The unrecorded tragedies of the age of sail

What are some especially tragic episodes in naval history?

The age of sail contains countless ships lost with all hands and no surviving account of what happened, making catastrophe almost an everyday feature of maritime service.

Many losses left neither survivors nor a recovered ship, so even the final sequence of events is unknowable. Their frequency makes them easy to overlook beside named battles and celebrated wrecks. The passage is a reminder that routine seafaring once carried a level of lethal uncertainty very different from modern expectations.