The Wager Disaster

by C. H. Layman

  He at last mustered up resolution enough to attempt it, first having crossed himself for an hour together, and made a kind of lugsail out of the bits of blankets they wore about them, sewed together with split supple-jacks.[21] We then put off, and a terrible passage we had. The bottom plank of the canoe was split, which opened upon every sea, and the water continually rushed over the gunnel. I may say that we were in a manner full the whole way over though all hands were employed in bailing without ceasing a moment. As we drew near the shore the cacique was eager to land, having been terrified to that degree with this run, that if it had not been for us every soul must have perished; for he had very near got in amongst the breakers, where the sea drove with such violence upon the rocks that not even an Indian could have escaped, especially as it was in the night.

  We kept off till we got into smooth water, and landed upon the island of Chiloé, though in a part of it that was not inhabited. Here we stayed all the next day in a very heavy snow, to recover ourselves a little after our fatigue; but the cold was so excessive, having neither shoe nor stocking, we thought we should have lost our feet. Captain Cheap was so ill that if he had had but a few leagues further to have gone without relief he could not have held out.

  But it pleased God now that our sufferings, in a great measure, were drawing to an end.

  What things our cacique had brought with him from the wreck, he here buried underground in order to conceal them from the Spaniards, who would not have left him a rusty nail if they had known of it. Towards evening we set off again, and about nine the same night, to our great joy, we observed something that had the appearance of a house. It belonged to an acquaintance of our cacique; and as he was possessed of my fowling-piece, and we had preserved about one charge of powder, he made us load for him, and desired we would show him how to discharge it. Upon which, standing up, and holding his head from it as far as possible, he fired – and fell back into the bottom of the canoe. The Indians belonging to the house, not in the least used to fire-arms, ran out and hid themselves in the woods. But after some time one of them, bolder than the rest, got upon a hill, and hollowed to us, asking who and what we were.

  The incident of the Indian and Byron’s musket.

  This fanciful engraving is from a cheap pirated edition of Byron’s Narrative. The three remaining survivors are being rescued in a canoe by an Indian and his wife. Byron has just given his musket to the Indian, who fires it somewhat uncertainly. Campbell looks on sadly, and Cheap is past caring.

  The Indian guide was now among his own people, and Captain Cheap and the two midshipmen were hospitably received in a primitive village. Their generous hosts killed a sheep, brought potatoes and eggs and barley meal, and warmed the strangers with an enormous fire, it being the depth of winter.

  The villagers sent a message to Castro, a town some 80 miles north, to inform the Spanish authorities of the arrival of the three men. A few days later a message came back that the prisoners were to be taken directly to a certain place where a party of soldiers would meet them. Their hosts were very concerned to hear this, as they had a great dread of the Spanish. Byron says that they “detest the very name of a Spaniard”, and that this is not surprising “for they are kept under such subjection and such a laborious slavery by hard usage and punishments.”

  The three survivors were taken under guard to Castro and then to Chacao in the far north of Chiloé island, where the Governor resided. Here they were well treated, recovered their strength quickly, and were allowed to go about as they pleased. About three months later Mr Hamilton was brought in by a search party that the Governor had sent south to find him.

  Byron learned Spanish as fast as he could, managed to scrounge some better clothing and look less like a scarecrow, and started to observe his surroundings. He was particularly interested in the women of Chiloé. He praises their fine complexions and says that many of them are very handsome. “They have good voices,” he writes, “and can strum a little upon the guitar, but they have an ugly custom of smoking tobacco… Women of the first fashion here seldom wear shoes or stockings in the house but only keep them to wear upon particular occasions. I have often seen them coming to the church bare-legged, walking through mud and water, and at the church door put on their shoes and stockings, and pull them off again when they come out.” He seems to have been a great success with the ladies. He went to stay for three weeks with a lady at a farm who had two handsome daughters, and says that she seemed to be as fond of him as if he had been her own son, and was very unwilling to part with him. And one of the priests offered to convert him to Catholicism and give him his niece in marriage, offering as an inducement his fine wardrobe, which he said would be left to Byron on his death. Byron says the clothing was, in his present state, quite a temptation.

  They were then put in a ship for Valparaiso, where they were imprisoned in filthy conditions. After a while they were ordered onto a mule train to the capital, Santiago, where they spent the next two years fairly agreeably as prisoners-of-war on parole, staying with a generous Scots doctor, Dr Patrick Gedd.

  Byron did not lose his interest in the women of the country. His account can continue the story.

  Chapter 22

  An Adventurous Passage to France

  Santiago, January 1743. Byron describes Chile, admiring just about everything but particularly the ladies and the wine. Relations with the Spanish in Santiago are friendly, which is ascribed to the humane way Commodore Anson had treated his prisoners. Campbell becomes a Catholic “and of course left us”.

  In December 1744, under an agreement between Britain and Spain for the exchange of prisoners, the three remaining survivors are told to embark in a French frigate at Valparaiso, and after a six-month delay they reach the Caribbean, where they are chased unsuccessfully by two British ships. The frigate joins a convoy to sail across the Atlantic, and the French Commodore punishes the poor station-keeping of one of his captains by ducking him three times from the yardarm. They arrive in Brest and are delayed several months more awaiting repatriation formalities and a passage home.

