Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell

Position: 49°51’49.7″N 6°24’34.4″W

Let’s continue our periodic series on famous sea captains with a portrait of Sir Cloudesley Shovell. Not the retro-Metal band, but the man behind history’s greatest name for an Admiral. A snappy name is not, however, the basis of his fame. Nor is his notoriety based on his early years as an eager rating making his ambitious and rapid way up the greasy pole of naval promotion.

Born in 1650 in modest circumstances, Shovell went to sea at 13 as a lowly cabin boy. He gained notice after a few watery fits of derring-do. His family would recount the tale of their 17-year-old lad swimming between two English warships battling the Dutch Navy with orders clenched in his teeth. Back then, sailor’s superstition held swimming was bad luck. Swimming invited sinking.

Rising to captain in 1677, he sailed HMS Sapphire to the Mediterranean and defended Tangiers from Salé raiders. Returning to England at the end of the 1680s, Shovell patrolled the Irish Sea from the Scilly Isles (aka the Scillies) to the coast of Ireland. Thrashing the French Fleet during the battle of Bantry Bay in 1689 earned him a knighthood and promotion to Rear Admiral the following year. Dabbling in politics, Sir Cloudesley served as Member of Parliament for Rochester for a term before his promotion to full Admiral in 1702.

Short List

His portrait shows a confident, well-fed man and the kind of leader with high expectations of his crew. I’d venture he would never expect anyone to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. That particular list would have been exceedingly short. After battling the Dutch, the Irish, the French and the Spaniards on Europe’s seas for forty years, Shovell was widely regarded as one of the finest sailors and navigators of his age. Yet, despite his rollicking naval resumé and political success, none of his early heroics were quite enough to overcome his ignominious fate.

Scilliness

In January 1705 he ascended to Admiral of the Fleet. Two years later he was back at sea for the Spanish War of Succession. Shovell led a fleet of 22 ships from his flagship HMS Association to the Mediterranean and engaged the French at Toulon. The French proved unengaging. Frustrated, the navy ordered Sir Cloudesley back to England. After passing the Bay of Biscay in a series of gales, the weather on October 21, 1707, lifted long enough for the fleet captains to take a latitude sight and correlate that with soundings of 93-130 fathoms (1 fathom = 6 feet, or 182.88cm). Together the measurements indicated they were approximately 200 miles W-SW of the Scillies.

The fleet sailed on towards the English Channel, heaving to (stopping) at 16:00 on October 22 to take soundings. The weather had deteriorated and taking a latitude sight wasn’t possible. Nevertheless, satisfied with their progress, at 18:00 Shovell gave the order to sail on – directly towards the rocks of the Isles of Scilly. At 20:00 HMS Association ran hard aground on Outer Gilstone Rock. The ship took three minutes to sink and 800 men went down with her. In total, four ships, an estimated 2,000 men and Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell were cast into Neptune’s cold embrace that night.

Crypto

Sharp readers might be tempted to embroider a conspiracy theory out of the event. It has all the necessary threads of truth. Had an admiral of Shovell’s stature drowned today, terabytes of speculation would have stuffed Google’s hard drives fuller than a six-pack of Nathan’s hotdogs. Trolls would concoct something about how the French paid him off with millions in Bitcoin to do a job they couldn’t do themselves. After all, his fleet foundered on the Scillies. An area that Cloudesley had patrolled for two years and knew well. Perhaps his knowledge and experience gave him more confidence than it should have.

Local legend tells us the plucky Admiral swam to shore. A woman scouring the beach for plunder stumbled across our exhausted hero as he lay prostrate like a stranded manatee. Examining his body she took an immediate fancy to his large emerald ring. Rather than fight him for it, she instead suffocated him with a couple of handfuls of wet sand. A few minutes later the prize was hers without argument. Today, a small white column stands where Sir Cloudesley burbled his last bubble for the sake of a bauble. (🙄 – ed.)

It was and remains the Royal Navy’s greatest loss of ships and men in a single incident. The sheer scale of the disaster coming at the hands of a expert sailor and navigator could not be brushed off as bad luck or mere drunken incompetence. Something had to be done to improve navigation at sea. More specifically, how to accurately calculate longitude.

Jacob’s Staff

Early in the 18^th century treading the well-trod waters around England was carried out through a combination of latitude sights, depth soundings, and dead reckoning.

The ability to measure one’s position north or south of the equator (latitude) has been known since at least 325 BCE. Latitude can be measured by observing the angle of the sun or stars with something as crude as a cross-staff or Jacob’s staff (see illustration). The problem was knowing where you were east to west, i.e., your longitude.

Plumbing the Depths

Nearing the Scilly Isles, Shovell’s fleet knew it was heading into shallower waters because they made soundings. In other words, they dropped a lead weight with a bit of tallow on it overboard and measured the amount of line let out. Sand and pebbles would stick to the tallow (beef fat) confirming the leadsman had indeed struck bottom.

On Aleta we use our sonar depth sounder to help verify where we should be. If the depth of the water indicated on the chart roughly matches the depth sounder’s reading, we take that as a win. If the chart and sonar don’t agree and we are in unexpectedly shallow water, general panic breaks out until the calming hand of the captain takes the helm and steers Aleta back to safety. (🙄 – ed.)

The Short and the Long of It

Dead reckoning is just what it sounds like. Briefly, you take a sight (if you can), make a sounding (if you can), keep an eye on your log (speedometer) and maintain a heading using your compass. All the while feeling for currents and watching your stern wake for drift. Sailing in a known direction at a known speed for a measured amount of time (an hourglass will do nicely) allows for a simple calculation of estimated position. At night and in cloudy weather you are at the mercy of nature, your fallible instincts and faulty mathematics. Despite keeping within sight of each other, log position entries from the surviving ships of Shovell’s fleet varied by as much as 40 miles.

Longitude on the other hand cannot be observed directly and requires a lot of complex math to get right. Just ask my uncle. It also requires knowing the precise time in Greenwich, England, however far away you are. On a creaking, pitching ship sailing around the far side of the world, such technology simply did not exist in 1707. To its credit, the British government understood the problem and passed the Longitude Act in 1714 to solve it. The act offered a prize of £20,000 (equivalent to about £3 million today) to anyone who could devise a practical and reliable method of finding longitude at sea. That, as they say, is another story. Read: Longitude – by Dava Sobel.

By Jeeves!

If you visit Westminster Abbey, head to the south choir aisle. There, not far from P.G. Wodehouse, you will find the mortal remains of Sir Cloudesley. His extravagantly carved memorial was hewn from solid marble at the behest of Queen Anne. His was a courageous life, but his death was, perhaps, his greatest contribution to Queen and Country. By fetching up on the rocks he instigated the development of accurate mechanical timekeeping and the reliable calculation of longitude. Within a hundred and fifty years of his death Britannia ruled the waves and eventually held dominion over a quarter of the Earth.

Notes

• Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell / Rise Above Records
• Cloudesley Shovell – Wikipedia
• Scilly naval disaster of 1707 – Wikipedia
• Shovell and the Longitude | Crayford History
• Sir Clowdisley Shovell | Westminster Abbey
• The British shipwreck that changed the world – BBC Travel
• A Fateful Emerald: The Story of Sir Cloudesley Shovell – Hastings Independent Press

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