Next message: Frank Reed: "Sea trials of Huygens' clocks"
From a short article on the history of the longitude problem in the Journal
of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada -- after outlining the early
stages of the quest for longitude, the author writes:
"Meanwhile, more and more ships ploughed the seas in dismal ignorance of
their positions. Not only were valuable cargoes forever being lost in
shipwrecks, but the toll in lives was appalling. There was Sir Cloudsley Shovel, for
instance, returning to England from Gibraltar in 1707 and running into heavy
weather. His navigators all agreed the fleet was off Ushant, although an
ordinary seaman had the temerity to advise his superiors that he reckoned
otherwise. While he was being sentenced to swing from the yardarm for his mutinous
attitude, the fleet sailed in accordance with the navigator's decree, ran
head-on into the Scilly Isles and lost four ships and two thousand lives, Sir
Cloudsley's among them. Some solution had to be found."
And from there, the author describes how this tragedy influenced Parliament
to offer the Longitude Prize. I am posting this because it was written in
1974 --TWO DECADES before Sobel's "Longitude". Just a little documentation to
support my comment that I had heard the story, told in much the same way, over
25 years ago. Note that this was not my source from back then. It's yet
another re-telling.
The rest of the article is interesting. You can find it on ADSABS by using
"Cloudsley" as a search term.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/advanced_fulltext_service.html
And if you use the more common spelling "Clowdisley", you will find two very
nice articles "Navigation and Astronomy - II: The Last Three Hundred Years"
from 1981 by Derek Howse, which I've read before, and "The Board of Longitude
1714-1828" from 1989 by Peter Johnson, which I haven't seen before.
-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
