1703 Fair Speed
THE St George and the Cinque Ports left Kinsale on 11 September 1703. That night Dampier, drunk, had ‘high words’ in his cabin with his First Lieutenant, Samuel Huxford. He summoned the Master, James Hill, and ordered him to turn the ship round, go back to Kinsale and put Huxford ashore. Hill refused to obey this command.
It was not a propitious start or one to inspire confidence in the crew. Dampier took no notice of the Articles of Agreement he had helped formulate and had readily signed. ‘Disagreements and Mismanagements defeated our most promising Hopes’ the Mate of the St George, William Funnell, wrote.†
They headed south toward the island of Madeira off the coast of north Africa. Selkirk, as Master, navigated. Dampier praised him as ‘the best man on the Cinque Ports’. Captain Pickering, ‘a main Pillar of the Voyage’, was impressed with his skills. On the wide Ocean, in this wooden vessel with canvas sails, Selkirk struggled with time and gravity, the force of winds, the movement of the planets and the turning tides.
Lookout was constant. From the moment he saw Kinsale recede he logged the ship’s course and speed by ‘dead reckoning’, hour by hour, watch by watch, day by day. He referred to uncertain nautical charts and to almanacs of tide tables and the waxing and waning moon.† He used a lead plumb line to measure the depth of the sea, a wooden quadrant to measure altitude, a cross-staff to find latitude (the distance north or south of the equator) by the Pole Star, a back-staff to find latitude by the Sun at noon, an azimuth compass to read the magnetic bearings of stars, a steering compass, a nocturnal to gauge the time by night, a sundial to gauge it by day.†
He logged the course steered by the compass, the speed of the ship through the water, the magnetic variation of the stars, the drift of the ship away from the wind, the state of the currents and tides, the vagaries of the weather. Errors were cumulative and hunches frequently wrong.
Fifty miles was fair speed in a day. At noon if the sky was clear he checked his dead reckoning latitude against meridian altitude – the angular distance between the horizon and the Sun. But he could not measure longitude – his distance east or west on the earth’s surface. The theory of longitude had been understood since classical times. Selkirk knew that relative time and place were determined by the orbiting of the earth on its axis: one revolution of three hundred and sixty degrees in a day, fifteen degrees in an hour. To measure the difference of longitude between the meridian where he was, and some fixed meridian, like perhaps Greenwich, he needed to know at the same moment his own local time and local time on the prime meridian. The difference between these, one hour or fifteen degrees, was the difference of longitude. No timepiece had been invented to gauge it. Such a timepiece would have to be accurate for months on end, in a bucketing ship, in every climate.
In 1703 this was a distant dream. The watchmaker who was to ‘Find the Longitude’ and devise such a timepiece, John Harrison, was a ten-year-old boy.† Selkirk, and navigators of his day, tried to find it by calculating the movement of the moon in relation to the sun and the brightest stars. ‘Diligent searchers of the heavens’ compiled tables of lunar distances. But they did not know what laws controlled the movement of the moon, nor the relative positions of the stars, as time markers, one with another.
Reading the Longitude was a frustrating puzzle and navigation was as much luck as science. It was easy to get grandly lost, to be all at sea, a prey to hostile ships, storms, dwindling rations and the ravages of disease. With the technology of wood, glass and string, with crude magnets, wits and vigilance, Selkirk and his ship tried to be in rhythm with the cool grace of the turning world. There was much to divert him and the crew from such pure pursuit: quarrels, drunkenness, mutiny, weevils in the biscuits and no lemons or limes.
1703 A Parcel of Heathens
THE PRIVATEERS reached the island of Madeira after fourteen days. It was of interest to them only for its liquor. William Funnell described it as a pleasant place, but inhabited by Portuguese. A stone wall, cannons and a castle defended its coast. Vineyards covered its southern slopes. Dampier sent boats ashore to load up with casks of wine.
The men sailed on to the Cape Verde Islands. As they anchored at St Jago,* local people clamoured to barter hogs, hens, watermelons, bananas and coconuts, for shirts, breeches and bales of linen. Funnell described them as Murderers, Thieves and Villains: ‘They will take your Hat off your Head at Noon-day although you be in the midst of Company and if you let them have your Goods, before you have theirs, you will be sure to lose them.’†
The privateers considered themselves English, civilised and entitled. They casked fresh water, cut timber for fuel, captured a monkey as a talisman and took Negro men and women as slaves. They gave them meagre food rations and hard lessons in obedience.
