Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  Byron’s oversight ensured the next expedition, led by Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret in the Dolphin and the Swallow, left England with plans to stop at Más a Tierra. Having lost contact with Wallis during a tough passage through the Straits of Magellan, Carteret, a lieutenant on the Dolphin under Byron, realised his crew needed fresh food and water. On 10 May 1767, HMS Swallow, profiting from a strong southeasterly wind, fetched the eastern end of Juan Fernández, and opened into Cumberland Bay, fully expecting it would be as empty as it had been on the day Anson departed.

  But I was not a little surprised to observe a great number of men all about the beach, with a house and four pieces of Cannon over the waterside with two large Boats lying off of it, a Fort about two or three hundred yards up on the rising of the hill and on which they hoisted Spanish Colours, it was faced with stones and masonry has 18 or twenty embrasures with a longhouse inside of it, which I took for Barracks for the garrison, it did not seem to be fortified on the back or land side next the hill, all these works are on the westernmost side of the land of the Bay; there are round about the fort of different kinds about 25 or 30 houses, much Cattle feeding on the brow of the hills which seemed to be cultivated, many spots being parked and enclosed.6

  There was another block house at Puerto Inglese. While English strategists and French savants speculated Spain had finally acted. The secret had been well kept, even the Spanish Ambassador in London knew nothing, warning Madrid that the Wallis/Carteret expedition might attempt to colonise the Falkland Islands, Juan Fernández and the Galápagos.

  Finding the Spanish in control of Cumberland Bay Carteret quickly bore away (changed course) without showing any colours. He did not have a Spanish flag, while hoisting an English ensign would have caused problems. Instead he made for Más Afuera, although ‘not the most eligible place for a ship to refresh (as Anson described it)’, it had been vacant when he last saw it. Arriving on 16 May, the Swallow remained standing off and on for several days, unable to anchor in the rough weather, sending the cutter inshore whenever the weather abated to fill the casks with much needed water. Having landed on the island two years earlier Lieutenant Erasmus Gower reported the water supply much reduced. It had been a very dry summer that year, then one night a furious storm filled the gullies and washed away some of Swallow’s casks. Watering was difficult, dangerous work, leaving the men bruised and battered, soaked and chilled. One night Carteret was lucky to get the cutter on board and stowed before ‘a terrible hard squall broke on us, & laid down the ship in a surprising manner, had we been but half a minute later in getting the boat in, we unavoidably must have lost her’. Several of the crew were fine swimmers, including three men who had to coast round the treacherous island, risking shark attack, after heavy surf prevented the boat reaching them. Whenever the weather allowed, Carteret sent the cutter inshore for water, fish and seals, but only managed to get his anchors down on 21 May, and on the 23rd the Swallow was once again driven out to sea. Carteret feared he had lost two boats and 28 men; their recovery was fortunate, ample proof that Más Afuera was no substitute for the salubrious bay at Más a Tierra.

  From the 16th of May to ye first time we was drove off from the anchoring ground, we had scarce anything else but a series of dangers, troubles fatigue and misfortune … it was a kind of miracle we had not lost the boats several times by the constant hard gales and violent sudden squalls and gusts of wind; which would at times be attended with Lightening & dreadful Claps of Thunder and hard rain, … A thing I could never have credited if I had not been witness to it, as it was so very different from what we had two years before with Commodore Byron, and the Constant NW, NNW & WSW winds we met here & in out Passage did surprise me much, for former Authors have mentioned and it has been generally thought that the winds are constantly from ye S to ye SW on this Coast.7

  He also took the care to correct the navigational details of Anson’s narrative, which he attributed to the Reverend Walter rather than the Commodore. Carteret reckoned the island was surrounded by anchorages, but poor holding ground meant none were safe in a storm, an account confirmed by modern visitors. At least the fishing was excellent:

  All the time we were about this island, we lived upon the fish we caught, in order to lengthen our stock of provisions; and not a piece of meat, was made use all this time, either by me or any other person.8

  For once Byron’s nickname ‘Foul Weather Jack’ proved misplaced; the hard weather fell to Carteret.

