HMS Association

The Vessel

HMS Association was a 90-gun second-rate ship of the line, the flagship of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell of the Royal Navy Mediterranean Squadron. She had been laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard in 1696, launched in 1697, and was considered by her contemporaries one of the finest English capital ships of her generation. She was 50 metres long on the gun deck, 1,459 tons, and manned at her final voyage by 800 men. Her main armament of twenty-six 32-pound lower-tier guns was the heaviest metal afloat under an English flag.

She was the product of the Royal Navy's late seventeenth-century professionalisation under William III, the moment at which the English navy surpassed both the French and Dutch fleets in tonnage, training, and operational organisation. Her career under Shovell between 1704 and 1707 had been one of the highest-profile flag assignments in the service: she had been present at the capture of Gibraltar in August 1704, at the Battle of Vélez-Málaga that same month, and at the failed allied attempt on Toulon in the summer of 1707.

Her return from the Toulon campaign in autumn 1707 was to be Shovell's triumphal homecoming. The Mediterranean Squadron, 21 ships in all, was under orders to return to Portsmouth by the end of October 1707. The weather through that autumn had been severe across the western Channel approaches. On 21 October 1707 Shovell's fleet was approximately 1,000 kilometres west of Brest, running east-northeast on a course toward Plymouth under topsails in a strengthening southwesterly.

The Voyage

Shovell had personally ordered a council of sailing masters aboard Association on 21 October 1707 to fix the fleet's position by dead reckoning. English navigation in 1707 was based on latitude by meridian altitude of the sun or a polar star, and on longitude by dead reckoning from the last known position. Latitude was reliable to within half a degree; longitude was reliable to perhaps 100 nautical miles on a fourteen-day passage in bad weather.

The sailing masters agreed on a fleet latitude of 49°40′N and a fleet longitude that placed them approximately 80 nautical miles west of Ushant, the French headland at the northwest corner of Brittany. This would have given the fleet clear water for the passage up the English Channel. Shovell accepted the masters' estimate and ordered the fleet to steer east-northeast on a course that should have taken them up the Channel.

The masters' position fix was approximately 80 kilometres in error. The fleet's true position on the evening of 22 October 1707 was some 80 kilometres north-northeast of the estimate, putting them not in the clear water of the Western Approaches but on the approaches to the Isles of Scilly at the western entrance of the English Channel. The Scilly reefs lay directly in their path.

The Disaster

At approximately 20:00 on the evening of 22 October 1707, the lookout aboard Association sighted breaking water directly ahead. The alarm was given; the ship was already too close to the rocks to clear them. Association struck the outer reef of Gilstone Ledge off the Bishop Rock at 20:02. Her hull opened below the waterline and she sank inside four minutes.

Of her 800 crew, none survived the initial impact. Admiral Shovell, his two stepsons Henry and James Narborough, his flag captain Edmund Loades, and the 796 other men aboard Association drowned within sight of the Scilly coast. Shovell's body washed ashore at Porthellick Cove on St Mary's the following morning; local tradition records that he was still alive when he reached the beach and was murdered for the ring on his finger by a local woman who was subsequently remembered in Scilly folklore. His body was preserved for autopsy and eventually buried at Westminster Abbey with full state honours.

Three other Royal Navy ships of the squadron were lost in the same sequence of events: HMS Eagle (70 guns, 380 dead, wrecked at Crim Rocks that night), HMS Romney (48 guns, 300 dead, wrecked at Bishop Rock), and HMS Firebrand (fireship, 24 dead, wrecked at St Agnes). Two other ships of the squadron, HMS Phoenix and HMS La Valeur, ran aground but were refloated with heavy casualties.

The total death toll was between 1,400 and 2,000 English sailors in a single night, the worst peacetime naval disaster in British history at the time and for most of the subsequent century. The Scilly Naval Disaster, as it became known in official Admiralty correspondence, was unprecedented in its scale and in its demonstration of the inadequacy of contemporary navigational methods.

The Legacy

The consequences for English maritime science were profound and lasting. Parliament passed the Longitude Act of 8 July 1714 in direct response to the Scilly disaster and the 1701 loss of HMS Sussex in similar circumstances. The Act established the Board of Longitude and offered a prize of £20,000 (equivalent to approximately £3 million in modern currency) for any person who could produce a practical method of determining a ship's longitude at sea to within half a degree.

The prize was pursued for fifty-eight years by astronomers who attempted to solve the problem by lunar distance method and by mechanical engineers who attempted to solve it by creating a seagoing chronometer. The astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne established the lunar distance method in operational form by 1767 with his Nautical Almanac; the Yorkshire carpenter John Harrison completed the H4 marine chronometer in 1759 and had its performance confirmed by transatlantic trial in 1761-62 and 1764, ultimately being awarded the full prize by Parliament in 1773. The Longitude Act was directly caused by the Scilly disaster; marine chronometry in its modern form was directly caused by the Longitude Act.

The wreck of HMS Association was located on 4 July 1967 by Royal Navy Lieutenant Roy Graham of HMS Drake's diving team at the coordinates given by the 1707 Admiralty inquiry, specifically at Gilstone Ledge, in approximately 30 metres of water. The subsequent salvage, conducted by a Royal Navy-sponsored civilian expedition in July-August 1967, recovered over 2,000 silver coins, 31 gold coins, some ship's fittings, pewter plates, and a fragmentary silver salver bearing Shovell's personal monogram. The recovered material was sold at Sotheby's in July 1969 in one of the most widely-publicised English maritime salvage auctions of the twentieth century.

The publicity around the 1967 salvage and the 1969 auction produced a regulatory backlash that led to the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, the first British legislation dedicated to protecting historic marine sites. The Gilstone Ledge sites, including the remains of Association, were declared protected under the Act in 1974. Subsequent diving on them requires a licence from Historic England. The Protection of Wrecks Act is the reason that modern British maritime archaeology exists as a regulated discipline.

The Association memorial at Porthellick Cove, a rough granite stone marking the place where Shovell's body came ashore, is the only contemporary marker of the disaster. The dead of HMS Association, HMS Eagle, HMS Romney, and HMS Firebrand have no joint monument. Their names are recorded in the muster books of the four ships at The National Archives in Kew; approximately 1,800 names, the cost of the English failure to measure longitude in 1707.