They stayed at St Jago for five fraught days. The rows between Dampier and Samuel Huxford became violent. According to Funnell, at midnight on 12 October, Dampier put ashore Huxford with his servant, chest and clothes, then sailed off at four in the morning. Dampier denied this, but others embellished the story. John Welbe, Midshipman on the St George, said Dampier pushed Huxford into a boat, threw his sea chest and clothes after him and ordered a Portuguese officer on St Jago, ‘a sort of corregidor’, to lock him up. Huxford managed to get back to the ship, but Dampier ordered him off.
Mr Huxford begg’d of him not to be so barbarous as to turn him Ashore amongst a Parcel of Banditries and Negro’s; but desired him to let him lye in the Long-boat; or he would be contented to go before the Mast, rather than go ashore amongst a Parcel of Heathens.†
Dampier despised this pleading. He connived with Thomas Stradling to pretend to Huxford that he would be allowed to sail in the Cinque Ports. Huxford, suspicious, refused to leave the St George. Dampier ‘with his own Hands took hold of him and thrust him out of the Ship into Lieut. Stradling’s Boat’. Stradling bundled him on board a Portuguese merchant ship and the St George and Cinque Ports sailed off without him.
Huxford was then marooned on St Jago where he died three months later, ‘partly with Hunger’. Welbe said he would not have blamed Dampier had he put Huxford ashore in Ireland, but to leave him to die in St Jago was a ‘monstrous Barbarity’. He was, he said, unsurprised by his Captain, ‘knowing the like Scene of Cruelty was acted by him, when Commander of the Roebuck.’ Then, too, Dampier had marooned his First Lieutenant, the officer with whom he should have worked in closest accord.
1703 The Scourge of the Sea
THE SHIPS cruised south down the coast of Brazil ‘not fully resolved what Place to touch at next’. Provisions were low. The men craved fresh meat and vegetables and were sullen when ‘great heaps of Stuff not unlike Men’s Guts appeared at the bottom of the Beer Butts’.†
They caught whatever food they could. On 22 October in deep Atlantic waters they caught a shark, a dolphin and two unfamiliar creatures, a ‘Jelly-fish’, gelatinous, slimy and green with ‘a Monstrous high fin and a long extended mouth’, and a large fish they called an ‘Old-wife’, deep blue with yellow-tipped fins and covered in spots and crosses.
These creatures were drawn, dissected, had bits of their anatomy put aside for medicinal use (sharks’ brains were thought good for gallstones) and were boiled for questionable dinner in a large copper cauldron on a brick hearth.
Shark and jelly fish made a change from salt beef and weevil-infested biscuit. White booby birds ‘about the bigness of a Duck’ landed on the ships and went into the pot. ‘They are so silly that when they are weary of flying, they will, if you hold out your Hand, come and sit upon it.’ They tasted ‘very Fishy’ and unless heavily salted made the men sick.
Disease spread. By mid-November fifteen men had fever. The toll rose in the following days. Phlebotomy was the attempted remedy – seven ounces of blood taken from veins on the forehead, arm or foot, or from under the tongue. It was measured in little three-ounce porringers. If that appeared to fail, a concoction of barley, cloves, liquorice and water was proff
ered. If any ingredient was unavailable something else was substituted.
The ships’ surgeons, John Ballett and James Broady, were vague as to why men became ill and what made them well.† If the patient recovered, their treatment was assumed to have effected the cure. Those with the ‘bloody flux’ were prescribed anise or quinces, grated nutmeg, laudanum, or hot bricks to sit on. A few brass pails were available so that ‘poore miserable Men in the weakeness may be eased thereon and not constrained to goe to either the Beake Head or Shrouds to ease themselves, nor be noysome to their Fellowes’.
Scurvy, Scorbutum, the ‘scourge of the sea’, claimed more lives than contagious disease, inanition, gunfire, or shipwreck. Its causes were thought ‘infinite and unsearchable’. Perhaps it was a disease of the spleen, or caused by the ship’s biscuit, or contracted from dirty clothes and cabins, the damp sea air, the salty pork, cares and grief, or the heat of the day.