  Carteret departed on 25 May, with most water casks filled, but abandoned a lot of cut firewood on the island. His men scarcely ate a pound of goat meat apiece. His chart, considered exemplary by Spanish navigator Alejandro Malaspina, had been obtained ‘at the cost of innumerable hardships and perils’. Returning to Britain in 1769, Carteret’s report of a Spanish garrison on Más a Tierra warned off other navigators. Even the Spanish were energised: Manuel de Amat, Viceroy of Peru from 1761 to 1776, sent expeditions from South America to Easter Island and Tahiti, reinforcing the Juan Fernández labour force with common criminals and soldiers from the mainland to support these voyages. Convicts and guards alike found the isolation depressing. Spaniards, Creoles and Indians saw nothing romantic in a sea-girt rock at the end of the known world. They were not, one imagines, avid readers of Defoe. It required an English sensibility to reach such eccentric conclusions.

  By the late eighteenth century Crusoe, Anson and Rousseau had transformed Juan Fernández, or at least the verdant and accessible parts, into a ‘happy’ island.9 Rousseau deliberately shifted the location from Defoe’s mythic compound to Walter’s quasi-realistic medicinal romance. He hoped men of greater education and insight would join Pacific voyages, to replace seaman’s tales of wonder and the unimaginative ramblings of half-educated prelates, with precise information, fit for the elevated minds of Enlightenment Europe. In the late 1760s the first such voyager set sail: Joseph Banks joined Captain James Cook’s Pacific voyage, itself a curious compound of navigational concerns, to observe the transit of Venus, and strategic geography. Profiting from Samuel Wallis’s discovery of Tahiti the expedition entered the Pacific without stretching north along the Chilean coast. With Más a Tierra occupied it made sense to head directly to friendly Tahiti, or enter the region via the Indian Ocean.

  Cook’s voyages transformed the map of the Pacific, filling in most of the unknown area, creating new cultural connections, while Banks and his artists opened European eyes to new wonders. Exploration vessels carried experts to hitherto unknown lands, their scientific and artistic endeavour on the European mind shifted attention away from the Juan Fernández group. Bernard Smith’s pivotal study slips past Selkirk’s island without a word.10 His Pacific, Cook’s Pacific, is entered by way of Patagonia, stopping briefly to savour the curiosities of Easter Island before reaching the Polynesian paradise of Tahiti, and the more challenging lands of New Zealand, Australia and Melanesia. On the Cook voyages navigators, scientists and artists, shared a workbench in the great cabin and read each other’s journals, breaking down disciplinary boundaries. The new Pacific studies of Joseph Banks did not address Juan Fernández, leaving island imagery necessarily impoverished. The new ways of seeing that came to the Pacific with Cook simply by-passed the old way point, leaving Juan Fernández without modern images, or taxonomic categorisation. There would be no struggles between classicism and realism in images of Juan Fernández. Only seafarers and navigators addressed the scene, their distant perspectives of El Yunque emphasising pedestrian concerns.

  The French expedition of Jean François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, set a rendezvous for Juan Fernández, should the two ships become separated rounding Cape Horn. La Pérouse cancelled the plan after his ships made a quick, easy passage, disposing of the ‘old prejudice’ based on Anson’s horrific account. Instead he headed for the cheap provisions of Concepción.11 The Franco-Spanish ‘Family Compact’ ensured a friendly welcome.

  NOTES

  1 V.T. Harlow, The Founding of the Se
cond British Empire 1763–1793, Volume II: New Continents and Changing Values, Longman, London, 1964, pp. 633–4.

  2 H.T. Fry, Alexander Dalrymple and the Expansion of British Trade, Toronto University Press, Toronto, 1970, pp. 100–2.

  3 R.E. Gallagher (ed.), Byron’s Journal, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1964, p. xxxi.

  4 Gallagher, Byron’s Journal, pp. 84–8.

  5 Más Afuera: ADM 344/2255, admiralty records, The National Archives, Kew.

  6 Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans, pp. 234–5; Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. 88–9.

