The Age of Sail and Steam - The Science of Navigation - page 180

FIGURE 7.7. The Scilly Isles naval disaster of 1707, as depicted by an unknown
eighteenth-century artist. Wikipedia.
Académie Royale des Sciences o√ered a valuable Prix Rouillés for naviga-
tion a year later.
The inability to estimate longitude at sea was not merely an inconve-
nience; it was dangerous. Many a ship had been lost at sea through the
crew's ignorance of their true position. Most infamous of these losses, and
the immediate spur to the creation of the Board of Longitude and the
Longitude Prize in Britain, was the disaster of 1707, one of the greatest in
British naval history. A large fleet of 21 warships, under the command of
the ludicrously named Sir Cloudesley Shovell, was returning home to
England from Gibraltar. In bad weather and with very poor visibility, the
fleet ran aground on the rocks of the Scilly Isles, a group of islands to the
west of Cornwall in the extreme southwest of England. Four ships foun-
dered, including three ships of the line (fig. 7.7). The total number of dead
was estimated at between 1,400 and 2,000, including the commander-in-
chief, whose body was washed up on shore and recovered a few days
afterward. A government inquiry concluded that the reason for the disaster
was the pilots' lack of knowledge of their true position owing to their
inability to accurately estimate longitude.
The Board of Longitude was set up as a direct consequence of this
disaster, to oversee and judge potential solutions to the problem that were