How a Marine Disaster Changed the World
My friend and I got lost in thick fog while climbing a mountain in New Zealand. We came across a track, but did not know whether to turn left or right to get to a sheltering hut. We needed another compass bearing to get the answer and, fortunately, the cloud cleared in time for us to do this. The people in this story were not so lucky.
At around 20:00 on 22 October 1707, believing they were off the coast of Brittany and heading into the English Channel, the British fleet ploughed on through darkness and straight into the Western Rocks off the Site of Scilly. The Association, under the command of Captain Edward Loades, struck the Outer Gilstone rock and sank within two minutes. Three other ships – the Eagle, the Romney and the Firebrand – were also wrecked. “The Weather being very hazy and rainy and Night coming on dark…some of them [were] upon the Rocks to the Westward of Scilly before they were aware. Of the Association not a Man was sav’d,” reported the Daily Courant, Britain’s first daily newspaper, at the time. Some 1,450 men were lost across the four ships, with only 24 survivors between them. It remains one of the worst disasters in British maritime history.
So how did the finest seamen of his age – as famous in his day as Lord Nelson was in his, according to Larn – get so completely, and catastrophically, lost? Foul weather didn’t help, nor did the low-lying nature of the Scillies and their fringing reefs, which blend into the water’s surface at night and in poor visibility. Analysis of the log books from the ships that did make it back to London also revealed the fleet’s officers were using charts that misplaced the Isles of Scilly eight nautical miles to the north.
All these issues were compounded by the real problem – that in the early 18th Century, there was no accurate way of determining a ship’s exact longitude (its east–west position) at sea. Sailors used a process called “dead reckoning”, measuring speed, direction and distance to estimate their location. But it was an educated guess at best. Shovell and his officers knew they were aligned with the English Channel but could never have known which side of the Scillies they were.
How was the problem of longitude solved? Read the answer here.