  7 H. Wallis (ed.), Carteret’s Voyage Round the World: 1766–1769, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1965, vol. I, p. 50.

  8 Wallis, Carteret’s Voyage Round the World, vol. I, pp. 128–41.

  9 Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, vol. III, p. 196.

  10 B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1960, pp. 3–13, 37–41.

  11 J. Dunmore (ed.), The Journal of Jean François de Galaup de la Pérouse, 1785–1788, 2 vols, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1994–5, pp. 36–40, 472–4.

  13

  Scurvy Resolved

  La Pérouse’s decision reflected his anxiety to avoid the ravages of scurvy, a central concern for all eighteenth century Pacific voyages. While the Spanish authorities in Madrid and Lima took practical steps to close the stable door to their Pacific sea lanes, the British began to address the primary cause of Juan Fernández’s enduring attraction. Anson’s voyage had been a truly hellish experience, the triumph of death left only a shattered fragment of the original force to complete a mission set for three times their number. These deaths had been accompanied by madness and disaster.

  The salutary tale of the store-ship Wager might have been created especially for the purpose. Wrecked on an inhospitable coast discipline collapsed, Captain David Cheap lost his mind and at least one of his young officers went over to the enemy, entering the Spanish Navy and the Roman Church. This was hardly surprising, the wrecked mariners saw Cheap shoot one of his own midshipmen, for no obvious reason.1 Wager’s people never made it to Juan Fernández, dribbling home in sorry groups. Once they had recovered their health the officers were more concerned to apportion blame than account for their conduct: and the petty officers made useful culprits. Walter, or more likely Robins, used the Wager disaster to create an alternative expedition, to highlight Anson’s exceptional, heroic leadership. Having served this exemplary role, the unfortunate Cheap was not subject to further punishment.

  To leave the story there would disguise other differences. Anson’s ships only survived because they sought salvation on a well-known uninhabited island. Unlike Cheap Anson had several experienced officers under his command and his ships, however distressed, arrived in one piece. Without their ship Wager’s men, like Shelvocke’s, had no legal or structural basis for discipline. Finally, and perhaps critically, Anson arrived at a near perfect refuge, packed with fresh food, good water and decent weather. Cheap and his crew did not. Once his men began to recover from scurvy Anson was able to clean the ships, ending the ravages of typhus and dysentery. Cleanliness was the key to oceanic voyaging, defeating most transmissible human epidemics. Landing on an uninhabited island, the crews escaped exterminating horrors like dysentery, typhus, malaria, yellow fever and local violence that awaited sickly, emaciated scorbutic men in pestilential port cities and tropical islands.

  While ocean-going merchant seafarers had known about the danger of scurvy on long voyages for two centuries, frequently citing the useful properties of citrus fruits, the Royal Navy of 1740 had little experience of global navigation. Most naval operations involved relatively short cruises in Home Waters or the Mediterranean, punctuated by frequent returns to port to clean the hull, restock the water butts and obtain fresh food. Furthermore big manpower-intensive ships did not put to sea in winter, while those in the Mediterranean had access to a year round supply of fresh food. In the Caribbean, where fruits were easily obtained, men died of yellow fever long before they could become scorbutic.

  The Royal Navy belatedly created a permanent Sick and Hurt Board in the early 1740s. Hitherto medical care had only been organised in wartime. This development coincided with the scurvy epidemic on Anson’s ships. The link between a newly global navy, the greater focus on disease and the arrival of Anson at the Admiralty saw the Sick and Hurt Board tasked to find a solution. In 1747 Physician James Lind examined the disease, recording that it led to lassitude, immobility, depression, irritability and anger. Painful joints were a common early symptom. Scorbutic men bruised easily, their hair and teeth fell out, old wounds reopened and the skin discoloured. In the same year, elixir of vitriol, a mild sulphuric acid, had been identified as a cure. While an oral dose of vitriol might clear up the mouth ulcers that commonly afflicted scorbutic men it had no other benefits. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), a truly global conflict, the Board reviewed many more remedies. The basic rule for selection was full disclosure of contents, cheap ingredients and ease of storage on long voyages. While the first and last stipulations were obvious the central question of cost reflected the unprecedented scale of British naval operations. Even the Royal Navy could not afford gold plated solutions.

