by Derek Wilson
There can scarcely have been an unluckier Pacific voyager. Had Carteret continued on a westerly course he might well have fallen in with islands of the Tonga or Fiji groups. Turning northwards where he did carried him through empty sea to the west of the Society Isles and to the east of Samoa.
In 10°S 167°W Carteret again turned westward, looking for the Solomons that Byron had missed two years before. He sailed right through the region where they had been located on charts since the Spanish voyages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Then, by a cruel irony, he came, seventeen days and thirteen hundred miles later, to the island of Santa Cruz, the easternmost of the Solomon group – and did not recognise it. Quiros had described the island carefully, and indicated that it possessed a good harbour in Graciosa Bay (where he had established a settlement) and was well stocked with animals, fruit and vegetables. But Quiros had also located Santa Cruz twenty degrees east of its true position, and that explains why Carteret failed to identify it.
That failure gave birth to a complete brood of further disasters. The scurvy-weakened crew were desperate for fresh food and water so Carteret anchored in a bay on the desolate northern coast and sent out a reconnaissance party to see what benefit the island offered. To their delight, the men came upon Graciosa Bay and its more abundant hinterland. They also found a large group of friendly natives. All was going well until the leader of the party, anxious to gather a boatload of coconuts, ordered one of the trees to be cut down. This broke a local taboo and the mood of the islanders changed. To dissuade them from making an attack, the Swallow’s master fired a pistol. This had the exact opposite of the desired effect. In the subsequent affray, seven of the Englishmen were wounded (four later died of tetanus). After that it was impossible to re-establish good relations or to gather supplies. The Swallow’s men took on fresh water but only by frightening the natives away with musket salvoes.
Carteret now gave way to depression and inertia. His ship needed a complete overhaul. Most of his men were sick. He had only one lieutenant fit enough for duty. There was no prospect of obtaining fresh food. He would have to abandon his plans of resuming exploration to the south with a refreshed crew. To crown all he was himself gravely ill with an intestinal disorder – near to death, if his own lugubrious account is to be believed. He bitterly blamed the master, Alexander Simpson, for provoking the hostility of the islanders. He blamed his crank and now leaky ship. He blamed his lack of officers. In fact, as he lay weak and sweating in his cabin, he blamed everyone but himself:
My ill state of health; the little regard that had been given to my orders, the incensing and falling out with these people . . . the loss of so many of my best men . . . the great number of sick . . . the little likelihood there was of getting any refreshments for them, the want of officers . . . were dispiriting incidents that at once blasted and damped all my hopes, from being again in a condition to pursue the voyage any farther, and this at the time when I had flattered myself I was at the point of doing something worthwhile towards the desired end.30
He summoned the master and the fit lieutenant to his sickbed and asked them what they thought it best to do. They advised him to turn northwards in order to pick up the known route which would bring them to the Marianas and thence, by using the monsoons, to Batavia. This was the way Anson, Byron and (though Carteret did not know it) Wallis had gone. It was the only known way and, therefore, the only way which offered any safety.
But Carteret did not take it. The adventurous spark, it seems, had not been entirely extinguished. By sailing on a heading west by north he hoped to reach New Britain, of which Dampier had written enthusiastically and, perhaps, on the way to make fresh discoveries. On 20 August he fell in with a cluster of islands which were part of the main Solomon group, though, of course, he did not know it. Still dispirited, he, too readily, decided not to linger. Landing looked hazardous and when the Swallow came close inshore the inhabitants made hostile gestures. So Carteret sailed on, having failed to write his name in the annals of exploration as the man who rediscovered the fabled and long-lost Solomon Islands. He now continued parallel to but out of sight of the archipelago and, on 28 August, he reached the large islands of New Britain and New Ireland.
At last the travellers found a cove where they could drop anchor in peace and safety, carry their sick ashore and gather food, water and timber. New Ireland was not the brimming, natural larder Dampier had represented it to be but the men were able to gather coconuts in abundance. This they did by chopping trees down rather than by the more energetic process of climbing the tall, slender palms. Carteret, like Byron, set great store by the produce of the coconut palm – not only its fruit but also its leafy crown, which he called ‘cabbage’:
The milk, or rather water, of these nuts is an excellent and perhaps the best anti-scorbutic that is in the world. The cabbage part of this tree ... is a white, juicy crispy substance, has much of the taste, when eaten raw of our chestnuts, but when boiled eats much like a good parsnip. But you must cut down a tree for each cabbage which makes a great destruction of these useful trees.31
Frugal though the hospitality of this place was, Carteret’s spirits revived. He named it ‘English Cove’ and set up a plaque claiming New Ireland and New Britain for King George.
When the Swallow weighed anchor, on 9 September 1767, it ended a remarkable phase in the exploration of Oceania. The, often unsung, achievements of Anson, Byron, Wallis and Carteret, were considerable. They did not clear up the mystery of the great southern continent. Their routes were dominated by prevailing winds and the search for antiscorbutics. There was still much exploration to be done and not before the end of the century would mariners and geographers have accurate Pacific charts to study. But what these four English voyages did was to indicate the general pattern of that scattering of islands which lies across the Tropics between New Guinea and Easter Island like ink spots flicked from a pen onto blotting paper, thickly clustered in the West and thinning towards the East.
