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Frank,

You mentioned a short article on the history of the longitude problem in
the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and continued to
say

>I am posting this because it was written in
>1974  --TWO  DECADES before Sobel's "Longitude". Just a little documentation to
>support my  comment that I had heard the story, told in much the same way, over
>25 years  ago. Note that this was not my source from back then. It's yet
>another  re-telling.
>
>
Of course it is. It's a re-hashed version of a few paragraphs in chapter
VIII, on "Longitude", in _The Story of Maps_ by Lloyd A. Brown. The book
was written in 1949. Although the the author of the article gives no
reference,  he makes no attempt to disguise his source as he copies
verbatim whole phrases and sentences from Brown. The latter attributes
his own quotes relating to Shovel diligently to Gould, _The Marine
Chronometer_, 1923 (!). So this is the ONE source where it all comes
from in regular intervals of 25 years. I don't remember what sources
Gould uses and I don't have his book handy. I would be much surprised if
he did not go back to the primary ones that there are. I will check this
when I get a chance.

As regards the hanging of the seaman, Gould only says that "A story was
current, long afterwards, that [...] " and Brown reports it exactly that
way. Many derivative accounts omit the indirection, making the hanging
look like a verified fact. Sobel beats them all when she tells us what
the sailor thought.

Herbert Prinz

   

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