18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 33

[cahn]

And, I mean, it doesn't have to be just 18th century characters, either!

(also, waiting for Yuletide!)

Comments

Scilly naval disaster

[mildred_of_midgard]

So now Eugene and VA are allies, and they wage war against France for many years. In 1707 they try invading Toulon (southern coast of France, west of Savoy, see the zoomed in map above) with British help.

Here's where we connect this discussion to a discussion of a few months ago. The British admiral who's leading the fleet that tries to invade southern France via Toulon, with VA and Eugene, is Admiral Shovell. As soon as I saw that name, I had to check if it was the one I knew, and it was. I haven't told you about him, but he came up in my reading, because...

After the failure to invade France, Shovell has to sail his fleet out of the Mediterranean and back up to England. As the ships get close to England, the weather is really bad. They can't take sightings or soundings to determine where they are, so they get horribly lost. Not in the sense that they're very far away from their destination, but in that they're much, much closer than they think they are. This means they end up in shallow waters, thinking they're in deep waters, and the ships run aground. Four warships with everyone aboard them sink, killing 1,400-2,000 people.

Now, this is presented in the longitude book I read, by Dava Sobel, as a result of the longitude problem not being solved, i.e. they had no way of telling how far east they were. Wikipedia tells me, in contrast, that the ships most likely sank for other reasons, including failure to determine latitude adequately. However,

While no contemporary discussions are known that appear to relate the disaster specifically to the longitude problem, the scale of the disaster may have contributed to concern about the problem in general, which ultimately led to the Longitude Act in 1714.

And this is of course the act that led to the events of the longitude book and the invention of Harrison's timekeeping device!

I should add that Sobel, a few pages into the book, also presented stories of the sinking that sounded so apocryphal to me that I immediately stopped reading, checked Wikipedia, and was informed that these stories were unsupported myths that arose decades later. So this immediately told me that the longitude book could not be trusted for history. (Sadly, or perhaps encouragingly considering how many people use it, Wikipedia presents a better sourced and more convincing looking account of this disaster than the published book I read. It even points out that Sobel is reviving discredited myths by presenting them as "unqualified truth" in the book.)

Regardless, it was cool to make a connection and realize that an episode in the two bios I was reading simultaneously, Eugene and Victor Amadeus, were related to an event I knew about from reading up on the longitude problem!

Also. Up to 2000 people dying off the coast of the Scilly Isles because the British navy can't tell where it is that close to home, in 1707, came as quite a shock to me. This isn't Amelia Earhart getting lost in the middle of the Pacific, this is the Brits at the Scilly Isles!

Navigation is harder than I thought, it turns out.