Carteret, still following Dampier’s narrative, decided to make for Mindanao in the southern Philippines, where the buccaneer-explorer had found the local people so hospitable. But almost a century had passed since Dampier’s visit and the indigenes had learned during that time to be wary of Europeans, most of whom seemed to be bent only on conquest. Thus, when Carteret sent a cutter ashore for water the islanders, ‘at the sight of our boat . . . fired two great guns and sent three boats who chased ours till they got sight of the ship’. And later, ‘about 9 o’clock at night we were suddenly surprised with the hollowing of a number of men onshore abreast of the ship, intended as I imagine to have frightened us. It was exactly like the Indian war cry, which is a sudden, hideous hollow they all give the instant they attack, to dismay and terrify their enemies . . .’32 Frustrated again, Carteret gave Mindanao a wide berth.
He now became the first circumnavigator to take the channel between Sulawesi and Borneo en route for Batavia. It was the shortest course and, with forty of his men totally incapacitated, he had no alternative. On 15 December 1767 and 246 days after leaving the Straits of Magellan this unfortunate captain dropped anchor off the Dutch port of Maccasar (modern Udung Panjang) on the south-west coast of Sulawesi. The long sequence of encounters with deceptive havens and hostile natives was past. Now his ship and his men could be rested for five months until the easterly monsoon began in May. Or so Carteret may reasonably have hoped. But he was doomed to drain to the dregs the cup of disappointment.
His letter to the governor, requesting permission to stay received an abrupt answer:
he ordered me instantly to depart and be gone from this part nor to offer to approach any nearer nor to anchor on any parts of this coast or suffer any of my people to go onshore in any part of his government . . .33
This callous refusal of aid to mariners so obviously in distress was occasioned by fear and insecurity. The Dutch East India Company relied for the maintenance of its monopoly on alliances with local rulers.
Many of these alliances, forged by a mixture of force and diplomacy, were very tenuous and might easily be upset by the agents of rival commercial nations. The governor of Maccasar, like all his colleagues in the service, was thus under strict instructions not to succour foreign merchant ships.
Carteret was furious. He told the governor’s men that under no circumstances would he depart. He accused them of want of humanity. He took them on a tour of the Swallow’s sick and dead. He threatened to run his ship ashore if they continued to deny an ally ‘the treatment they would [give] to a Christian enemy’.34 Eventually, the Dutch offered a compromise: he might rest up his ship at Bonthain, a small harbour down the coast and wait there for the monsoon season. This was agreed, amicable relations were restored and courtesy gun salutes were exchanged.
But before Carteret had been a few weeks at Bonthain relations were soured again. He was allowed a house in the town to use as a hospital but beyond that the movements of his men were strictly limited. His hosts, so he claimed, made him pay through the nose for supplies. Worst of all, Carteret became obsessed with suspicion. He persuaded himself that the Dutch were planning to massacre their unwanted guests. This fear seemed confirmed when he received a letter warning him of a plot hatched by the Dutch and one of the Sulawesi princes. The ‘plot’ was, in fact, a fabrication by a local faction trying to involve the English in their struggle against the Dutch. But Carteret’s xenophobia and persecution mania were easily aroused. He had the Swallow ostentatiously guarded. He sent angry letters to the local officials and threatened reprisals at the highest diplomatic levels when he returned to England. The governor, genuinely surprised and alarmed, demanded evidence for Carteret’s allegations but the Englishman refused. By the time the expedition put to sea again on 22 May relations with the Dutch had been well and truly soured and Carteret’s reputation had gone ahead of him to Batavia. This involved more delays and acrimonious exchanges before Swallow could be repaired and reprovisioned for the journey home. The captain was not sorry to get away from Batavia on 15 September. Many of his men were sick with the inevitable malaria or dysentery and the Dutch eastern capital was, in his words, a place where ‘nothing else reigns but pride, haughtiness, insolence, jealousy, suspicion and mistrust.’35
At his last anchorage before setting out to cross the Indian Ocean Carteret noted further evidence of what he regarded as the tyrannical rule of the arrogant Dutch. This was at the south-east corner of Java. Although it was far from any colonial settlement, the people did not flock out in their canoes to sell local produce to travellers as they had done in time past ‘for fear of being seen by any of the guard boats which the Dutch keep here in the straits to speak to all shipping that go through’.36 Only under cover of darkness did some of the Javanese venture to trade with the Englishmen.
