Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  If Campbell provided context and meaning for the epic voyage, readers demanded more detail. Pascoe Thomas’s True and Impartial Journal of 1745 duly obliged, but Anson’s quasi-miraculous return, laden with Spanish booty, Chinese silks and a narrative of disaster and redemption, the greatest event of the age, demanded an official explanation. Well aware that he faced competition, Thomas wryly noted that a ‘Certain Honourable Gentleman’ had stolen his notes, and returned home early from Canton, seeking ‘to discourage others.’ The ‘Gentleman’ was the Reverend Richard Walter, Anson’s chaplain.

  Walter’s book turned this British story into a universal possession. On the surface the authorised account could be read as a travel narrative, a modern version of the buccaneer texts that had been read so closely when the squadron arrived at Juan Fernández, as guides to local navigation and natural resources. Consciously or otherwise they shaped the organisation and language of their successors. Yet the new version was subtly different. Anson, the central figure, as leader, decision-maker and hero, always appeared in the third person as ‘Mr Anson’, enlightened despot of the island, detached, serene, judicious and wise. Although this was a deliberate literary construction, other accounts confirm Anson wore the ‘mask of command’, a potent blend of authority and detachment, with the same pride and purpose as his rank. Anson had no need to be the hero of his own tale; he had acquired wealth, power and status beyond ambition. After his return he had married the Lord Chancellor’s daughter and defeated a French fleet off Cape Finisterre, becoming Lord Anson. He would revitalise the Royal Navy and direct British strategy until his death in 1762.5 Famously taciturn, he avoided the public gaze, taking solace in his garden. Rather than blowing his own trumpet Anson put a great deal of his own time and money into the Voyage because it had been a major learning experience for the British state, and above all for the Royal Navy that he led. Consequently the book addressed a far wider range of issues than older voyage texts.

  Fuelled by a universal hunger for information, the official account attracted over 1,800 advance subscriptions among the social, political, naval and commercial elite, several from the middling sort, and a few subscription libraries. Curiously, while most Cambridge colleges subscribed, none of those at Oxford bothered. Among the dukes, earls and archbishops, admirals John Byng and Edward Hawke stand out, along with Swynfen Jervis, father of another naval hero, joining Lord Hardwicke (Anson’s father-in-law), Admiralty Secretary Thomas Corbett, former Jacobite apologist and historian Viscount St John, patriotic engraver/publisher John Pine and the Book Society of Stowmarket. By contrast, Pascoe Thomas recruited seafarers, including voyage veterans and the middling sort in southern towns, including many from Gosport, not least peruke makers Daniel Dickens and John Miller – men who may have profited from the ravages of scurvy.

  With strong advance sales, the Voyage easily carried the cost of well-drawn charts and pictures. Where other texts used illustrations for dramatic effect the official illustrations, many based on Lieutenant Piercy’s Brett’s drawings, were integral to the process of annexing and anglicising the island, giving it a place on the global chart, an existence in the contemporary visual imagination and a strong visual identity.6 In the same way that the woodcut frontispiece of Robinson Crusoe fixed the castaway in British culture, Anson’s illustrations defined his island. Despite the high price the book went through four editions in a year, remaining in print ever since, a distinction it shares with Robinson Crusoe. By 1776 Anson’s book had reached a fifteenth English edition, making it the most successful travel book of the century. As Glyn Williams observed, it was a work in the mould of Richard Hakluyt’s Elizabethan narratives, a striking adventure story that carried a strong message about the need for exploration, trade and colonies. That this message was shared with a massive 2,000-page compendium suggests these texts were the alpha and omega of contemporary imperial thought, one a vast canvas of time and space, the other a record of singular achievement. Neither should be confused with works of history: they were entirely forward looking, urging the ambitious to act, not rest on past glories.

