of the engines. There were only minor injuries.

The worst accident involving a bird strike came in 1960 when an Eastern Airlines flight hit a flock of starlings just after take-off from Boston in the United States damaging all four engines. It crashed into the sea killing 62 people out of 71 on board.

On this day......647 years ago. On January 16, 1362, the Grote Mandrenke or “great drowning of men” carried off at least 25,000 people, as a massive Atlantic gale caused floods in England, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.