She lost her masts in a violent storm in the English Channel, and was driven onto the rocks below a cliff on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, England.

The vicar of nearby Worth Matravers recorded the event in his parish register: On the 4th, 5th and 6th day of January, a remarkable snow storm, sometimes a hurricane, with the wind at south.

On the latter day, at two in the morning, the Halsewell East Indiaman, 758-tons burthen, commanded by Captain Richard Pierce, bound for Bengal, was lost in the rocks between Seacombe and Winspit quarries in this parish.

[2] On her second voyage the Halsewell left Portsmouth on 11 March 1783, stopped at São Tiago and Johanna and reached Madras on 26 July 1783.

At the end of December the passengers boarded at the Hope, including a sizable contingent of soldiers being sent as reinforcements to the East India Company.

[3] The wind died the next day, offshore from the Dunnose headland on the south east of the Isle of Wight, becalming the ship.

[6] The crew managed to turn to a westward course, but found that they were running towards shore so changed back to an eastward course, hoping to round Peverel Point and anchor in Studland Bay.

[13] The ship had struck at the foot of a tall and near-vertical cliff near Seacombe, on the Isle of Purbeck, between Peverel point and St. Alban's head.

The passengers and officers, numbering almost fifty people, including three black women and two soldiers' wives, took refuge in the round-house (cabin).

[19] It was reported that the "rapacious plunderers on the sea coast ... are so devoid of humanity as to strip the bodies of the dead as soon as the waves have thrown them on the shore."

Opening just three weeks after the tragedy, the new show included an "exact, awful and tremendous Representation of that lamentable event".

[28][b] To commemorate the event, Augustus Frederic Christopher Kollmann composed "The shipwreck, or the Loss of the East Indiaman Halsewell", an orchestral symphony.

[29] Henry James Pye published a poem that began, What language can describe, what colours shew, Each varied form of terror and of woe?

With pallid features, and dishevell'd hair, In all the agony of dumb despair, Here on the deck the wretched victim lies, And views approaching death with lifted eyes, Here piercing cries, drown'd by the founding main, Invoke an abient mother's aid in vain.

In February 1787 the County Magazine published a poem by George Smith that began, What dreadful scenes on Albion's rocks!

[32] The idea of the father with his two daughters waiting in the roundhouse for their fate, and the scene of the cave below the sheer cliff, added drama to the story.

"[36] Charles Dickens wrote a short story called "The Long Voyage" that recalled the shipwreck, published in 1853.

[37] An 1856 account said that some old people of the region still remembered the wreck, and that sometimes fragments of the ship's timbers and copper were washed ashore or found in the rocks.

The mounds of four long graves could still be discerned in a flat area nearby where the cliffs were broken by a small valley formed by an intermittent stream.

[19] The wreck lies between two steep hills named East and West Man, midway between the landing places of Seacombe and Winspit (formerly Windspit).

[38] The United Kingdom's Maritime and Coastguard Agency and the Nautical Archaeology Society have been jointly piloting an "Adopt-A-Wreck" plan using the wreck of the Halsewell.