On the night of October 22, 1707, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell's fleet was making for the mouth of the English Channel, home from a failed attempt on Toulon. It had sounded ninety fathom that morning and lain by through the afternoon; at six Shovell made sail again in hazy weather, believing the Channel lay open. Around eight several ships signaled danger at once. The flagship Association struck the Gilstone rock off Scilly, and Josiah Burchett, Secretary of the Admiralty, wrote that in less than two minutes there was not any thing of his Ship seen. The Eagle and the Romney went down nearby; one man came off the Romney alive, her quartermaster, a butcher by trade. Nobody ever counted the dead; Royal Museums Greenwich puts the toll above 1,300.
The fleet had not sailed blind: latitude was taken on fifteen of the passage's twenty-two days. Burchett blamed Shovell for making sail in the dark; W. E. May, working through forty-four surviving logbooks in 1960, found two things wrong at once. The observing was loose — the latitudes recorded across the fleet spread by twenty-five and a half miles on average, and no officer allowed for magnetic variation. What they were checked against was wrong too: the pilot books laid the Lizard and Scilly nearly five leagues, fifteen miles, too far north, and the manuals disagreed on the longitude of Cape Spartel. Edmond Halley had warned in 1700 that both faults pushed the same way: north of Scilly, into the Bristol Channel. Every check was a comparison against a figure nobody had verified, and a false standard confirms the error instead of catching it.
The Longitude Act of 1714 is usually told as Parliament's answer to that night. The record does not support it: nobody in 1707 is known to have blamed longitude, and the first known link is a pamphlet by William Whiston and Humphry Ditton, lobbying for the bill in June 1714, when it was already before a committee. What the Act did was price a testable claim, scaled to how well it could be verified — ten thousand pounds for fixing longitude at sea to within one degree of a great circle, sixty geographical miles; fifteen thousand to two-thirds of that distance; twenty thousand to half.
The story most people know is false. It says a sailor worked out that the fleet was off course, warned Shovell, and was hanged from the yardarm for it. No contemporary account contains any such episode: not Burchett; not the notes a salvage agent made on St Mary's in 1709; not the history of the islands a garrison officer published in 1750. The antiquary James Herbert Cooke, reviewing the records in 1883, called it a ridiculous legend and could cite nothing older than an 1864 article for it. A popular history of the longitude problem repeated the hanging as fact in 1995.
Nobody had to be a villain for more than a thousand men to die. The fleet checked its position, loosely, and against charts that were wrong; a false reference does not fail loudly, it agrees with you. A position is either verifiable or it is a guess dressed up as a fact — exactly where the rocks off Scilly were, whether or not the chart had them there.