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“The Isles of Scilly are just off the Cornish coast, but are in every way a world of their own. A natural wonder, like a collection of precious marine jewels, where nature flourishes and the soul is inspired â€, this is how the locals describe the collection of small islands southwest of England today.
This is not how the Royal Navy would have described it on the terrible night of October 22nd, 1707, when a British fleet of 21 British warships headed for Portsmouth, England’s home port on England’s south coast, made the wrong turn.
Due to poor navigation they were too far north and turned too late. In the dark of night and stormy seas, four of the ships crashed into some of the many rocks and reefs that line the waters around the Isles of Scilly Archipelago.
One ship after the other was about to sink, while the rest of the ships either ran aground or managed to avoid a catastrophe.
By dawn, more than 2,000 men and a number of female passengers had died – including Fleet Admiral Cloudisley Shovell and 800 aboard his 94-gun flagship, the HMS Association.
Hit by towering waves, his ship sank in minutes. Corpses littered the waters.
Nobody survived.
Cloudisley Shovell was born in Norfolk in 1650 and his family was landed and respected – if not well off. His unusual name comes from his maternal grandmother, Lucy Cloudisley.
At the age of 12, he went to sea as a cabin boy under the care of Admiral Sir Christopher Myngs, a relative on his father’s side.
Young Shovell saw sea battles quickly. In the Four Day War (1666) against the Dutch, he volunteered to swim to each ship while the cannons blazed and an urgent call for help – he carried the dispatches in his mouth.
Cannon smoke helped hide it from enemy fire.
Despite the youngster’s heroism, it was too late for help and the British had to retreat into the fog.
His mentor Admiral Myngs was wounded and died a few days later in England.
After the Admiral’s death, he remained at sea in the care of Rear Admiral Sir John Narborough, who promoted him to midshipman at the age of 17.
His next sea service was serving on the flagship of the Duke of York – the future King James II.
For the next 30 years, Shovell rose to the ranks of the Royal Navy – and served with great honors.
The last half of the 17th century was a tough time for Britain – and for Shovell:
The European powers vied for empire, military conflicts broke out everywhere, the British built a fleet to outperform the other powers, and there was unrest in the English monarchy.
King James II, a Catholic, was deposed and Parliament invited the Protestant William of Orange and his wife Mary to take over the British crown – with Shovell switching his allegiances from James, whom he served at sea, to William, who was him knighted.
Slavery and piracy were widespread, and witchcraft, heresy or treason were still punished by hanging or burning at the stake in Britain, Europe and colonial America.
A brilliant time in Shovell’s life during those troubling years was the marriage of Elizabeth Hill, Lady Narborough (1661-1732), widow of his former commandant and benefactor Admiral Narborough, who had two sons – Sir John and James, both junior naval officers.
When Admiral Shovell returned to England with a fleet of 21 ships in October 1707 after assisting European allies in an attack on Toulon in France – west of the French Riviera – he likely believed that he had cannon fire at the port and then the wounded and exhausted troops was a success and that he would receive ample praise on his return to England.
It was hardly a victory, however. He was not there in time to destroy the 46 French warships in the port of Toulon. They have already been sunk on the orders of Louis XIV, who wanted to make them afloat again after the war.
Shovell’s flotilla stopped in Gibraltar and then headed for the Bay of Biscay before turning north towards the English Channel.
The weather worsened along the way, and Shovell called a council of officers. One of them said they were off course. He was outvoted and Shovell decided the course for the fleet.
The officer was right and Shovell was wrong.
Bad weather prevented star sightings, so navigation had to be based on dead reckoning and depth sounding by placing weighted lines.
As they approached southern England, they miscalculated their position and turned too late to face the English Channel.
Under dark skies, turbulent seas, rain squalls and strong winds, the fleet unknowingly steered into a disaster on the Isles of Scilly.
One story – never proven – has it that an unnamed seaman offered Admiral Shovel his opinion that they had gone off course and was hanged from the yard for his insolence.
Around 8 p.m. Shovell’s flagship HMS Association hit Gilstone Reef in Scilly’s Western Rocks area – about 30 miles southwest of Land’s End in Cornwall.
Within three or four minutes, the Association sank with the loss of all 800 on board – including Admiral Shovell, his two step-sons, and the Admiral’s Greyhound.
The warships Eagle, Romney and Firebrand sailing behind them met a similar fate.
The death of about 2,000 people made it one of the worst disasters in Royal Navy history.
No one was punished for the tragedy on Scilly Isles following an Admiralty investigation and court martial as most of the potential witnesses died in the disaster.
