Touche, Mike.
Your references are obviously better than my memory.
It looks like I've been lead astray by the coincidence of the two
South Atlantic naval battles in two different wars and the
participation in each of an Admiral Graf Spee, one a man and the other
a pocket battleship.
Marion"s footnote mentioned neither Graf Spee nor the final outcome of
the battle. Maybe there were enough British ships and British shells
to plaster the region and eventually hit the German ships.
In respect to some of Ludwik's question regarding Coriolis, Marion, in
another footnote, remarks that he published his result for the
effective force observed in a rotating coordinate system in 1835 as an
"outgrowth of his study of water wheels".
Brian McInnes