Scilly Naval Disaster
- When
- 1707
- Where
- Gibraltar; Isles of Scilly
- Episodes
- 2
On 22 October 1707, four Royal Navy ships under Admiral Cloudesley Shovell struck rocks off the Isles of Scilly. The disaster killed between 1,400 and 2,000 sailors, including Shovell, due to navigational errors and inadequate instruments.
Episodes
- Departure from Gibraltar
Shovell's fleet of twenty-one ships left Gibraltar on 29 September 1707 to support the siege of Toulon.
- Wrecking off the Isles of Scilly
Four Royal Navy ships struck rocks off the Isles of Scilly on 22 October 1707, killing between 1,400 and 2,000 sailors.
Background and detail
Fleet Deployment. During the War of the Spanish Succession, Great Britain dispatched a fleet to support the siege of Toulon. Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell commanded twenty-one ships, including his flagship HMS Association, departing Gibraltar on 29 September 1707.
The Wrecking. On 22 October 1707, HMS Association struck Outer Gilstone Rock at 8 pm and sank, killing its crew of about 800 men and Admiral Shovell. Three other ships were also lost, resulting in a total of 1,400 to 2,000 deaths.
People involved
- Cloudesley Shovell · Commander-in-Chief of the British Fleets
- Edmund Loades · Captain of HMS Association
Sources
- Scilly naval disaster of 1707 Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-27
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.