The Compass That Points to Itself

In 1707, four British warships struck the rocks off the Scilly Isles, drowning nearly two thousand sailors in a single night. The fleet's navigator, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, had been so confident in his own calculations that when a common sailor dared offer a correcting reading, Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny. The admiral trusted his own reckoning over every other voice — and steered an entire fleet into disaster.…