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Geoff, you wrote:
"Can anyone shed any light on this - or is it another popularized myth, like
the hanged seaman story?  Perhaps the act of heaving-to to take soundings
was interpreted by non-seafaring authors as evidence of the need for a chat!"

I don't think there's any hard evidence of such a discussion but it would have 
been an ordinary thing to do. There's a comment somewhere in the writings of 
Pepys where he is amazed by the amount of discussion among a vessel's 
officers and their confusion over position whenever a vessel is about to 
enter the English Channel. He was writing some years before that shipwreck. 
There were "Captains" to spare aboard the Association that night. They would 
have discussed their estimates of position. 

As for the hanged seaman, the hanging emerged from tales told in the Scillies 
in the early 19th century. Notes from shortly after the shipwreck tell a 
story of a common sailor doubting the navigation who was ridiculed but not 
hanged. In the earliest versions of the story, this sailor is said to have 
smelled something distinct (seaweed fires?) that informed him that the fleet 
was perilously close to the Scillies. Sailing by the smell of land would 
today be considered an "indigenous" method of navigation, not something that 
western Europeans would use, but this was 300 years ago, and I don't think 
it's implausible. By the end of the 19th century, this aspect of th story was 
changed to a common sailor "keeping his own account". I suspect this was the 
influence of nineteenth century scientific navigation having almost 
completely replaced the old "indigenous" techniques. Of course, it's highly 
unlikely that he could have kept his own account. 

-FER




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