Qualla: HMS Association https://qualla.com/hms-association en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:10 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/7/hms-association-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: HMS Association https://qualla.com/hms-association HMS Association: Introduction https://qualla.com/hms-association/ Photo credit Andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 3.0. She went down in three or four minutes. The crew of HMS St George, sailing in formation just behind her, watched the Association vanish - all ninety guns, all eight hundred men - into the dark sea off the Scilly Isles. It was eight o'clock at night, the 22nd of October 1707. The four ships lost together that night carried nearly two thousand sailors. Almost none of them survived. The men were mostly young, drawn from coastal villages all over England and Wales, and many of them had been at sea since boyhood. Captain Edmund Loades, who had grown up in a Navy family - his mother was the sister of Rear Admiral Narborough - drowned alongside his admiral's two stepsons, the Narborough brothers, who were themselves only just out of their teens. Henry Trelawney, second son of the Bishop of Winchester, was on board as well. By daybreak on the 23rd, the worst peacetime naval disaster in British history was complete. The empire did not yet have language for what had happened. What it did, eventually, was change the way the world measured itself.

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/7/hms-association-wp/gbg7-hms-association-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full HMS Association: What the Association Did https://qualla.com/hms-association/ Photo credit Andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 3.0. Association was launched at Portsmouth Dockyard in 1697 as a 90-gun second-rate ship of the line. By the time she sank, she had already survived one of the worst weather events in English history - the Great Storm of 1703, which she rode out at anchor off Harwich. Her rigging was...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/7/hms-association-wp/gbg7-hms-association-what-the-association-did.mp3 0:06 2 full HMS Association: The Sailors Who Were Not There https://qualla.com/hms-association/ Photo credit Andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 3.0. It is tempting to tell this story as a story of an admiral, but the admiral was one of two thousand men, and most of the others have no monuments and few documented names. The Association carried about eight hundred men: ordinary seamen, idlers, gunner's mates, powder monkeys as ...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/7/hms-association-wp/gbg7-hms-association-the-sailors-who-were-not-there.mp3 0:06 3 full HMS Association: The Outer Gilstone, at Eight P.M. https://qualla.com/hms-association/ Photo credit Andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 3.0. What happened was a navigation failure of the kind that haunted every captain in the age of sail. Shovell's squadron had been blown northward in stormy weather across the Bay of Biscay and into the Western Approaches. Their dead reckoning - the running tally of compass course and...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/7/hms-association-wp/gbg7-hms-association-the-outer-gilstone-at-eight-p-m.mp3 0:06 4 full HMS Association: The Longitude Act https://qualla.com/hms-association/ Photo credit Andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 3.0. Latitude, in 1707, was a solved problem - you could measure the angle of the sun at noon or the pole star at night, and from that derive how far north or south you were. Longitude was the problem nobody could crack. To know how far east or west you were, you needed to know exactl...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/7/hms-association-wp/gbg7-hms-association-the-longitude-act.mp3 0:06 5 full HMS Association: What the Divers Found https://qualla.com/hms-association/ Photo credit Kognos, CC BY-SA 4.0. For two and a half centuries the wreck lay where it fell, on the Gilstone Ledge southeast of Bishop Rock, in tide-riven water that the locals knew was deadly to work. In June 1967 Engineer-Lieutenant Roy Graham of the Royal Navy returned for a second attempt with the minesweeper ...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/7/hms-association-wp/gbg7-hms-association-what-the-divers-found.mp3 0:06 6 full