  While he did not have the time to compile the book, he was running a world war against France between 1745 and 1748, and never displayed any great enthusiasm for putting pen to paper, Anson micro-managed the project. Acutely aware of the strategic and political significance of the expedition and anxious to exploit his hard won knowledge Anson produced a guide for future voyagers. Although Richard Walter compiled the text it soon became clear the parson, an author so clumsy that he managed to leave God out of his book, lacked the insight, judgement and literary skill to impose Anson’s agenda on the material, let alone produce a technically competent guide for future British expeditions. The draft had to be reworked by larger minds. Anson handed it to mathematician, artillerist and engineer Benjamin Robins FRS. Not that his Lordship allowed either author a free hand. Robins waited on Anson every morning, to read aloud the latest passages, so his Lordship could check the facts and shape the message. Robins’s scientific skill and ability to see the big picture is especially clear in chapters X and XIV, which abandon the narrative to analyse Spanish trade flows and the strategic opportunities open to a squadron rounding Cape Horn in better condition. These chapters digested the experience of the voyage, earlier narratives and captured Spanish material. When Robins left London, to take up a high profile post in India, Walter was left to take the manuscript through the press. Ultimately Anson was responsible for the book; it reflected his aims, his experience and above all his objectives – and he checked every page.7 Anson and Robins gave the text its purpose, inner logic and precision. As Robins boasted:

  no voyage I have yet seen, furnished such a number of views of land, soundings, draughts of roads and ports, charts and other materials, for the improvement of geography and navigation, as were contained in the ensuing volume; which are of the more importance too, as the greatest part of them relate to such islands or coasts, as have been hitherto not at all or erroneously described, and where the want of sufficient and authentic information might occasion future enterprises to prove abortive, perhaps with the destruction of the men and vessels employed therein.8

  The drawings were all based on accurate records, and approved by Anson, unlike the ‘bold conjectures and fictitious descriptions’ of other authors. Captured Spanish charts and pilots, critical to Anson’s success, had proved very accurate. The value of this handbook for invading the South Pacific was evident ninety years later, when hydrographer Captain Philip Parker King checked Anson’s charts. He found them ‘old-fashioned’ but serviceable.

  Anson’s official history informed and instructed future commanders on every aspect of their work, from navigation and operations, to cruising formations and boat patrols, advice that remained relevant a century later.9 For his personal delectation Anson commissioned marine artist Samuel Scott to capture key events of his voyage in oils, but there would be no picture of Juan Fernández. With Brett’s sketches and Anson’s input Scott would have had no difficulty presenting the magical island in suitably verdant form, but Anson made a different choice. He focused on the taking of the Manila galleon, the burning of Paita, and his later triumph off Cape Finisterre. He chose to memorialise glory, not providential recovery. The assessment of Juan Fernández in his book was at once more fulsome and more practical. He had no need of a pictorial reminder.

  Published accounts agreed that Juan Fernández was an island paradise, a romantic vision of loveliness amid a vast, desolate ocean, a vital source of life and health amid the horrors and death of a scorbutic catastrophe. Printed text, manuscripts and images concurred in blessing the island as an ideal British location – part country estate, part health spa, and packed with the finest foods. The expedition locked the island into an English world view, one of three idealised locations, along with Tinian and Cape Town, where a fleet could refresh should another such venture be attempted. Anson’s handbook for future British circumnavigators put a premium on accurate
navigational information, including a major contribution to contemporary understanding of magnetic variation. If anyone was in doubt as to the strategic purpose, the list of refreshment stops was repeated on the very last page, pointedly returning the reader to the ‘vallies of Juan Fernández’ before they closed the book.10 These ‘English’ refreshment stops for scorbutic circumnavigators opened the age of British global power.

  Anson used his prize money to buy Moor Park at Rickmansworth. The magnificent house had recently been rebuilt in the Palladian style, and decorated by Sir James Thornhill, creator of the ceiling in the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital, by Benjamin Heskin Styles. Styles a South Sea speculator and insider dealer, had sold up before the Bubble burst. Anson’s expedition could be seen as a heroic vindication of the original project, rebuilding commercial confidence in the South Pacific, bolstering the link between seapower and the City. The delusions and designs of 1711 had come full circle. With an eye to the future Anson also invested heavily in the family seat at Shugborough, home of his elder brother Thomas, where Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown landscaped the grounds to create an idyllic ‘rolling’ topography. Anson added an Ionic temple, in the Greek revival style, moving local author Samuel Johnson (no admirer of Anson) to write:

  A grateful mind! praise! All to the winds he owed,

  And so upon the winds a temple he bestowed.11

  If the Shugborough temple recalled his voyage the extensive gardens at Moor Park recalled the island that saved his men from disaster. They would be his only solace after the death of his wife.

