A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  The two ships came broadside on and began to pound each other with cannon fire. The Centurion’s guns were loaded with grapeshot and men stationed in the yards kept up a steady fusillade with small arms. The objective was to shred sails and rigging and drive men from the Cobadonga’s decks without causing serious damage. This quickly demoralised the Spaniards. Saumarez ‘could observe the officers running about confusedly as if they were preventing the desertion of their men from their quarters, which accordingly proved so’.22 In a couple of hours it was all over. The Spanish captain struck his colours and was soon a prisoner aboard the Centurion. He had lost about fifty men and a further 170 were wounded. British casualties were three dead and sixteen wounded.

  Philip Saumarez was put in charge of the prize and much of his time over the next few hours was devoted to clearing up the debris of battle, repairing damage, burying the dead, making provision for the wounded, shipping prisoners across to the Centurion and getting the Cobadonga under way. But he was able to start inventorying the cargo. What he discovered must have taken his breath away, though he recorded it laconically enough:

  at 6 p.m. sent a launch away [to the Centurion] loaded, having to the value of 55,000 pounds sterling on board her in chests of silver . . . From our first beginning to ship off to this instant esteem by a general calculation that I have sent on board 1,300,000 dollars, besides some wrought plate . . .23

  But that was not all. Over the ensuing days the prize captain continued to find caches of treasure. As well as the chests packed with new-minted coin and other consignments catalogued in the Cobadonga’s bill of lading, there were, as usual, scores of concealed private caches of gold and silver. Money was hidden beneath cabin floors, in the false bottoms of passengers’ trunks, and even in the middle of a cheese.

  The two vessels made their way back to Macao. Anson knew that his reception there would be unfriendly but there was nowhere else that the battle damage could be made good. Here the Cobadonga was sold, being unequal to the long haul back to Europe. From the point of view of circumnavigation there is little else worth recording about the voyage of the Centurion. On 15 December she made sail for England. She took the shortest route to the Cape, following a course which was now well-charted, sailed with the SE trades across the southern Atlantic, and picked up the prevailing westerlies of the northern hemisphere to reach Spithead on 15 June 1744. Stories of her exploits had gone before her so that Anson and his men were welcomed as heroes. Crowds turned out to gaze in wonder at the thirty-two well-guarded cartloads of treasure which lumbered along the main road from Portsmouth to London. Amidst the public celebrations many were the lusty performances of the most popular song of the day – Rule Britannia. Thomas Arne had written it only weeks before Anson’s expedition set out and the Centurion’s triumphant return seemed to confirm – to patriotic landsmen, at least – that Britons really did rule the waves. In course of time every survivor received his share of prize money, divided according to rank. For all of them it was more wealth than they had ever seen before. Whether they felt it adequate compensation for five years of living with death and terror we cannot know.

  In the story of circumnavigation the voyage of the Centurion marks the end of an era. It was the last of the great buccaneering expeditions whose objectives were plunder and the raiding of enemy bases. In that regard it was by far the most successful of such ventures. No commander ever returned to port with such a vast treasure as that which Anson delivered to a grateful British government. But no commander ever returned from a circumnavigation voyage having lost so many men. Of the 1,939 who set sail under his leadership, fewer than 500 survived. The vast majority were victims of scurvy. The tale of the Centurion and her sister ships had a moral: if the Great South Sea was ever to be conquered some means would have to be found of enabling mariners to survive more than four weeks away from land without falling victim to debilitating disease.

  * Saumarez had by this time transferred back to the Centurion.

  6

  CONQUERING THE GREAT SOUTH SEA

  Among those who read the published accounts of the Centurion’s voyage was Dr James Lind, a naval surgeon. During several voyages he had had plenty of opportunity to observe and to try to treat cases of scurvy but it was the appalling loss of life during Anson’s expedition that drove him to make a serious study of the disease. Between 1748 and 1754, when he was living in Edinburgh, he gathered information from mariners and other doctors and experimented with various possible remedies. The result was A Treatise on the Scurvy which was dedicated to Anson and published in 1754. It was soon reissued, was translated into French and aroused great interest in the international maritime community. Lind followed it three years later with An Essay on the most effectual means of Preserving the Health of Seamen in the Royal Navy, which contained observations on the prevention and treatment of scurvy, typhus and malaria as well as pioneering ideas on hygiene and disinfectants. Lind’s work sets him firmly in the top rank of eighteenth century medical researchers and it is little short of a tragedy that the Admiralty did not adopt his recommendations until 1795, the year after his death.