Those who observed it wondered at its horrors: lassitude, dejection, infected gums, filthy breath, loose teeth, weak legs, swollen flesh, aches and pains, skin blotched with blue or red stains, ‘some broad and some small like flea biting’ and ‘such costiveness as neither Suppository, Glister, nor any Laxative can put it right. For 14 Daies together they go not to stoole once’.†
Mariners knew that those with scurvy would, if given a chance, suck lemons even on an empty stomach. They had seen those sick with it eat fruit and greens and quickly find their former health. None the less for decades no prescriptive correlation was made between fruit and vegetables and scurvy. It was thought that fresh meat, wine, sugar and ‘other comfortable things’ would cure it, or oatmeal, or beer mixed with the yolk of an egg, or perhaps the juice of oranges, lemons or limes, or maybe bran, almonds and rosewater, or green ginger, or sweating in steam if that could be arranged, or strong Vinegar and ‘a good bathe in the Blood of Beasts’.
James Lind, the naval surgeon who would determine the prevention and cure of scurvy was not yet born. It was 1747 when he did a controlled trial of antiscorbutics on board a warship, the Salisbury. He took twelve sailors all with similar symptoms of advanced scurvy. For six weeks he fed them the ship’s standard diet: morning gruel, dinner of mutton broth, pudding and biscuits, supper of barley, raisins, rice, currants, sago and wine. But in pairs he also gave them different daily supplements: cider; elixir of vitriol; vinegar; seawater; two oranges and a lemon; a concoction of nutmeg, garlic, mustard seed, barley water and gum myrrh. The ‘most sudden and visible good effects’ were from the men who ate the fruit. Lind published these findings in his Treatise of the Scurvy in 1753. His was a scientific approach in a speculative age.
But on the St George and Cinque Ports, in 1703, Ballett and his assistants raked out excrement ‘like hard sheep’s treckles’ with a spatula from the rectums of men with scurvy. ‘Warm the spatula and anoint it with oil.’ They cut septic flesh away from the sufferers’ gums, so that they might better eat their biscuits and meat.
1703 Enough to Terrifie any Man
ON 2 NOVEMBER the ships crossed the equator. The fit were ritually ducked: hoisted up by a rope from the main yard, dropped into the sea from a height, then picked up by boat. Many ‘recovered the colour of their skins, which were grown very black and nasty’ Funnell wrote.
For days ‘much troubled’ by gusting southerly winds, the ships made no headway. The men could not hear each other or keep their foothold. Cold, soaked with spray, afraid of being overwhelmed by waves, they had no choice but to secure the guns and anchors and wait for the wind to drop.
The epidemic of fever spread. Captain Pickering lay in his hammock on the Cinque Ports, too ill to move. Command passed to his lieutenant, Thomas Stradling, a gentleman mariner only twenty-one years old. Selkirk disliked his highhandedness and complained that neither he nor Dampier adhered to the Articles of Agreement.
On 24 November they reached Le Grande off the Brazilian coast. They anchored in a bay to the south-west of the island. It led to woodland dense with foliage. It seemed like a jungle ‘not inhabited by any other than Jaccals, Lyons, Tygers etc. Which in the Night make a most hideous Noise, enough to terrifie any Man.’†
In a makeshift way the men ‘wooded, watered and refitted their Ships’. The holds were washed with vinegar and water, the deckhead was smoked and the stench subdued. The armourer improvised a forge, coopers repaired casks, carpenters mended masts. But the ships were in disrepair and beginning to leak. Their wood was infested with worms. They were not sheathed underneath and it was not possible to repair them on a remote South Sea island ‘having neither materialls nor conveniency’.
Boats sent to the mainland three miles away stockpiled supplies of rum. Graves were dug for the dead. Captain Pickering ‘departed this Life’. More than the cursory heaving overboard, his funeral was a ceremony of prayers, homage, cannon fire and burial by a waterfall. Dampier confirmed Thomas Stradling as Captain of the Cinque Ports in his place.
Pickering’s death was a serious loss. The men had thought him fair. Dampier quarrelled with his new First Lieutenant, James Barnaby. A late night drinking session ended with Barnaby requesting ‘Leave to take his Chest and Cloaths out of the Ship’. He said he would rather live among the Portuguese than continue with this voyage. Dampier told him to take his things and go where he pleased.
