Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  While the wild, natural and romantic aspects of the island were more likely to alarm his readers than enchant them – the taste for such sublime experience was as yet limited – Shelvocke’s text became a resource for later voyagers.

  The distinctly unimpressive economic returns of voyages to the South Seas meant Shelvocke would be the last British privateer to cruise the South Seas. While Rogers brought home prize goods worth £148,000, and healthy profits for investors, the Dampier and Shelvocke expeditions were commercial disasters. A decade later John Campbell lamented that the painful combination of avarice, buccaneering and chaos ‘gave the public a bad idea of all Expeditions to the South Sea, and induced many to suppose, that … they were calculated purely for the private Advantage’, while taking tales of mutinies and disasters too seriously was keeping the nation asleep, unaware of the riches to be had by men of enterprise and energy. Despite these problems the cultural impact of buccaneer and privateer voyages would be out of all proportion to their number, or their financial success. Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, The ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and other voyage narratives transformed the intellectual landscape of eighteenth-century Britain. However, the licensed predator had run his course; no more would put in at Juan Fernández to refit and refresh, recover goatskin clad castaways and feast on crayfish. Henceforth British power would be projected into the Pacific by the Royal Navy.13

  Before the next British voyagers arrived they had an opportunity to reflect on the last Dutch attempt to contest the future of the South Pacific. Hoping to cut into the Dutch East India Company’s Asian monopoly the West India Company sent an expedition under Jacob Roggeveen in 1721. Following the Schouten/Le Maire voyage, the three-ship squadron set Juan Fernández as their rendezvous, and the flagship arrived on 24 February 1722. All three vessels remained for several weeks. Suitably refreshed, the expedition sailed off into the unknown, finding and naming Easter Island. In British accounts Roggeveen claimed Juan Fernández ‘would afford subsistence for 600 families at least’. John Campbell added emphasis:

  Whatever nation shall revive and prosecute Mr Roggewein’s plan, will become, in a few years, master of as rich and profitable a commerce, as the Spaniards have from their own country to Mexico and Peru, or the Portuguese to Brazil.14

  This foreign endorsement was doubly convenient, investing long held British views with a degree of impartiality, and a hint of urgency. In fact the Dutch studiously ignored Roggeveen, he was arrested at Batavia (modern Jakarta) by the Dutch East India Company and arrived home a prisoner. The Dutch never came back to Juan Fernández, and later it became clear that contemporary accounts of the Roggeveen voyage were garbled, misleading and in some cases invented. Roggeveen’s journal noted the island had ‘extremely good water and firewood, and fish’, which were ‘in such great abundance that four men with the hook are able to catch in two hours for a hundred men so many than they have enough for a midday and evening meal’. The fish were fried in fresh seal oil. He dismissed the buccaneer narratives of abundant greenery as romances and above all said nothing about settlement, or the strategic value of the islands.15 That Campbell happily bolstered his own argument with some very doubtful Dutch courage should not mislead. The Dutch showed no interest in Juan Fernández, and Roggeveen was the last Dutchman to enter the Pacific via Cape Horn.

  After Shelvocke and Roggeveen, the islands slumbered for almost twenty years, visited by a few discrete smuggling voyages while the occasional Spanish expedition landed dogs to destroy the goat population, long the staple diet of freebooters and interlopers. In truth, the silence of those years was only the lull before the storm. The British had been planning and projecting their way into the South Pacific ever since the high drama of Drake and Cavendish, fuelled by the lure of silver and the promotion of vital export trades. Britain produced a surplus of woollen goods and manufactures, which were hard to place on the global market. The prospect of new American markets encouraged merchants and manufacturers to engage with the wider world, embark their money in new voyages, or push the ministers for another Spanish War.16

  NOTES

  1 Belgium, then the Austrian Netherlands, was ruled by the Habsburg Empire then at war with Spain.

  2 Hatley, unlike Shelvocke, was a South Seas veteran. R. Fowke, The Real Ancient Mariner: Pirates and Poesy on the South Sea, Travelbrief, Shropshire, 2010.

  3 G. Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea Performed in the Years 1719, 20, 21, 22, in the Speedwell of London, of 24 Guns and 100 Men, (under His Majesty’s Commission to Cruise on the Spaniards in the Late War with the Spanish Crown) till She was Cast Away on the Island of Juan Fernández, in May 1720; and was afterwards Continued in the Recovery, the Jesus Maria and Sacra Familia &c., Sennen, Innys, Osborn & Longman, London, 1726, pp. 115–20 (spellings modernised).

  4 Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World, pp. 205, 210, 208; Skottsberg, The Natural History of Juan Fernández and Easter Island, vol. I, p. 111 noted Bahía Pangal was named after the Gunnera peltata (giant pangues) that grew there with trees and ferns. He also noted the waterfall that Shelvocke used.

