Crusoe's Island
Page 10
By the 18th all 135 invalids had been brought ashore, a monumental task for the handful still strong enough to carry them in their hammocks across a rough, stony beach, and up a steep hill. A dozen men had died as they were being brought ashore. After three weeks the daily death toll ebbed. Once ashore, the sick recovered quickly, a century and half before anyone understood the causation this apparently miraculous transformation only reinforced the notion of a magical island.
Once the invalids had been housed, tents were set up for the cooper and sailmakers, while two copper ovens were brought ashore to bake bread. Not only was fresh bread good for morale, but it reduced the strain on scorbutic teeth and gums. As the men recovered they were put to work catching fish, goats and seals. The main task was feeding the fires that baked their bread, and made charcoal to work the blacksmith’s forges. Those remaining on board faced a major task. Badly damaged rounding the tempestuous Cape Horn, the ships had been left in a state of almost indescribable filth by the combination of a large number of sick and dead men and the destruction of the seamen’s heads (the flimsy ‘seats of ease’ that projected out over the bowsprit). The crew were unable to clear either the effluent or the dead. Few British warships ever sank to the state and condition of Anson’s squadron, floating charnel houses with raw sewage slopping across the lower decks, infecting the ballast and stores. Centurion’s ‘Teacher of the Mathematicks’ Pascoe Thomas reported the ship to be in ‘a very nasty condition’. He was not exaggerating. Anson was equally blunt; the ship was ‘intolerably loathsome’.8
Once the ships had been cleaned, the casks taken ashore, shaken down, refreshed and rebuilt by the coopers, a full store of water was quickly placed on board. Anson’s men had discovered broken pottery, a fire and food scraps; evidence of a recent Spanish landing. They had reason to expect the Spanish would return, and were in no position to fight. With so many men at work or recuperating ashore the Centurion was desperately short handed. On 30 June a violent offshore gust parted the cable on the small bower anchor, with only a dozen men on board Anson watched in some trepidation, until it became clear that the best bower would hold. The smaller cable had been cut by the rocky holding ground; it was quickly bent onto the spare anchor. The ship was warped closer inshore on 1 July, secured for the rest of the stay. In July two forges were set up ashore to repair the chain plates and other ironwork. Major repairs to the rigging would depend on the Gloucester, which carried spare stores.9 In a stark reminder of just how savage the passage round the Horn had been the flagship’s sails and running rigging were so far gone that an anchor cable had to be unrove to make ropes, and despite using every scrap of worn canvas there was barely enough to make a single suit of sails.
On 21 June midshipmen on the lookout hill reported a large ship attempting to beat up into the wind and enter the bay. Before she could be identified a thick haze descended and the ship was not seen again for almost a week. Finally, on the 27th, HMS Gloucester limped into view, attempting to sail into the bay from another direction. Something was desperately wrong. The ship, her masts and yards damaged and deranged, was being handled by a tiny crew of sick men. Once she was within reach of the shore, about three miles out, Anson dispatched a boat with fresh food and water. Climbing onto the deck Philip Saumarez ‘found her in a most deplorable condition, nearly two-thirds of her men being dead but very few of the rest able to perform their duty’. One-third of Captain Mitchell’s skeletal crew were small boys, best able to resist scurvy. Rats scampered over the inert carcasses of the dead and dying, lying on the decks amid their own filth, in search of an easy meal. Many of the sick, too far gone to defend themselves, lost fingers and toes to the ultimate survivors.10 The voyage from Brazil had cost the lives of 254 men, only 92 remained to crew a floating morgue, once the most beautiful ship in His Majesty’s Navy.