Barnaby then tried to go ashore. Dampier restrained him, tied his hands behind his back and left him slumped on deck all day. Toward evening one of the crew cut him free
and about ten at Night, Barnaby and eight more of our men put their Chests and Cloaths in the Pinnace, and desir’d some of the Ship’s Company to go in the Boat with them; which accordingly they did, Cap. Dampier being in his Cabbin quite drunk.†
This was mutiny. Twelve men had left the St George and taken its pinnace. Dampier suspected that they planned to capture a Portuguese bark near the shore then work as pirates. To foil them he sent letters to the Governor of Rio de Janeiro, ‘to acquaint him with the Knavish Part of their Intent’. The men were not seen again.
Selkirk described their going as a ‘great weakening to the Ship & Damage to the voiage…’ Dampier, he said, ‘should not have suffered the said Men to go on Shoar’. After Pickering’s death and this mutiny, Dampier, Morgan and Stradling became more secretive and self-seeking. They arranged everything between themselves ‘without the knowledge of any of the said Ships Company’.†
The more the men were excluded from decision making, the more mutinous they became. They wanted strategy and a common purpose. They had been at sea five months: no gold had come their way, they had taken no prizes and their ships were in disrepair. The captain was drunk and wild-tempered and the point of the voyage seemed lost.
1704 Alone with the Ship’s Monkey
THE TWO SHIPS headed south toward Cape Horn. Dampier ruled they should not stop again until they reached The Island. Each day the men became more desperate for comfort. Their dried meat and grain were infested with ants, cockroaches and rats’ droppings.
The belongings of those who died of scurvy or fever were vied for in wrangling auctions: a sea chest, bought in London for five shillings, went for three pounds. Shoes, bought for four shillings and sixpence, went for thirty-one shillings. Half a pound of thread that had cost two shillings was sold for seventeen and sixpence.
As they neared Cape Horn the sky turned black. They reefed and furled their sails and waited for the storm. On the night of 4 January 1704 the wind hit so hard it raised the waves to the height of mountains. Rain poured down ‘as through a Sieve’. Sheet lightning hit the sea and lit the breaking waves like fire. The ships went where the storm took them. The sea broke over the decks, smashed rails, masts and yards, soaked the men and loosened the anchors. There were no lantern lights or fires for warmth or food. The sick shivered in wet hammocks in the lower decks. A boy aloft lost his hold and drowned in the night. The men crawled the decks, prayed and expected shipwreck.
Only when a corposant, a ball of light, an elec
trical discharge, appeared on the shattered masthead would they dare to believe that the storm had passed. When grey dawn came the sea was calm. But the ships had lost sight of each other. Dampier supposed they would reunite at The Island. On the Cinque Ports Selkirk calculated that he was west of Cape Horn. He turned the ship north into the Great South Sea and headed up the coast of Chile, toward Juan Fernandez.
But Dampier was lost. For three days he headed north to the east of the Horn. He realised his mistake only when ‘contrary to all expectations’ he came to islands east of Tierra del Fuego – the Land of Fire. He much resented Funnell’s criticism of his navigation skills, the suggestion that he was less than the supreme pilot of these seas. His men braved the Horn again.
The Cinque Ports reached Juan Fernandez on 4 February. Its crew of ninety was reduced to forty-two. They were in tattered clothes and they were hungry and sick. They turned on Stradling and accused him of inept command, unfairness and deceit. Selkirk fuelled dissent. He disliked Stradling’s upper-class highhandedness. He said that after Pickering’s death Stradling had held no consultation with the men and that Articles of Agreement were ignored.†
Stradling lost all command. The Cinque Ports anchored a mile from the shore, on the eastern side of the Great Bay, in forty-five fathoms of water.* The men took the boats to the shore, their sights set on the clear water streams, the goats in the mountains, the crabs and lobsters that scuttled the rocks. ‘For two Days the Ship lay as it were without Men’. Stradling stayed marooned on board, alone with the ship’s monkey.
Dampier saw The Island but sailed on past. ‘Our Captain thought it not to be the right Island’ Funnell wrote with scorn. No two charts gave the same latitude. Dampier thought it was at ‘33:30 South forty-five Leagues west from the coast of Chili’. Its true latitude is 340 47’S.* After several days, when no other land came into view, the ship turned back. Then, ‘passing by the great Bay, we saw our Consort Capt. Stradling in the Cinque-Ports’. Thus Dampier identified his port of call.
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