  From Midshipman Byron’s narrative

  The women of Santiago are remarkably handsome, and very extravagant in their dress. Their hair, which is as thick as is possible to be conceived, they wear of a vast length, without any other ornament upon the head than a few flowers. They plait it behind in four plaits and twist them round a bodkin, at each end of which is a diamond rose. Their shifts are all over lace, as is a little tight waistcoat they wear over them. Their petticoats are open before, and lap over, and have commonly three rows of very rich lace of gold or silver. They love to have the end of an embroidered garter hang a little below the petticoat. Their breasts and shoulders are very naked, and indeed you may easily discern their whole shape by their manner of dress. They have fine sparkling eyes, ready wit, a great deal of good-nature, and a strong disposition to gallantry.

  Their estancias, or country houses, are very pleasant, and have generally a fine grove of olive trees with large vineyards to them. The Chile wine, in my opinion, is full as good as Madeira, and made in such quantities that it is sold extremely cheap. The soil of this country is so fertile, that the husbandmen have very little trouble; for they do but in a manner scratch up the ground, and without any kind of manure it yields an hundredfold. Without doubt the wheat of Chile is the finest in the world, and the fruits are all excellent in their kinds. Beef and mutton are so cheap that you may have a good cow for three dollars, and a fat sheep for two shillings. Their horses are extraordinary good; and though some of them go at a great price, you may have a very good one for four dollars, or about eighteen shillings of our money.

  The climate of Chile is, I believe, the finest in the world. What they call their winter does not last three months; and even that is very moderate, as may be imagined by their manner of building, for they have no chimneys in their houses. All the rest of the year is delightful; for though from ten or eleven in the morning till five in the after
noon it is very hot, yet the evenings and mornings are cool and pleasant. In the hottest time of the year it is from six in the evening till two or three in the morning that the people of this country meet to divert themselves with music and other entertainments, at which there is plenty of cooling liquors, as they are well supplied with ice from the neighbouring Cordilleras.

  We had a numerous acquaintance in the city, and in general received many civilities from the inhabitants. There are a great many people of fashion and very good families from Old Spain settled here. A lady lived next door to us whose name was Doña Francisca Giron; and as my name sounded something like it, she would have it that we were parientes.[22] She had a daughter, a very fine young woman, who both played and sung remarkably well: she was reckoned the finest voice in Santiago. They saw a great deal of company, and we were welcome to her house whenever we pleased. We were a long time in this country, but we passed it very agreeably.

  We found many Spaniards here that had been taken by Commodore Anson, and had been for some time prisoners on board the Centurion. They all spoke in the highest terms of the kind treatment they had received; and it is natural to imagine that it was chiefly owing to that laudable example of humanity our reception here was so good. They had never had anything but privateers and buccaneers amongst them before, who handled their prisoners very roughly; so that the Spaniards in general, both of Peru and Chile, had the greatest dread of being taken by the English. But some of them told us that they were so happy on board the Centurion, that they should not have been sorry if the Commodore had taken them with him to England.

  After we had been here some time Mr Campbell changed his religion, and of course left us.[23]

  At the end of two years, the President sent for us, and informed us that a French ship from Lima bound to Spain had put in to Valparaiso, and that we should embark in her.[24] After taking leave of our good friend Mr Gedd and all our acquaintance at Santiago we set out for Valparaiso, mules and a guide being provided for us. I had forgot to say before, that Captain Cheap had been allowed by the President six reals a day, and we had four for our maintenance the whole time we were at Santiago, which money we took up as we wanted.[25]

  The first person I met upon our entrance into Valparaiso was the poor soldier who had been kind to us when we were imprisoned in the fort. I now made him a little present, which as it came quite unexpectedly made him very happy.

  About the 20th December 1744 we embarked on board the Lys frigate, belonging to St Malo. She was a ship of four hundred and twenty tons, sixteen guns and sixty men.

  The Lys joined a small convoy of French ships, but sprang a leak and had to return to Valparaiso for repairs. This was unfortunate for the British passengers, as all the other ships were captured by the Royal Navy or English privateers in the Atlantic, and if the Lys had shared the same fate Cheap, Hamilton and Byron might have returned home sooner than they did. As it was Lys had a troublesome passage in the Pacific and around the Horn, and there were delays amounting to six months before she headed for the West Indies to replenish her supplies of water.

  One morning about ten o’clock, as I was walking the quarterdeck, Captain Cheap came out of the cabin and told me he had just seen a beef-barrel go by the ship; that he was sure it had but lately been thrown overboard, and that he would venture any wager that we saw an English cruiser before long. In about half an hour after we saw two sail to leeward from off the quarterdeck; for they kept no look-out from the mast-head. We presently observed they were in chase of us. The French and Spaniards on board now began to grow a good deal alarmed, when it fell stark calm; but not before the ships had neared us so much, that we plainly discerned them to be English men-of-war, the one a two-decker, the other a twenty-gun ship.

