Maritime disasters are sadly not unusual and the UN estimates there are around three million shipwrecks littering the ocean floor. Here we have selected some of the most poignant stories about the famous ships that have been claimed by the seas through time.  

More than 900 years ago, William, the only legitimate son of Henry I of England, was returning from France with a huge entourage. At Normandy, they boarded the White Ship, a state-of-the-art vessel on its maiden voyage. William requested wine be brought on board and soon the whole party was roaring drunk. They set sail at midnight, hit a rock and sank quickly in the English Channel. The heir to the throne and the cream of English aristocracy – around 300 people in total – drowned and it's been called the Titanic of its day.

Probably built in around 1510-11, the Mary Rose was one of Henry VIII’s naval fleet and said to be the king's favourite ship during her 34 years of service. Heavily armed with a crew of 400-500 men she saw frequent action against the French. Then in 1545, the Mary Rose was in the Solent (between Great Britain and the Isle of Wight) when she attempted to make a sharp turn. A strong gust blew the ship over and, as the gun ports were open, the ship sank with the loss of almost all onboard. As she went down in only 40 feet (12m) of water, efforts were made at the time to retrieve her but failed.

In the 1960s, archaeologists located the wreck and hundreds of artefacts were recovered. In 1982, the world held its breath as the nearly 500-year-old ship was brought to the surface live on television. She now rests at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, kept constantly moist to preserve the timbers. Around 19,000 fascinating every-day objects are on permanent display there plus the skeletons and facial reconstructions of the tragic crew.

During the 17th century, the Thirty Years War was raging in Europe and King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden knew he needed a strong naval presence in the Baltic. He commissioned the Vasa ship to be built with two gun decks, 64 bronze cannons and a crew of 450 men. On 10 August 1628, the ship set sail on its maiden voyage but only a few metres offshore, as everyone watched, disaster struck and the ship keeled over and sank with the loss of about 150 men.

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In 1962, the ship was salvaged and brought to the surface. The intricately beautiful carvings and miraculous state of preservation were a wonder to behold. However, it was clear that the reason the ship sank was from a fatal flaw in its design. It was so badly constructed that even a light breeze would have knocked it over. Today, however, the Vasa ship takes pride of place as a major attraction at its own museum in central Stockholm.

In May 1845, the British navy sent an expedition to find a northerly route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Sir John Franklin set off with two steamships, the Terror and Erebus, each reinforced with iron to cut through the Arctic ice. The expedition comprised 133 men, state-of-the-art equipment plus three years' worth of the latest invention – tinned food. The ships were last seen in July at Baffin Island, Canada, then disappeared...

The story grabbed the public imagination with Charles Dickens and Mark Twain writing about the mystery. Numerous rescue expeditions were sent out and a timeline has been pieced together from notes left by the men found in strategic places, conversations with Inuit peoples and recent marine archaeology. It seems by 1846, the ships had become trapped in the ice off King William Island, Nunavut, and did not move for two years. The recent hit TV series, The Terror, is based on these harrowing events.

Inuit peoples report hunting expeditions with Crozier and his men in 1849 and 1850. The last evidence of the team was in 1859 when an expedition was sent to the spot where the vessels were last seen, only to discover a small boat and a skeleton of a crew member who likely had abandoned ship. In 2014, the wreck of the Erebus was found and its bell recovered while the Terror was found two years later. In 2019, underwater cameras were sent into HMS Terror and images of the officers’ rooms with plates and glass bottles were discovered.

Undersea treasures: the world's most fascinating shipwrecks

On 5 December 1872, a ghost ship was found sailing 400 nautical miles off the Portuguese Azores islands in the Atlantic Ocean. There were no signs of life on board nor any indications of panic or a struggle, although the only lifeboat was missing. Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs, his wife Sarah, two-year-old daughter Sophia Matilda and six other crew of the merchant ship had simply vanished into thin air. The last log entry was on 25 November. The Mary Celeste remains one of the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

Just weeks after the American Civil War ended in 1865, the SS Sultana paddle-steamer was charged with the task of taking Unionist prisoners of war back home. Although the Sultana was originally intended to transport cotton, Captain James Capp Mason decided to make money by carrying human cargo instead, with the government paying per person onboard. Captain Mason was on the Mississippi river making his way to Missouri when a fault with one of the boilers was discovered. He decided there wasn't time to fix it and pressed on with the lucrative job.