  5 Williams, The Great South Sea, pp. 197–204; W. Betagh, A Voyage Round the World: Being an Account of a Remarkable Enterprise Begun in 1719, Chiefly to Cruise on the Spaniards in the Great South Ocean, London, 1728: T. Beattie, ‘“Entirely the Most Absurd and False Narrative that was ever Deliver’d to the Publick”: An Inquiry into What Really Happened on George Shelvocke’s Privateering Voyage’, The Mariner’s Mirror 97(3) (2011), pp. 163–76.

  6 Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World, p. 215.

  7 Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World, pp. 219, 221, 232–3, 238–41, 244.

  8 T. Sutcliffe, Crusoiana; or Truth versus Fiction elucidated in a History of the Islands of Juan Fernández, Manchester, 1843, pp. 55–6.

  9 Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World, pp. 259–62.

  10 Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World, pp. 246–7.

  11 Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World, pp. 248–51.

  12 Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World, pp. 257–8, with a picture of the two creatures at the western end of Windy Bay, pp. 252–3.

  13 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. II, pp. 213–14; Campbell, Navigantium, vol. I, p. 239; D. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century, University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1990, pp. 46–8, 95–6, 112–15.

  14 A. Sharp (ed.), The Journal of Jacob Roggeveen, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974; Campbell, Navigantium, vol. I, pp. 184–320.

  15 Sharp, The Journal of Jacob Roggeveen, pp. 81–2.

  16 A. Frost, ‘Shaking Off the Spanish Yoke: British Schemes to Revolutionise America, 1739–1807’, in M. Lincoln (ed.), Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1998, pp. 19–37, here pp. 19–20.

  7

  George Anson’s Voyage

  In 1738 the invariably strained Anglo-Spanish relationship plumbed new depths. Long-standing quarrels over the terms of the Asiento, South Seas Company political influence and British arrogance spiralled into war. Company complaints about unfair restraints on market access met a growing desire among the wider commercial community to resume the old habit of plundering Spanish America, overriding the wisdom and caution of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. His deluded opponents supposed the possession of a vast costly Navy meant a war with Spain would be short and successful. Plans were legion, including South Seas projects pivoted on Juan Fernández. The strategy could not be faulted for modesty. Valdivia in Southern Chile would be an ideal settlement, while Juan Fernández might be occupied and fortified as ‘a settlement, retreat, or as a place of rendezvous’. South Seas ‘experts’ Hubert Tassell and Henry Hutchinson, men connected to the Company, recommended occupying Juan Fernández, building a small fort and houses and cultivating the land as a settlement, retreat or rendezvous. Such designs had more than hint of the massive, overblown
1712 scheme, combining an impressive fleet with a landing force of 1,500 troops. Both men sailed with Anson’s expedition, linking naval force with commercial ambition.1

  Eventually a force of six warships and two transports was placed under the command of Captain George Anson, an officer with considerable American experience, albeit North American, and an expertise in celestial navigation. His flagship was HMS Centurion, a sixty-gun battleship. Resources were so tight that Anson’s tiny landing force consisted of Chelsea Pensioners and raw, untrained Marines. Although his troops were distinctly unimpressive Anson embarked a formidable library of South Pacific books, using the most recent, Shelvocke’s text, to encode signals. British information security was shocking. By January 1740 the French knew of plans to attack Spanish America, perhaps at Buenos Aires, which had been an early objective, or establishing a colony in Patagonia. Intelligence from Paris finally roused the Spanish to recognise the danger, and by the middle of the year warnings had been sent from Madrid to the governors of Manila, Mexico and Peru. Spying became circular when the British captured a Spanish dispatch, advising the Viceroy of Mexico ‘that the King of Spain had heard of our fitting out six ships, with 700 land forces on board, for to go round Cape Horn to the South Sea’. The Viceroys should be on guard, using the annual royal revenue to enhance local defences. Long before he sailed from Spithead Anson knew the element of surprise had been lost.2 To make matters worse the Spanish sent a powerful squadron to destroy his force before it could reach the Pacific.

  A delayed departure meant Anson’s squadron rounded Cape Horn in winter storms. Only four ships made the rendezvous at Juan Fernández, their crews decimated by hypothermia, typhus, dysentery and, above all, scurvy. Eighteenth-century mariners knew how scurvy affected the human body, but they had no idea what caused it, other than long sea voyages. The symptoms were terrifying. Teeth became loose in the gums, old wounds reopened and began to bleed, men lost their strength, limbs became swollen, joints tightened, and sections of skin blackened. Sixteenth-century Spanish mariners had appreciated the preservative quality of lemons, and some English seamen learned the lesson, notably those sailing to India. Yet no one made a systematic attempt to analyse the disease until after it had decimated Anson’s expedition.

  While eighteenth-century men sought divine intervention and looked for land, modern medical knowledge has expanded our understanding of what went wrong. The expedition spent months anchored at Spithead before sailing, a period when the men had little access to fresh food. The long voyage south did little to improve the situation, living on salt meat, hard biscuit and other preserved rations. By contrast Anson and his officers had eaten fresh provisions at Spithead, arriving at Juan Fernández in better condition.