Admiral Shovell’s body washed up on the beach at Porthellick Cove on St. Mary’s Island 7 miles from sinking, causing a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
According to reports, a local woman found the admiral and he was still alive – but hardly. When she noticed that he was wearing an exquisite emerald ring that his close friend Captain James Lord Dursley had given him, she murdered him by choking him in the sand and then stealing the ring.
When his body was clearly identified by the Purser of HMS Arundel, who knew him well, he noticed that the ring was missing and reported it.
The island authorities opened an investigation but found nothing.
Shovell’s widow, Elizabeth, offered a hefty reward to anyone who made the ring. As the story goes, the woman was silent and kept the ring, fearing that her crime would be exposed.
Thirty years later she is said to have stood on a clergyman’s deathbed, which she had done, and given him the ring. He gave it to the Earl of Berkeley to return to the Shovell family, but they said they never got the ring.
This story has another mystery: how did Admiral Shovell’s body and that of his two step-sons, Sir John Narborough and brother James, and the Association’s captain, Edmund Loades, reach St Mary’s beach so quickly?
One suspicion is that the men survived the wreck and were at least temporarily able to save themselves in one of the small boats of the HMS Association that carried the current closer to the island. Then they drowned trying to get ashore – except maybe the admiral.
Locals temporarily buried the disaster victims in the sand.
When news of the tragedy reached England, Queen Anne ordered that Shovell’s body be returned to England in full honor for a proper burial. They dug the body out of the beach and took it to Plymouth, where it was embalmed and then taken to London.
His final resting place is in Westminster Abbey.
The two step-sons are buried in the old town church of St. Mary.
For 260 years the HMS Association lay in its watery grave on Gilstone Reef. Then in 1967, 12 divers from the minesweeper HMS Puttenham found the wreck, parts of which were scattered at depths of 30 to 120 feet. First they found a cannon, then 2,000 other artifacts, including silver and gold coins – most of which were auctioned off by Sotheby’s.
The Isles of Scilly have long been a graveyard for ships, and before law and order existed, salvaging ships wrecked on their treacherous rocks and reefs was a welcome homework for the people who lived there.
Today the Scillies are a popular tourist destination.
“Everything looks and feels very different on Scilly – simpler, friendlier, more innocent,†say the islanders. “Life moves at an easier pace.”
Not on that fateful October night, 1707.
• • •
Contact Syd Albright at [email protected].
• • •
Admiral Schaufel …
Fleet Admiral Sir Cloudisley Shovell was born in Norfolk in 1650 and went to sea for the first time in 1664. Family tradition has it that, as a boy during the Second Dutch War, he carried dispatches in his mouth and swam through enemy fire. He served with Sir John Narborough and after his death married his widow Elizabeth. He fought the Berber Pirates, was knighted, promoted to admiral, and helped capture Gibraltar before becoming admiral of the fleet in 1705 – just two years before his death in the Isles of Scilly.
– Westminster Abby
Wreck of the HMS Association …
In 1966, divers of the Naval Air Command Sub Aqua Club dived in poor diving conditions in the HMS Association’s sinking area, but found nothing. They found the wreck the following year and have since recovered more than 2,000 artifacts on Gilstone Ledge at depths of 9 to 120 feet – including gold and silver coins, an 18 pounder bronze cannon, and a 19 foot 6 anchor that could have been the association.
Tragedy produces navigation invention …
The Isles of Scilly disaster seven years later led to a search for better navigational instruments. The Longitude Act of 1714 established a chalkboard that offered a reward to anyone who invented a navigational instrument that would accurately measure longitude. The price ranged from £ 10,000 to £ 10,000 (around £ 1.5 million to £ 3 million today) depending on the accuracy. Watchmaker John Harrison won the award.
Funeral at Westminster Abbey …
The Royal Navy Admiral, Sir Cloudisley Shovell, who lost his life in the Isles of Scilly Disaster, is buried in Westminster Abbey. He has a lot of company. There are 3,000 more buried there, including Charles Darwin, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickins, King Edward the Confessor and David (“Dr. Livingston, I assume?”) Livingston. The last monarch buried there was George II. Kings and queens are not buried together.
Isles of Scilly …
Isles of Scilly: A group of 50 granite islands – five of them inhabited – lying 30 miles from Land’s End in Cornwall and having a population of just over 2,000. The largest islands are St. Mary’s and Tresco. Belonging to Tavistock Abbey in the Middle Ages, the islands passed to the Godolphin family, then to the Crown in 1933. Piracy, destruction and smuggling were not unknown before gardening and tourism gained the upper hand.
– John A. Cannon, Oxford Press
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