Built in 1850, the SS Pacific was a 225-foot (68.5m) paddle-wheeler which served an important role in the Gold Rush, carrying precious cargo all over the Americas. Her final departure was from Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, on 4 November 1875. That same night, the SS Pacific collided with another ship, and sank within 30 minutes, taking with it almost 300 souls and 4,000 ounces of gold to the bottom of the sea. The shipwreck's location remains elusive, but as of December 2022, a Seattle-based company believes they've found the wreck, and even won the salvage rights to go with their discovery.

Luxury was the watchword on the Titanic. Accommodation was split into three classes with the most opulent rooms and public areas for the first class down to the functional but clean and decent rooms for third class. Many rich and famous names were included among the passengers such John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim. The ship's designer Thomas Andrews and J Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line that commissioned the ship, were also onboard.

Then at 11.40pm on 14 April, off the coast of Newfoundland in the mid-North Atlantic, the ship struck an iceberg. Over the course of nearly three hours, as the ship was going down, people scrambled into the 20 lifeboats but it was soon apparent that they could only carry a small number of the passengers. Even then, due to panic, many boats were not filled. Only 705 people survived that ghastly night. Legend has it, the band stayed on deck and kept playing up to the last.

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While the RMS Titanic is the most famous of White Star Line's vessels, she wasn’t the only ship in her class – the Titanic had two sister ships, the RMS Olympic and the RMS Britannic. While the Olympic served as a passenger liner and warship before being scrapped in 1935, the story of the Britannic saw yet another tragedy befall this trio of siblings. 

HMHS Britannic remained in service until a fateful trip through the Kea Channel in the Aegean Sea. On the morning of 21 November 1916, the Britannic was rocked by an explosion. Nobody knows the exact cause of the sinking. Some believe it was a torpedo, others think it more likely she hit a mine. At the time London's The Observer reported that German forces admitted they torpedoed the ship in the belief she was transferring "fresh troops for our enemies" rather than acting as a hospital ship. 

Discover more about the Britannic's fascinating story here too

The Lancastria sank in under 20 minutes and those who jumped into the water had to swim through miles of oil slick while still avoiding attack by machine guns from the air. About 4,000 men, women and children lost their lives. The scale of the disaster was so great that Winston Churchill ordered a complete news blackout so as not to destroy war-time morale and it was nearly six weeks before the tragedy was reported by the press. 

Find out where to see the world's most famous historic ships today

The Gustloff was ordered to take on refugees and around 10,000 boarded at Gdynia. Although it had not sailed for many years, the ship left harbour at 7pm on 30 January 1945. It was spotted by the Soviet submarine S-13 and three torpedoes were launched. It took an hour to sink but many of the crew were killed in the explosion and much of the life-saving equipment was frozen on deck and could not be used. Only 1,239 people survived and it remains the world’s worst maritime disaster. (Pictured here are German soldiers onboard in 1940).  

Folk singer Gordon Lightfoot wrote a ballad called The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald thus enshrining the ship in popular memory. The Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company commissioned this freighter to work on the Great Lakes in North America and named it after the company president. By 1975, the ship was still working carrying taconite and iron ore. In November that year, a huge storm whipped up and Captain Ernest McSorley messaged that it was the worst seas he had ever experienced.

At 4:10pm the captain made contact again saying, "We are holding our own". Nothing more was ever heard from him or the 29 other crew. A search found some smashed lifeboats, life jackets and debris. The following year, the wreck itself was found and they discovered it had split into two. There are theories as to what happened – maybe the hatches were improperly closed, or it had hit a rock. But the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, immortalised in song, remains a mystery to this day. 

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