  The voyage became a universal possession. In 1748 Anson’s friend Henry Legge, British minister in Berlin, was moved to write: ‘it is a work which, as an Englishman, I am proud of, and, as a mariner, I think will be of perpetual use to the faculty’. The Prussian king, Frederick the Great, expressed ‘a strong curiosity to see you’. John Hawkesworth, editor of the first of Captain Cook’s journals, promised to ‘do my best to make it another Anson’s Voyage’.12 The book created a new literary genre, prompted an enlightenment fascination with the Pacific that lead to the voyages of Cook, Bougainville and others, and reshaped the European garden. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau picked up the French ‘translation’ it provided a plot device, while the illustrations opened up a new insight into the relationship between man and nature. St Preux, the hero of la Nouvelle Héloise, a thinly disguised autobiography, joined Anson’s voyage. Where Anson carefully set out the strategic value of Juan Fernández, Tinian and the Cape of Good Hope as refitting stations for British warships, Rousseau, often following the French text very closely, used the first two as metaphors conveying virtue and purity. Finding an artificial Elysée at the home of his erstwhile lover the hero, both Rousseau and St Preux, lost interest in formal gardening. The wild garden forms ‘a sentimental and moral turning point for St. Preux, reshaping his state of mind, as the islands are physical turning points and supply the physical needs of Anson’s sailors’. Anson, who had seen these places, preferred classical idylls, combining artificially informal landscaping, ancient buildings and trophies, a three-dimensional version of a canvas by Claude Lorraine.13

  The official narrative did not include a portrait, allowing ‘Mr Anson’ to keep his distance, but his pan-European celebrity created a market for a picture. Amsterdam, centre of the European print trade, duly obliged. Among the many variations on the theme of naval heroics, geographical achievement and plunder, two prints offered the newly made peer alternative heraldic supporters to the rather predictable lion and seahorse assigned to Baron Anson of Soberton in Hampshire. Artists developed an image from the official narrative to identify the insipid gentleman in the portrait, replacing the medieval sea monsters that littered the open spaces of old charts, with a truly monstrous creature – a male elephant seal. The image in Shelvocke’s book, revised for the Voyage, caught the eye of the artist. Not only had Anson taken a fabulous treasure, survived a perilous voyage and browbeaten the Chinese, but he had captured the likeness of an awe-inspiring beast. Jan Wandelaar gave the beast a degree of animation and expression worthy of a professional artist. The sea monster is tamed by Neptune, trident in hand, with Anson’s portrait held aloft by Britannia, her crown adorned with the sterns of warships with a mountainous background suggestive of the seal girt island. Another elephantine image merely copied Brett’s beast, while Neptune, Amphitrite and a triton do homage to the hero, his voyage represented on a globe, complete with the stop-over at Juan Fernández, illuminated by the sun of undying fame, bursting through the metaphorical clouds which had hung over the expedition.14 In both images Anson maintains the same curiously reserved expression, unwilling to smile lest the viewer note that the expedition had cost him his teeth! As Carl Skottsberg noted a century ago there are no more elephant seals on Juan Fernández.15

  NOTES

  1 Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans, p. 63.

  2 Campbell, Navigantium, vol. I, pp. xv–xvi.

  3 J.S. Corbett, England in the Mediterranean: A Study of the Rise and Influence of British Power within the Straits, 1603–1713, Longman, London, 1904, pp. 525–58. On the rapid Anglicisation of Gibraltar, see S. Conn, Gibraltar in British Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1942.

  4 Campbell, Navigantium, vol. I, pp. 325, 328; Frost, ‘Shaking Off the Spanish Yoke’, pp. 20–1.

  5 A.D. Lambert, Admirals: The Men Who Made Britain Great, Faber & Faber, London, 2007, ch. 4.

  6 Marshall & Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, p. 260.

  7 Williams, The Great South Sea, pp. 254–6; Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans, pp. 237–41.

  8 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, pp. 2–3.