  New naval hospitals built at Haslar and Stonehouse in the early 1760s provided naval doctors with ideal opportunities to try new remedies. These hospitals had bars on the windows, to stop the men deserting. Trials on board cruising ships after the return of peace in 1763 pointed to the importance of fresh vegetables and fruit, but storage remained the key problem, especially on overcrowded battleships. The American War of Independence (1776–82) transformed naval understanding of scurvy. Gilbert Blane, Physician to the Fleet in the West Indies provided fruit and fruit juice to improve health, while Captain Roger Curtis commanding the gunboat flotilla at Gibraltar used Moroccan lemons to cure scorbutic men.

  The first post-1763 British expeditions to the South Pacific, those of Byron and Wallis, used far smaller vessels than Anson, allowing the officers to devote more attention to crew comfort, cleanliness and health. Both expeditions had outbreaks of scurvy, but they did not prove fatal. This was hardly surprising, expedition vessels provided a very different environment from the crowded warships of 1741, and they had the option of stopping or changing course to find fresh food. After his untimely death much credit was accorded to the beatified Cook for defeating scurvy, but his approach, and his understanding, differed little from that of Byron and Wallis. None knew how to prevent or cure scurvy, so they did everything they could to avoid the problem. Of the numerous remedies embarked, most possessed only prophylactic value. Anxious to keep his men healthy Cook forced them to consume sauerkraut, malt wort and spruce beer, dosing himself with the same delights. By contrast Joseph Banks, having consulted widely, brought carefully bottled lemon juice. As Endeavour crossed the Arafura Sea Banks noticed the physical symptoms of the disease, he drank the juice, and was cured. He recorded that Cook and fellow scientist Daniel Solander, who were obviously scorbutic, became very ‘nostalgic’ or homesick.2

  Twenty years later Captain Arthur Philip, an officer with considerable experience in Portuguese colonial service, deliberately reduced the voyages of the first convict fleet to Botany Bay to no more than nine weeks duration. He understood that scurvy normally appeared after twelve weeks at sea. At Rio de Janeiro he purchased large quantities of oranges, issuing several a day to his crews and the convicts they were transporting. Oranges are excellent sources of vitamin C. Philip lost only forty-eight from a complement of over a thousand, many of whom, like Anson’s men, had been in poor health before they left Britain. In the 1790s Spanish hydrographer Alejandro Malaspina voyaged and charted the Pacific coast of the Empire, avoiding lethal outbreaks of scurvy with frequent stops. Instead he lost twenty men to land-based diseases. By contrast, Bruny d’Entrecasteaux’s chaotic French Pacific expedition lost over 40 per cent of the crew to scurvy and dysentery after political divisions
destroyed the discipline needed for effective man management.

  Despite the citrus successes of the American War the Royal Navy hesitated until a scurvy epidemic in the Channel Fleet in 1795 threatened national security. Finally the Navy standardised Cook’s paternalistic man-management system. It was no coincidence that Admiral Sir Roger Curtiss was the Captain of the Fleet, or that Fleet Surgeon Thomas Trotter recommended fresh meat and vegetables as the ideal preventive, keeping lemon juice to cure those already affected. The Sick and Hurt Board agreed. In 1795 Admiral Peter Rainier’s sixteen-week voyage to the East Indies demonstrated beyond doubt the value of lemon juice, his men had been issued three-quarters of an ounce of juice per day. They were beginning to show scorbutic symptoms at the end of the voyage. Rainier stopped the rot by increasing the dose to one ounce. His report led other admirals to demand lemon juice. That year physician Sir Gilbert Blane joined the Sick and Hurt Board, and within months the Board recommended a regular issue of juice. This posed serious problems of supply, and cost. Finally in 1800 Anson’s nephew John Jervis, Admiral the Earl St Vincent insisted on a regular issue for all ships on home stations. Preventing scurvy was vital to maintaining a close blockade of the main French naval base at Brest.