During the two month crossing of the Indian Ocean (25 September–28 November) the Swallow still had to be manned by a sickness-depleted crew, despite the fact that numbers had been augmented by twenty-five sailors pressed by the Dutch who took the opportunity of escaping back to England. Seven more mariners died before Swallow reached the Cape. However, with the wind on her port beam or quarter most of the way, she did not require heavy handling. At Cape Town Carteret, after twenty-seven and a half months at sea, at last, found a port of call to his liking:
Here we breathed a good air, had the wholesome food and went freely about in the country, which is extremely pleasant, and I began to think myself already in Europe.37
Six days into the new year, 1769, Swallow set out on the last lap of her ill-fortuned voyage. She made calls at the uninhabited islands of St Helena and Ascension. At the latter the men feasted on turtles. They caught eighteen of these large creatures by the simple expedient of waylaying the females at night, when they came ashore to lay their eggs, and turning them on their backs. Ascension was also an island ‘post office’. Captains calling there had developed the habit of leaving messages in bottles recording their visit. It was by complying with this habit that Carteret revealed his whereabouts to a famous rival.
Three days after Swallow’s departure on 1 February, Louis Antoine de Bougainville called at Ascension. This first French circumnavigator who had haunted Byron in Magellan’s Strait in 1765 had followed Wallis and Carteret from Europe and gradually gained on them. He had called at the Cape after the Englishman and left quickly in the hope of overtaking him. Arriving at Ascension on 4 February, he discovered, to his delight, that he had already gained six days on him in the southern Atlantic. Bougainville now lost no time in pressing his pursuit and, on 19 February, he came up with the Swallow. He immediately sent one of his officers in a boat to enquire if the English captain needed any assistance. Carteret politely declined and questioned his visitor about the identity of his own ship. The young man, who, much to Carteret’s disgust, presented himself dressed only in a waistcoat and trousers, told a cock and bull story about his ship being in the French East India Company’s service and now returning from a voyage to Sumatra. He was under strict instructions to reveal nothing while keeping his eyes and ears open to everything that might be of interest aboard the Swallow. Thus Bougainville played with his rivals just as he had done four years before. And just as on that earlier occasion he and Byron never met, so now the French and English circumnavigators came very close together without actually setting eyes on each other. Soon the two vessels parted company, Bougainville’s racing ahead. Only afterwards, when comparing notes with his officers and men, did Carteret realise the identity of the apparently solicitous Frenchman.
A month later, on 20 March, Carteret and his men came to anchor at Spithead – ‘to our great joy’.
*Cf. below, p.194.
* This experiment proved extremely successful, though Byron attributed the crew’s failure to catch fish to the Dolphin’s copper bottom.4
* These arguments surface again during the Falklands War in 1982.
7
FILLING IN THE GAPS
Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s expedition may claim to have been the first genuinely scientific voyage of circumnavigation. The scholarly Frenchman set out with the deliberate objective of making reliable charts of those parts of the Pacific through which he passed, collecting plants, and trying to master the accurate measurement of longitude. But he did not set out on a pure and disinterested quest for truth. He was following the principles laid down by de Brosses for the French colonisation of distant lands. The charts he drew up were for the benefit of his countrymen who would follow after, establishing settlements, as he had done in the Falklands. The plants he collected were nutmegs and cloves which his superiors wanted to try growing on Île de France (Mauritius). This Indian Ocean island had been ruled by the French East India Company for half a century but the government in Paris had now decided to bring it directly under crown control. While Bougainville was still on his outward voyage the new governor arrived at Île de France and began transforming what was no more than a port of call into a thriving colony whose economy was based on plantation agriculture. His objective was to grow spices there and thus make France independent of Dutch supplies from the Moluccas. Bougainville was charged, secretly of course, with obtaining plant specimens for preliminary tests. But the task to which the scientist-captain devoted most energy was experimenting on the measurement of longitude.
The correct calculation of longitude was the philosopher’s stone sought by hundreds of eighteenth-century astronomers, mathematicians, inventors and cranks. So important was it that, in 1713, the British government offered the staggering sum of £20,000* to the man who could solve the problem to within thirty nautical miles of accuracy. They then set up the Board of Longitude to examine the ‘solutions’ which came flooding in. Despite the hundreds of ingenious ideas and mechanisms which were submitted, half a century passed without anyone winning the reward.
The key to the calculation of longitude is time. If you know what hour it is at the place where you are now and also at your original point of de
parture; if you subtract one figure from the other and multiply the result by fifteen, you know how far east or west of your starting point you are, measured in degrees of longitude. It only then remains for you to add or subtract the difference between the longitude of your embarkation point and the Greenwich meridian to fix your absolute longitude. That is the easy way. Unfortunately, it was not available to sailors in the 1760s. Or, rather, it was only just beginning to be available. To make the necessary calculations an accurate chronometer is essential: one that is impervious to the erratic movements of a ship and to variations in heat and humidity. Such sophisticated instruments were just on the point of being perfected.
In 1728 a thirty-five-year-old horologist by the name of John Harrison arrived in London with a design for a new clock. He devoted the rest of his long life to perfecting it. During that time he made a succession of instruments. The first was cumbersome and expensive but its successors were progressively more manageable – and accurate – and a pocket chronometer tested on a trip to Barbados in 1764 enabled longitude to be calculated to within ten miles. The terms of the government’s offer had obviously been met but it took the now aged Harrison another nine months to induce them to pay up. Meanwhile similar work had been done in Paris, where Pierre Le Roy produced another type of chronometer in 1765. The principles had been established but it was still a further twenty years before ships could be issued with inexpensive, standard chronometers.