  Scurvy is a wasting disease brought on by a critical deficiency of vitamin C. The human body can store enough vitamin C to last a few weeks, but this must be replaced by regular supplies obtained from fresh vegetables, citrus fruits, milk, raw fish or seal meat. Older men have a smaller reserve of vitamin C than boys and younger men, explaining the earlier onset and disproportionate losses among the old soldiers. Even so it would be six months after sailing that the first scorbutic outbreaks occurred, longer than modern science would suggest. HMS Gloucester recorded the first cases on 11 March 1741.

  However, the problem was more complex; the men were also suffering from deficiencies of niacin and other vitamins, leading to idiotism, lunacy and convulsions, while the lack of thiamin and vitamin A caused night blindness. Rough weather rounding the Cape Horn left the men exhausted, filthy, frozen, bruised and short of hot food, all of which reduced their resistance to scurvy, and other shipboard diseases.

  Having rounded Cape Horn and narrowly avoided disaster due to navigational errors, Anson waited for some days at the first rendezvous, Socorro on the Chilean coast. It proved to be a desperate disappointment. Where Narborough’s journal recorded landing on a fine sandy beach Anson saw only a rocky shore and crashing waves. There was no food or succour to be had, and after a few hair-raising days trying to hold station in storm conditions he headed north for Juan Fernández, ‘the only road in that part of the world where there was any probability of our recovering our sick, or refitting our vessel, and consequently our getting thither was the only chance we had left to avoid perishing at sea’.3

  Unfortunately Anson had an inaccurate location for the island, a common feature of existing accounts, including Shelvocke’s. The position given was too close to the mainland and one degree of latitude too far north. To make matters worse Anson lost faith in the navigational abilities of the ship’s master after the close brush with disaster rounding Cape Horn. A fine observational astronomer and experienced navigator Anson made a cautious approach, missing Juan Fernández and sailing right up the Chilean coast before admitting his error. In the nine days that were wasted close on one hundred men died, a tragedy that inspired some powerful lines in the official voyage narrative, lines that established the island at the heart of the story: ‘Under these disheartening circumstances, we stood to the westward; and, on the 9th of June [1741], at daybreak, we at last discovered the long-wished for island of Juan Fernandez.’4

  Although their books (notably Shelvocke’s) told them the island would be their salvation, first indications suggested it was a tough, rugged and mountainous place. The following day HMS Centurion coasted along the northern shore, with a northerly wind, looking for the main anchorage, Windy Bay. The sight of this verdant island with waterfalls cascading into the ocean was enough to revive some invalids, they struggled onto the deck simply to see and smell salvation. The officers, more concerned to find the anchorage, quickly realised there was no one on the island, either Spaniard or Englishman. Four more men died that day. With a desperately weak crew, one that depended on the officers, boys and even a cleric to carry out the simplest manoeuvres and a current carrying them close to the shore Anson wisely anchored at sunset. Early the following morning the cutter was sent to locate Windy Bay, while Anson waited for a fresh easterly gale and high seas to abate. The crew set about fishing, quickly hauling in a prodigious quantity. The boat returned seven hours later with grass and fresh seal meat, having located the anchorage to the west, and the following morning (12 June), the anchor half-raised, the crew were too weak to haul it up to the cathead, the ship drifted into Windy Bay, luffing up towards the watering place at Bahía Pangal. During the day three more men died. The ‘dreadful and fatal’ voyage of 148 days from Brazil had finally ended.5 The disaster was a direct result of poor diet before the ships left England, and the length of passage from the last landfall.

  Shortly after the Centurion anchored, the sloop Tryal appeared. Anson hoped she could help to shift the Centurion’s anchors further inshore, but the tiny warship was in no condition to oblige. Anson sent Lieutenant Philip Saumarez and a boat crew to carry the hawsers on board and help work the ship, they found that only Captain Charles Saunders, a lieutenant and three men were able to work the sails. The sloop had lost 34 men from a crew of only 100. Most of those still living were close to death; they lay on the deck, literally awash in their own excrement, amid the wreckage of the rigging, alongside the unburied dead. Saumarez’s men helped Tryal moor inshore of the Centurion. By the next morning the two ships were anchored. Saumarez recorded both ships ‘sending materials ashore to raise tents for the sick, who now died apace. It being impossible to conceive the stench and filthiness which men lay in or the condition that the ship was in between decks.’6 With so few men fit for duty, Anson and his officers had to work the ship, and carry the scorbutic invalids ashore. As the first boats headed for the island the officers were enraptured by ‘this enchanting landskip, which still improved upon us the further we advanced.’ However such delights would have to wait: the first priority was the health of the remaining men, then refitting shattered, filthy ships. Anson’s mission depended on the mythic restorative qualities of Juan Fernández.

  On 15 June the Tryal was blown out of the bay by ‘t
he violent flaws of the wind’, and had to be helped back by Centurion’s pinnace. She returned on the 17th, to find that a tented camp had been established at Bahía Pangal, close to the original Spanish settlement and Shelvocke’s camp. The landing was not easy, ‘by reason of pretty much surf, and great stones like rocks, instead of sand or gravel on the shore’. To improve access Anson had the men build a wharf.7