  The French had now thoughts, when a breeze should spring up, of running the ship on shore upon Puerto Rico; but when they came to consider what a set of banditti inhabited that island, and that in all probability they would have their throats cut for the sake of plundering the wreck, they were resolved to take their chance and stand to the northward between the two islands. In the evening a fresh breeze sprung up, and we shaped a course accordingly. The two ships had it presently afterwards, and neared us amazingly fast.

  Now everybody on board gave themselves up. The officers were busy in their cabins, filling their pockets with what was most valuable; the men put on their best clothes, and many of them came to me with little lumps of gold, desiring I would take them, as they said they had much rather I should benefit by them, whom they were acquainted with, than those that chased them. I told them there was time enough, though I thought they were as surely taken as if the English had been already on board.

  A fine moonlit night came on, and we expected every moment to see the ships alongside of us; but we saw nothing of them in the night, and to our great astonishment in the morning no ships were to be seen from the mast-head. Thus did these two cruisers lose one of the richest prizes, by not chasing an hour or two longer. There were near two millions of dollars on board, besides a valuable cargo.

  On the 8th at six in the morning we were off Cape la Grange; and what is very remarkable, the French at Cape François[26] told us afterwards that was the only day they ever remembered since the war, that the cape had been without one or two English privateers cruising off it. Only the evening before two of them had taken two outward-bound St Domingo-men, and had gone with them for Jamaica; so that this ship might be justly esteemed a most lucky one.

  In the afternoon we came to an anchor in Cape François harbour.[27] In this long run we had not buried a single man, nor do I remember that there was one sick the whole passage. But at this place many were taken ill, and three or four died, for there is no part of the West Indies more unhealthy than this. Yet the country is beautiful, and extremely well cultivated.

  After being here some time, the Governor ordered us to wait upon him, which we did; when he took no more notice of us than if we had been his slaves, never asking us even to sit down.

  Towards the end of August a French squadron of five men-of-war came in, commanded by Monsieur l’Etendière, who was to convoy the trade to France. Neither he nor his officers ever took any kind of notice of Captain Cheap, though we met them every day ashore.

  On the 6th September we put to sea, in company with the five men-of- war and about fifty sail of merchantmen. On the 8th we made the Cayco Grande; and the next day a Jamaica privateer, a large fine sloop, hove in sight, keeping a little to windward of the convoy, resolving to pick up one or two of them in the night if possible. This obliged Monsieur l’Etendière to send a frigate to speak to all the convoy and order them to keep close to him in the night; which they did, and in such a manner that sometimes seven or eight of them were on board one another together; by which they received much damage; and to repair which the whole squadron was obliged to lay-to sometimes for a whole day.

  The privateer kept her station, jogging on with the fleet. At last, the Commodore ordered two of the best-going ships to chase her. She appeared to take no notice of them till they were pretty near her, and then would make sail, and be out of sight presently. The chasing ships no sooner returned than the privateer was in company again.

  As by this every night some accident happened to some of the convoy by keeping so close together, a fine ship of thirty guns, belonging to Marseilles, hauled out a little to windward of the rest of the fleet; which l’Etendière perceiving in the morning, ordered the frigate to bring the Captain of her on board of him; and then making a signal for all the convoy to close him, he fired a gun and hoisted a red flag at the ensign staff; and immediately after the Captain of the merchantman was run up to the main yard-arm, and from thence ducked three times into the sea. He was then sent on board his ship again with orders to keep his colours flying the whole day in order to distinguish him from the rest.

  We were then told that the person who was treated in this cruel manner was a young man of an exceeding good family in the south of Fra
nce, and likewise a man of great spirit; and that he would not fail to call Monsieur l’Etendière to an account when an opportunity should offer. The affair made much noise in France afterwards.

  One day the ship we were in happened to be out of her station, by sailing so heavily, when the Commodore made the signal to speak to our Captain, who seemed frightened out of his wits. When we came near him he began with the grossest abuse, threatening our Captain that if ever he was out of his station again he would serve him as he had done the other. This rigid discipline, however, preserved the convoy; for though the privateer kept company a long time, she was not so fortunate as to meet with the reward of her perseverance.

  On the 27th October in the evening we made Cape Ortegal[28] and on the 31st came to an anchor in Brest road. The Lys having so valuable a cargo on board was towed into the harbour next morning, and lashed alongside one of their men-of-war. The money was soon landed; and the officers and men who had been so many years absent from their native country were glad to get on shore. Nobody remained on board but a man or two to look after the ship, and we three English prisoners, who had no leave to go ashore.

  The weather was extremely cold, and felt particularly so to us, who had been so long used to hot climates; and what made it still worse, we were very thinly clad. We had neither fire nor candle; for they were allowed on board of no ship in the harbour, for fear of accidents, being close to their magazines in the dockyard. Some of the officers belonging to the ship were so good as to send us off victuals every day, or we might have starved; for Monsieur l’Intendant[29] never sent us even a message; and though there was a very large squadron of men-of-war sitting out at that time, not one officer belonging to them ever came near Captain Cheap.