ABSTRACT
Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. He and ROOKE were the two chief fleet commanders during the wars to contain Louis XIV, 1688-1713. Their particular contribution to British maritime supremacy in the eighteenth century was their creation and training of a disciplined fleet rather than the collection of individual ships of the mid-seventeenth century. He died when his flagship, the Association, was wrecked on the Scilly Isles, due to navigational errors arising from the inability to calculate longitude exactly. The resulting determination to solve the problem led to the setting up of the Board of Longitude in 1714.