  This, however, did not prevent individual captains and ships’ surgeons from trying the new methods. Lind knew nothing about vitamin C deficiency but he did realise that scurvy was the result of poor diet and he deduced that it could be avoided by ensuring that seamen were plentifully supplied with citrus fruit, onions, vegetables or lemon juice. As his ideas filtered through to naval commanders of various nations the incidence of scurvy fell dramatically and other shipboard diseases were brought under greater control.

  It was as well that this was so, for, at about the same time, the governments in London and Paris became obsessed with sending naval vessels on long voyages of discovery to the Great South Sea. This was the age of the Enlightenment, when scientists, philosophers and political thinkers threw off old religious and philosophical restraints, sought knowledge for its own sake and worked for the perfection of human society. It would be pleasant to believe that the various captains now sent to explore the uncharted regions of the Pacific were despatched in the pure quest for truth The motives of politicians are seldom so unalloyed:

  We have reason to believe the French to be in a fair way of getting . . . spices in their plantations, as Mr de Poivre has actually planted at Isle de France some hundreds of clove and nutmeg-trees.* Every true patriot will join in the wish, that our English East India Company, prompted by a noble zeal for the improvement of natural history, and every other useful branch of knowledge, might send a set of men properly acquainted with mathematics, natural history, physic, and other branches of literature, to their vast possessions in the Indies, and every other place where their navigations extend, and enable them to collect all kinds of useful and curious informations; to gather fossils, plants, seeds, and animals, peculiar to these regions; to observe the manners, customs, learning, and religion of the various nations of the East; to describe their agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; to purchase Hebrew, Persian, Braminic manuscripts, and such as are written in the various characters, dialects, and languages of the different nations; to make observations on the climate and constitution of the various countries; the heat and moisture of the air, the salubrity and noxiousness of the place, the remedies usual in the diseases of hot countries, and various other subjects. A plan of this nature, once set on foot in a judicious manner, would not only do honour to the East India Company, but it must at the same time become a means of discovering many new and useful branches of trade and commerce; and there is likewise the highest probability, that some unsearched island, with which the Eastern Seas abound, might produce the various spices, which would greatly add to the rich returns of the Indian cargoes, and amply repay the expenses caused by such an expedition.1

  Those words were written by a Polish scientist and traveller who had made England his adopted country. John Reinhold Forster was a scholar of natural history and, in the same year that he wrote these wor
ds (1772), he embarked as naturalist on Captain Cook’s second great circumnavigation. To this we shall return. What interests us immediately is the light Forster sheds on the motivation for promoting voyages of discovery. Scientific enquiry might be the declared objective of some of these endeavours, but national prestige and commercial advantage were seldom absent from the minds of their promoters.

  The Spanish and Dutch explorations in the South Seas had kept alive interest in the possible existence of a vast continent somewhere to the west of America and to the south of China. Around the middle of the eighteenth century several writers made detailed studies of the existing accounts of Pacific voyages and put forward their own conclusions. Dr John Campbell, a prodigiously industrious Scottish author, published his monumental Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca in 1744 and such was the demand for it that it was reissued in parts. Campbell, who was something of a tubthumper, urged British captains to take up the challenge of discovery before their foreign rivals did so and thereby increase the size and competence of the navy, establish valuable new colonies and enhance national prestige. Charles de Brosses, whose Histoires des navigations aux terres australes appeared in 1756, had a more scientific interest. He was the first to suggest that the island chains comprising Polynesia were quite distinct from the southern continent and its offshore islands. He, too, urged persistence in the quest for terra australis, though he, naturally, wanted it to be discovered and settled by the French. De Brosses was the first to suggest that any newly-discovered distant territory would be the ideal place to send the unfortunates of European society such as the poor, orphans and – criminals. These and other works had a wide circulation and frequently ran to new editions and foreign translations. Most of the writers were armchair geographers. Not so Alexander Dalrymple.

