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Treasure hunters, no doubt, but I wonder if the author of the quote made a mistake. Farrell, Nigel, An Island Parish. A Summer on Scilly is not accessible on the web, so I can't check. HMS_Association_(1697) also says "for fear of attracting bounty hunters," and attributes it to Farrell, but not as a direct quote. --Akhilleus (talk) 04:22, 10 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The same user added it to Association's page. I've changed it to treasure hunters as this is the more accepted terminology, Bounty hunters are something quite different. I've also read, but cannot now remember where, a refutation of the story of the sailor of Shovell's flagship who argued the location and was hanged for his efforts, as being some lurid and dramatic later invention. Since all aboard Association were lost, where has this story come from, who could know what had transpired? Obviously a later fabrication. Benea (talk) 00:05, 11 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The term "bounty hunters" is indeed used by Farrell, but I agree that "treasure hunters" is more appropriate here. As for the story of the sailor of Shovell's flagship who argued the location and was hanged, it is still being told and very much associated with the disaster. However, it is a story (see also the valid point made by Benea) and is therefore clearly marked as a "legend" in the article. Thanks for your contributions, Cyan22 (talk) 01:20, 11 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I am thinking of re-working this section a bit, in particular to bring in more about latitude errors. The statement "No contemporary discussions are known that appear to have related the disaster to either navigation or longitude" is only half true. There are no mentions of longitude, but there are of latitude, specifically that the fleet was too far north. This was a known problem for ships heading into the channel before the 1707 disaster. Edmund Halley, no less, published a warning to navigators in 1700 which began "For several years last past it has been observed that many Ships bound up the Channel, have by mistake fallen to the Northward of Scilly, and run up the Bristol Channel or Severn Sea, not without great danger, and the loss of many of them." He attributes this to two causes: Errors in the charts and navigation books, which place the Scillies and the Lizard between 10 and 20 miles too far north; and the failure of navigators to adjust for magnetic variation, which was 7.5 degrees W at the time, and would lead to a course more northerly than intended (http://www.jstor.org/stable/102790). He recommends a latitude of 49 deg 40 N as providing safe clearance for the Scillies and the Lizard. Burchett in 1720 (so not quite contemporary but well within living memory) writes "I cannot but have a lively idea of the dangers fleets are exposed to upon entering the British Channel, when coming from foreign parts, but more especially when their officers have not the advantage of knowing their latitude by a good observation" (my emphasis). He describes his own experience of narrowly missing the Scillies in a Dutch ship coming into the channel some years earlier (https://archive.org/details/completehistoryo00burc). Simply looking at a chart, knowing that the fleet was on an Easterly course (actually E by N according to the reports) it's pretty clear that they were too far north. The only way a longitude error could have been a cause is if they thought they were already safely past the Scillies and the Lizard. But the depths there are less than 50 fathoms, not the 90 they had where they hove-to. I'll start by adding a map which shows the approximate route of the fleet from Spartel to the Scillies, based on the log-book observations of surviving ships (published by May, 1960). By the way, the story of the consultation as to the fleet's position is almost certainly one of the myths and legends, as pointed out by Pickwell (1973). While there was time to bring the masters onto the flagship while they were hove-to, launching the boats in heavy seas would have been a significant operation and would have been reported in the log-books, many of which have survived, and do record earlier visits to the Association. All comments welcome. Kognos (talk) 13:03, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I've made the changes to the section suggested above. I will need to also modify the myths section to refer to the supposed council of masters. Kognos (talk) 12:03, 18 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'm now looking at this section. I think it would be helpful to bring some of the text from the original sources into the main narrative, and add some detail, in particular from: Marcus, G.J. (1957). "Sir Clowdisley Shovel's last passage". Journal of the Royal United Service Institution. 102: 540–548. This is a very detailed source which uses original records, data from the surviving logs, some Admiralty sources not cited elsewhere, and more recent commentaries. I'll also remove the comment about error of longitude, which is dealt with in the Longitude and Latitude section. Kognos (talk) 18:30, 18 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
