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George, you wrote:
"So what Sobel did, unforgivably, was to relate such an implausible legend
as a fact."

UNFORGIVABLY. lol. IMPLAUSIBLE lol. You do enjoy hyperbole, George. But
let's get back to facts

How do you declare it all so implausible? How do you KNOW? Merely because
Gould said "yeah, right, i don't buy it" albeit, in Latin? The whole point
that I was getting at last week was how do we KNOW what is fact and what is
not in the terrible tale of the shipwrecks on the Scillies in 1707. You
weren't there (were you?). I wasn't there. Dava Sobel wasn't there. Hell,
Rupert Gould wasn't there...! So what really happened. It's well worth
exploring considering that the 300th anniversary is coming up so soon...

George, I think your biggest problem with the whole "back story" (what I
have recently called the social side of the legend) is that you personally
simply had never encountered it before you read Sobel's book. It was, as I
have said, very commonly told just the way she described it in the 1970s and
80s and probably before. Can you, George, cite examples of historians of
science, or historians of astronomy, or nautical astronomy, or whatever (!)
who told the story much as Sobel did, or do you confirm my suspicion that
the entire 'social side' of the thing was new to you before you read
"Longitude"?

The next step, of course, after we have enumerated the legendary details, is
to consider how one would actually verify or falsify the components of the
legend of the shipwreck of Admiral Shovell. There is, in fact, a process for
dealing with legends and the underlying facts. This process has been applied
to the Shovell story... a suprisingly long time ago [anyone?? it is (some of
it) on google books...]

 -FER


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