Coronation Inshore

Coronation was a large English warship built by Isaac Betts at Portsmouth in 1685 under the thirty-ships building programme begun in 1677. She carried about 90 guns, measured 161 feet by 45 feet and could have a wartime company of 660. At the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690 she flew the flag of Vice-Admiral Sir Ralph Delaval. In September 1691 Captain Charles Skelton commanded her in Admiral Edward Russell's Channel Fleet. After an unsuccessful patrol for the French fleet, worsening weather forced the English and Dutch ships towards Plymouth for shelter.

On 3 September a fierce south-easterly gale caught the fleet near Rame Head. Coronation was trying to round Penlee Point when a serious leak developed. A later naval inquiry thought the end of a plank or another plank joint had opened. Skelton knew of the leak and ordered the masts cut away, an attempt to reduce the wind's force and bring the listing ship upright, but she capsized. Witnesses disagreed even then: one ship reported her overturned miles offshore while another saw wreckage on shore. She may have broken while sinking and drifted in, or struck Penlee Point first and lost a section offshore.

Captain Skelton and roughly 600 men died, making this one of the worst losses in Plymouth's naval history. The exact total cannot now be fixed. Historic England's short history says only 13 survived, while its fuller record says 22 men reached shore and notes that Coronation was not carrying her full company of 660. The local wreck project gives a wider estimate of 17 to 23 survivors. These records agree on the scale of the disaster but not the final roll. No account supports pretending that every name or even the exact number aboard is known.

This inshore part lies off Lady Cove in about five metres of water among rock, shell sand, silt and kelp. Divers found it in 1967. Historic England records a wide scatter containing 64 iron cannon, cannonballs and large bronze pulley wheels marked with the naval broad arrow. Rope survived in the firing hole of one gun, showing that it was ready for use when lost rather than dumped as scrap. Little buried wreck is expected on the bare rock, and later rubbish complicates the site. A protected area was created in 1988 and came into force in 1989; diving or disturbance requires permission.

The wreck joins a nationally important warship to a particular Cornish headland and to the danger of entering Plymouth before its later breakwater existed. Its guns show the scale of a late seventeenth-century battle fleet, while their long trail helps test conflicting eyewitness accounts of the disaster. The inshore site also helped local divers develop careful underwater recording from the late 1960s onward. It is now part of a managed local diving project, but the no-take rule matters: the guns are evidence of how the ship broke apart and the place marks the deaths of hundreds of men.