Even with Saumarez’s boat towing, the Gloucester could not fetch the bay, the exhausted boat crew had to let go and watch the ship drift away with the offshore breeze. On 3 July she came within two miles, and fired two guns, a signal of distress. Another boat load of food was sent out, but the ship could not be brought in. This time she was swept off to the west, fetching up close to the island of Más Afuera, where rich fishing grounds provided vital nourishment. Only on the 25th did the horrific voyage of HMS Gloucester come to end when the anchor went down in Windy Bay. By this stage the crew had been reduced to a mere 80 men, few of whom were able to work. A working party of newly recovered men went on board with fresh food, and brought the ship to the anchorage, which Anson patriotically renamed Cumberland Bay, in honour of the King George’s II’s favourite second son. Much to Anson’s surprise the survivors of this horrific voyage recovered far quicker than those of the Centurion.11 The fish of Más Afuera had been their salvation.
Once the men regained their strength Anson allowed many of them to live ashore. Two heavy guns were laboriously landed, placed in a battery close to the forge and bakery at Bahía Pangal to fire signals. The first test for this precaution came on 16 August when a ship was spotted. On entering Cumberland Bay she proved to be the storeship Anna, the fourth and last member of the squadron to reach the island. Anna’s crew were in far better health than their naval colleagues, restored by a two month refreshment stop at Socorro. They had found Narborough’s beach by accident, communicated with local Indians and acquired a good stock of fresh food and water. Their voyage demonstrated that with a less crowded ship, better quality seamen and a long refreshment stop it was perfectly possible to round the Horn and make Juan Fernández. Although only a hired transport and not under naval discipline the ship’s master had not considered turning back, unlike the warships Severn and Pearl, which had abandoned the voyage, rather than face Cape Horn. Anna’s arrival enabled Anson to put the men back on a full measure of preserved rations, and bake more bread.12
While the expedition slowly returned to health the Spanish response collapsed. Forewarned by French intelligence the Viceroy of Peru armed four ships to locate the English intruders. Three headed south along the Chilean coast, the fourth cruised off Juan Fernández for several weeks departing only three days before the Centurion staggered in. By that calculation Anson’s last navigational problem had avoided a battle he was in no condition to fight. Reckoning Anson could not have remained at sea for so long without a landfall the Spanish concluded he must have been wrecked rounding Cape Horn. Heading back to base at Callao they were caught in a severe storm and put out of action for several months.13 The evidence they left on the beach ensured Anson kept Centurion ready to sail at short notice.
NOTES
1 Williams, The Great South Sea, p. 215; Tassell and Hutchinson to Sir Robert Walpole, 11 September 1739, in G. Williams (ed.), Documents Relating to Anson’s Voyage Round the World, Navy Records Society, London, 1967, pp. 18–26.
2 G. Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson’s Voyage Round the World, HarperCollins, London, 1999, p. 54. Captain William Douglas, HMS Worcester, to the Admiralty, 29 June 1740, in Williams, Documents Relating to Anson’s Voyage Round the World, p. 52.
3 R. Walter & B. Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, London, 1748; page numbers herein are all from the more accessible 1911 Everyman edition, edited by John Masefield (here pp. 104–5).
4 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, p. 106.
5 P. Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas and Round the Globe in his Majesty’s Ship the Centurion, London, 1745, p. 29; Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, pp. 108–10.
6 L. Heaps (ed.), Log of the Centurion: Based on the Original Papers of Captain Philip Saumarez on Board HMS Centurion, Lord Anson’s Flagship During his Circumnavigation 1740–44, Hart Davies, London, 1973, pp. 109–12 (hereafter ‘Saumarez’).
7 Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal, pp. 30, 35, 42.
8 Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal, p. 31; Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World,
p. 125.
9 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, pp. 127–8.
10 Saumarez, p. 114.
11 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, p. 125.
12 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, p. 149.
13 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, p. 71.
8
The Magical Island
The British set a course for Juan Fernández because it was unoccupied, and it had food, water and, above all, a suitable anchorage. They knew Selkirk and Will had lived on the island for years on end; they had the texts of Dampier, Rodgers, Shelvocke and others on board. Absorbed in an English history of the island, they blithely assumed that they had found some of Selkirk’s goats, animals whose ears he had marked thirty-odd years before! The more likely occasion for goats with torn ears was the frequent arrival of Spanish dogs, trying to clear the livestock.
