I know that ships of that time period probably went too slow to experience "jet lag" as we know it today, but did the ships go fast enough, or was timekeeping accurate enough, to notice the change in how many hours were in the day? If a sailor left Spain on a ship bound for the Orient, when he arrived, would he notice that his recorded time was different than the time kept locally? If so, what did they think was happening?
Related(?) question, same era: did sailors notice the shift in seasons going from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern, i.e. summer in the North is winter in the South, and vice versa? How did they explain it?
They were aware that time was different in different areas of the globe, but navies and merchant ships usually had a ship's day starting at local noon (when an observation would be taken to determine the ship's latitude). So their timekeeping devices wouldn't really "gain" or "lose" time, since the ship's day reset at noon -- if anything, the forenoon watch might lose a minute or two if they were moving really fast. The RN used a half-hour glass to know when to strike the bells in each watch, so there wasn't anything like a clock running on board ship all day. (Obviously, the exception to this is chronometers, which by gaining or losing time told you your position -- but they were navigational instruments, not timekeeping devices.)
I wrote about this more in this older post.