Odd this day
It is, today, the tragic 317th anniversary of the death of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudesley Shovell, shipwrecked off the Isles of Scilly, whose untimely demise was instrumental in turning public opinion in favour of figuring out longitude, and who struggled ashore only to be murdered by a woman who coveted his emerald ring, and confessed to the crime on her deathbed 30 years later.
Except everything after the word ‘Scilly’ there is complete balls.
We’ll come to the circumstances of his demise, and to longitude, in a bit, but first: yes, part of the reason I wanted to write about him was his magnificent name — not least because he lived in The Olden Days When No One Could Spell, and it was sometimes rendered Clowdisley. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
His unusual forename derives from the family name of his maternal grandmother, Lucy Cloudesley, and his uncle Cloudesley Jenkinson.
Anyway, he was born into a gentleman’s family, but not one noted for its wealth, and began his naval career as a 13-year-old cabin boy. He was a midshipman at 21, a lieutenant at 22, and a captain at 26, so: clearly a gifted mariner. He started to be mentioned in dispatches for things like setting fire to Barbary pirate ships in Tripoli harbour, and in a letter from Samuel Pepys to rear-admiral Sir John Narborough, telling him that “his Majesty and my lords are most particularly satisfied” with Shovell’s actions.
In 1691, he married Narborough’s widow (her husband having taken ill at sea and died in 1688). Basically, all went well for him, and he became admiral of the fleet, an MP, and the owner of a big house. Then, in 1707, on his way back from yet another pop at the French, he encountered “ferocious westerly winds and a strong northern current” on the way to Plymouth. Relying on soundings (to calculate the depth of the water) and dead reckoning (basically: where were we the last time we measured latitude, and how fast and in what direction have we been going since; not terribly reliable), Shovell thought they were entering the Channel, safely bound for home. Unfortunately, according to a Royal Museums Greenwich blog:
At about eight in the evening on 22 October, however, the crews on several of the ships spotted rocks and the glow of the St Agnes lighthouse. They were fast approaching the dangerous rocks and reefs surrounding the Isles of Scilly. The ships fired their guns as warnings, but the Association struck the Outer Gilstone Rock and soon sank. The Romney and Firebrand sank on the same rocks, while the Eagle went down off Tearing Ledge.
Worse still, according to Dava Sobel’s Longitude, Shovell:
had been approached by a sailor … who claimed to have kept his own reckoning … during the whole cloudy passage. Such subversive navigation by an inferior was forbidden in the Royal Navy, as the unnamed seaman well knew. However, the danger appeared so enormous, by his calculations, that he risked his neck to make his concerns known to the officers. Admiral Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny on the spot.
The story of him just making it to shore was a popular one for centuries, and even made it, for example, into an earlier DNB:
…but it has been widely regarded as nonsense for some time. Back in 1973, for example, a journal of naval history, The Mariner’s Mirror, published a paper with the splendid title of Improbable Legends Surrounding the Shipwreck of Sir Clowdisley Shovell in which J. G. Pickwell traces the story to
an account by Edmund Herbert … [who] appears to have written his account while living on St Mary’s having gone there in 1709 … in an unsuccessful attempt to salvage property from ships lost in the disaster … only reasonably trustworthy records were the log-books of the ships that escaped destruction but, of course, these would not have been available to Herbert. Written some two years after the event, Herbert’s account must, therefore, have been largely, if not entirely, compiled from rumours and hearsay. It is not surprising that it contains errors and, consequently, cannot be relied upon.
Which, as you can probably tell, is academic speak for “this fucker made it all up”. There was also, apparently, a chest near the body containing the great man’s treasure, which was, in reality,
a tin box which was found in Shovell’s pocket
…and Shovell’s murder
appears to be an old wives’ tale … the only evidence in support of the story is a letter … in the possession of the Earl of Romney. Unfortunately … there is no trace of it among the family papers … [even though, supposedly] it was sent by the second Lord Romney to a Captain Locker between 1732 and 1736, and revealed how a dying woman on St Mary’s had confessed to a clergyman that she had murdered Shovell for the sake of his valuables.
As Pickwell points out:
the existence of the letter would have meant that at least three people knew of the alleged murder — the minister who had failed to keep the confession to himself, and Lord Romney and Captain Locker, neither of whom had any reason to keep it secret. It can be assumed, therefore, that knowledge of the supposed murder would have been widespread, especially in Scilly, yet it is, perhaps, significant that three histories of the islands … written between about fifteen and sixty years after the letter, give no hint that Shovell may have met his death by any other means than drowning.
And then there’s the question of longitude. Back to the RMG blog:
Nicholas Rodger’s Command of the Ocean (2004), for instance, states very succinctly that Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s death ‘caused a profound shock, and led in due course to the 1714 Longitude Act’, while a 2007 guide to the Royal Observatory talked of ‘the public outcry’ to which ‘Parliament responded’ in 1714.
…and, of course, Longitude cites the story in its opening section as an example of a maritime disaster which might have been averted had the problem been solved sooner. While there was public mourning at the death of a great naval hero, though, the RMG blos says there is a distinct
lack of evidence for any public discussion of the 1707 disaster in relation to navigation or longitude.
The first mention of Shovell in relation to the Bill which offered a reward for figuring out the longitude problem came in 1714, the year of the Bill, and the day before a parliamentary debate about it. It’s in a flyer publicising one of the proposed methods which only mentions the disaster as the tenth in a list of 11 reasons for supporting their solution (firing rockets to warn ships, as it happens).
It was a remarkable thing for such a naval hero and experienced seafarer to come to grief so close to home, though. Perhaps this is why other legends have grown up around it — people feel that a simple accident, or terrible conditions, can’t be enough to explain it on their own.
(Not that the real story isn’t without odd coincidences. One of the other 1,300 men who perished that day, for example, was Shovell’s stepson, who had inherited a baronetcy, and was therefore named Sir John Narborough, just like his father).
Some details of the story of Shovell and Scilly are true. It’s said he was buried there, and he was, temporarily — then exhumed, embalmed, and installed in “an elaborate monument in very questionable taste” in Westminster Abbey.
It may be by the great Grinling Gibbons, but I think the author of that entry in the DNB had a point. I mean…
…what the hell is going on there?