Saumarez reckoned the food supply ‘providentially calculated for the relief of distressed adventurers who find such vegetables as are particularly adapted for curing the distempers contracted on long sea voyages and bad diets, especially those of the scorbutick kind’.1 Pascoe Thomas agreed:
here are Greens and Salads of several sorts, and very wholesome, by the assistance of which our sick men began to recover apace, and those greens and fish were our principal food while here, tho’ we often for the sake of variety, killed and eat the young seals and Sea Lions, and found them very good.2
The seeds and leaves of the pepper trees helped to season such fishy steaks. Fruit trees, perhaps descended from early Spanish plantings provided enough berries for Anson to order a pie. Thomas credited the Spaniards with sowing turnips and radishes, which had spread across Cumberland Bay in great profusion, with dock leaves, sow thistles, mallows, clover, wood and watercress, chicken sorrel, dandelion and several other edible herbs. He also found a species of wild oats, which could easily be cultivated. The rich soil was ‘the best and fattest I ever saw, and I doubt not would produce, in the greatest abundance, all sorts of European fruits, grains, herbs, or flowers, either for profit or delight’.3 Having no role in the refitting process, Hubert Tassell began reducing the island to a very English kind of order, laying out gardens. The link between husbandry, possession and title was clear, making gardens constituted ownership. Not only was this an earthly paradise, but it was an entirely practical one, holding out the promise of excellent crops, grown and harvested by any sensible Englishman.
Everyone agreed the key foodstuffs on Juan Fernández were watercress and wild turnips, goats, seals and sea lions, and especially bacalao, a large, white-fleshed cod-like fish. With so many dogs on the island, goats were hard to find, mostly in the higher reaches of the mountains; Anson had ‘many’ of the dogs shot. At a loss to explain how so many dogs could survive when the goats were so wary, Thomas concluded they must live on cats, rats and marine mammals. Saumarez reported they had entirely wiped out the goats on the level, barren western end of the island, disappointing hopes raised by the buccaneer narratives.4 Some of the lazy brutes were eaten by Anson’s men. Reports that they had a fishy taste confirmed Saumarez’s hypothesis that they were living on young seals. He reckoned there were no more than 150 or 160 goats on the island, but they tasted like venison. Saumarez also noted the island was overrun with rabbits.
With ‘turnips and Sicilian radishes’ ready to crop, Anson ‘sowed both lettuces, carrots and other garden plants, and sett in the woods a great variety of plum, apricot, and peach stones’ which, according to Spanish visitors to London in 1748, ‘have since thriven to a very remarkable degree’ (i.e. the peach and apricot trees were in fruit).5 There could be no more English method of asserting ownership than laying out gardens and deliberately planting fruit trees that would take years to grow into productive maturity. In word and deed Anson turned a fleeting residence into an enduring demonstration of a new reality, maps and charts, coastal views and gardens reinventing the island as an English landscaped park.
With few goats being caught (around one a day, Walter reported), the crew, growing ‘tired’ of fish, were persuaded to eat seal meat. To aid digestion, or perhaps mask revulsion, they referred to seal meat as ‘mutton’, while the flesh of the majestic sea lion became ‘beef’. Such meals were not without risk: one sailor had his skull crushed in the jaws of an enraged female sea lion as he was skinning her pup. The ‘extraordinary’ elephant seals were a major resource, resting on the beach in vast herds they could be killed with ease; a single pistol shot through the mouth was usually enough. The blubber was rendered down for lamp oil, and the highly nutritious flesh served up as steaks. Thomas suggested that the seal furs ‘might be of good value in England’.6
The massive elephant seal prompted more reflection, and a picture in the official account. For all their bellowing and posturing, Thomas reported they were easy to drive off. Young elephant seals were harvested for food; the large males provided some rough sport once the seamen had recovered their sprits they began baiting the beasts into a rage before worrying them to death with boarding pikes. Such random cruelty was a commonplace for eighteenth century Englishmen, with bear and bull baiting among the more popular entertainments. The bulldog was bred for such ‘sport’. The more reflective gentlemen took the trouble to record the habits and anatomy of their prey. Purser Lawrence Millechamp was particularly struck by the fact that the male had a bone in his penis.