  9 J. Barrow, The Life of George, Lord Anson, John Murray, London, 1839, pp. 41–2.

  10 Walter & Robins, Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World, pp. 4, 380. The authorship of this section cannot be in doubt; it was composed by an engineer, and improved by a navigator. Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans, p. 224.

  11 J. Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, 1716–1784: The Omnipotent Magician, Chatto & Windus, London, 2011. Anson spent at least £6,000 on the Moor Park garden (see pp. 97–8). D. Stroud, Capability Brown, Country Life, London, 1950, pp. 31–2 (Greek temple by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, an Anson client). M. Pedrick, Moor Park: The Grosvenor Legacy, Riverside Books, Rickmansworth, 1989, pp. 22–5.

  12 Legge to Anson, 4 September 1748 & n.d., in Barrow, The Life of George, Lord Anson, pp. 409–10; Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans, p. 237.

  13 Translated by E. Joncourt, published in Leipzig and Amsterdam in 1749. Grove, Green Imperialism, p. 233; C. Thacker, ‘“O Tininan! O Juan-Fernández!” Rousseau’s “Elysée” and Anson’s Desert Islands’, Garden History 5 (1977), pp. 41–7.

  14 Both engraved in 1751 by Jacobus Houbraken (National Maritime Museum, PAF 3415 and 3416).

  15 Skottsberg, The Natural History of Juan Fernández and Easter Island, vol. I, p. 174.

  11

  Closing the Stable Door

  However reluctantly Anson appeared on the international stage, his voyage and the international success of his book made him famous across the literate world. It also exposed Spanish weakness, pointing out Juan Fernández as ‘the only commodious place in those seas, where British cruisers can refresh and recover their men after the passage round Cape Horn’. Possession of the Falkland Islands and Juan Fernández would ‘make us masters of those seas’.1 Those words forced the Spanish government to occupy and fortify Juan Fernández, in case the British returned in strength. If they did the silver fleet would cease sailing.

  In 1748 Anson, as First Sea Lord, planned a follow-up project to survey the Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, thereby ensuring a swift passage to Juan Fernández, the inevitable destination of all those who entered the Pacific from the south. Chapter XIV, examining what might have been done had the squadron arrived in the Pacific without a scorbutic catastrophe,
reflected his thinking. By January 1749 Anson planned to send two sloops, calling at Juan Fernández to water and refresh before crossing the Pacific, seeking new lands to the west. Juan Fernández would also support a leap across the Southern Ocean towards New Holland (modern Australia). In Anson’s strategic vision new charts would link a chain of British insular bases stretching from the Falkland Islands by way of Juan Fernández to a new Pacific destination, replacing those other idyllic stopovers Tinian and the Cape of Good Hope.2

  The Spanish were under no illusions. Anson’s raid had done far more damage than the value of the bullion he brought back to Britain – an estimated eight to ten million dollars had been taken or destroyed, and a similar amount in lost trade, delays and the deterioration of cargoes. Above all Anson had crippled the flow of specie from Peru to Spain. Juan Fernández had become a serious strategic problem, and they had already examined the options. In September 1740 advanced warning of Anson’s expedition reached the Viceroyalty of Peru. The Viceroy, the Marquis de Villagarcia was fortunate that two brilliant young naval officers, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa happened to be in the country, working with a French scientific mission. They advised him how to improve coastal defences at Callao, built two galleys and helped equip a four-ship squadron to cruise off the coast. When the squadron returned without sighting the British the young officers concluded that Anson had failed to round Cape Horn, and were released to resume their scientific mission in the Andes, only days before Anson broke cover. They returned to Lima on 26 February, and took command of two ships the Viceroy had fitted out as cruisers ‘for the security of the coast of Chile and the island of Juan Fernández against any reinforcement coming to the enemy’. While Anson told his prisoners he was heading north the Spaniards knew other British ships had failed to round the Horn in 1741, and might try again. Their first object was to inspect Juan Fernández, the key to Anson’s success, and recommend a suitable response.3