When it came to the insular food supply Millechamp noted the shallow waters of the bay were home to vast shoals of a cod-like fish, ‘the most delicious repasts at this island’, which was easily hooked and often salted down for future consumption; indeed ‘two or three people could never fail to take as much as in about two hours as all the ship’s company could use’. Occasionally large sharks came into the bay to interrupt fishing. Thomas distinguished ‘several species of cod, rock-cod, cavallos, bremes, snapper, cray-fish, black-fish, several sorts of flat fish and abundance of others, some of a hundred weight and above, all taken with the hook’ because the bays were too rocky for a seine. Fish, he explained ‘were not only the chief refreshment we met with, but the principal branch of our food during our stay in this place’. The mighty salt water crayfish, so numerous that Selkirk had become sick of them, provided an alternative, a ‘delicacy in greater perfection, both as to size, flavour and quantity, than is perhaps to be met with in any other part of the world … of a most excellent taste.’ They were easily picked up from the shallows with boat hooks.7 The only seabirds he bothered to name were the spectacular albatross, observed by Edward Cooke thirty years before, and pintados. The rest were ‘not worth mentioning’.8 Thomas’s offhand observation suggests that with so much else on the plate oily seabirds were not eaten.
While the ships were overhauled the officers inspected ‘the only commodious place in those seas where British cruisers can refresh and recover their men after their passage round Cape Horn, and where they may remain for some time without alarming the Spanish coast’:
Indeed Mr Anson was particularly industrious in directing the roads [harbours] and coasts to be surveyed, and other observations to be made, knowing from his own experience of how great consequence these materials might prove to be to any British vessels hereafter employed in those seas.9
He began with a more accurate record of the location; most of the astronomical and hydrographic work fell to Philip Saumarez. Having settled the latitude of the island, and provided a brief description Saumarez focused on Cumberland Bay, including a coastal view and chart to improve recognition. The other bays were dismissed as ‘scarcely more than good landing places’ for watering. Ships were advised to anchor at the western end of Cumberland Bay in about 40 fathoms, only two cables from the beach, sheltered from the ‘large heavy sea’ that rolled in whenever east or west winds blew. As the holding ground was rough it was advisable to armour the last six fathoms of cables, to prevent them being rubbed through. The Bay was open to northerly winds, like the o
ne that wrecked Shelvocke’s ship, when these blew, waves broke over Centurion’s forecastle, fortunately they were infrequent. Sharp southerly gusts could blow ships out of the anchorage.
On shore, the mountainous terrain around Cumberland Bay was largely covered in thick woods. On the upper slopes the soil was thin, and the trees rarely grew to any size, as their scant roots often gave way. A sailor fell to his death over a cliff after two trees failed to hold; Lieutenant Piercy Brett was luckier, escaping without serious injury. Of the indigenous trees only the myrtle was large enough to work for timber, with pieces up to forty feet long being shaped. This tree also hosted a moss that tasted and smelled like garlic, which was soon employed in cooking. Saumarez confessed he was no botanist, but his journal formed the basis of the official narrative, rendering his singular ineptitude into a plural.10
NOTES
1 Saumarez, pp. 119–21.
2 Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal, p. 31, 36–37.
3 Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal, pp. 36–37.
4 Anon., Authentic Account of Commodore Anson’s Expedition, London, 1744, p. 43; Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal, p. 39; Saumarez, p. 118.
5 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, pp. 114–18; Saumarez, pp. 118–20.
6 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, pp. 114–15; Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal, p. 40.
7 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, pp. 120–1; Saumarez, p. 120; Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal, p. 30. They remain a culinary highlight.
8 Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal, p. 41.
9 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, pp. 111–14.