  Dalrymple joined the East India Company in 1752 at the age of fifteen. He served at Madras and made two voyages to China and the East Indies. These experiences and his wide reading of ancient travels stirred in him a passion for the extension of British commerce and colonisation. He returned to England in 1764 to urge the directors of the Company to commit men and ships to Pacific exploration. Not content with private persuasion, he carried his ardent campaigning to a wider public with An account of Discoveries Made in the South Pacific Ocean Previous to 1764 (1767) and followed this up three years later with A Historical Collection of Voyages . . . in the South Pacific Ocean. He ‘proved’ the existence of a southern continent, vast and populous which had:

  a greater extent than the whole civilised part of Asia, from Turkey, to the eastern extremity of China. There is at present no trade from Europe thither, though the scraps from this table would be sufficient to maintain the power, dominion and sovereignty of Britain, by employing all its manufactures and ships.2

  All that was needful, in Dalrymple’s view, was for brave captains of the stamp of Magellan to come forth, men spurred on, not by material considerations, but by passionate curiosity and the spirit of adventure.

  Scientists, philosophers and zealous patriots might campaign for new expeditions to be sent forth but if they expected the mercantile companies to finance such enterprises, they were baying for the moon. Even the prospects of the legendary isles of gold, the Solomons, and trade with a whole new continent could not induce the wealthy burghers of London, Paris or Amsterdam to put their hands in their purses. Their ships and men were sufficiently occupied in lucrative trade with the known parts of the Orient; they had no need to engage in speculative ventures to find new markets. So it was left to government-sponsored naval expeditions to solve the riddles still posed by the Great South Sea.

  If we ask why politicians should be any more anxious than merchants to squander money, men and ships on Pacific exploration, the answer lies largely in national prestige and maritime supremacy. Throughout much of the century Britain and France were in a sporadic state of either cold or hot war. Clashes occurred both in Europe and the colonies. Both nations had extensive overseas commercial interests. It was, therefore, important to make occasional demonstrations of nautical prowess. Moreover, since neither side was prepared to scale down its navy, work had to be found for captains and crews when there were no war manoeuvres to execute. Whatever the problematic mercantile advantages to be derived from opening up new territories, there were usually more quantifiable nautical and navigational spin-offs from long voyages: charts became more accurate; officers more skilled, new instruments could be tested; new islands and harbours might be discovered where ships could take on water and fresh food. The stage was thus set for new feats of endurance and the transportation of European rivalries to distant parts of the globe.

  The main strategic prize which still attracted imperialistically-minded officials in London and Paris was control over the western access to the Pacific. It was to achieve this that they revived their interest in the seas and islands of the southern Atlantic and also the old quest for a north-west passage. It was these objectives which gave the impetus to a flurry of momentous voyages in the 1760s and 1770s, voyages which provided fresh fuel for Anglo-French rivalry and sometimes brought the two nations close to war.

  The first location of that rivalry was a troublesome group of islands in the far South Atlantic known to the French as the Maloumes, to the Spaniards as the Malvinas and to the British as the Falklands. The uninhabited isles had first appeared on European charts in 1592, when John Davis discovered them. But it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that their potential importance was appreciated. When the French and British governments determined to have their respective flags carried all over the broad Pacific they realised that that task would be made much easier by the existence of a staging post where ships and men could be fully prepared for the storms of the Horn or the Straits. The Falklands possessed in abundance what the hostile Patagonian coast conspicuously lacked: safe anchorages, anti-scorbutic plants, fresh water, fish and the meat of seals, sea-lions and birds.

  In 1763 a thirty-four-year-old French soldier proposed to his government the founding of a settlement in the Falklands. Since Louis Antoine de Bougainville offered to furnish this at his own expense, the ministers in Paris eagerly supported the scheme.

  To the urbanity and dash of a French aristocrat and officer Bougainville added a genuine passion for scientific discovery. Not only had he served with distinction in Canada during the Seven Years War, principally as ADC to General Montcalm, but he was also a fellow of the Royal Society. He had taken up a naval career in 1756 and the change of direction seems to have been largely inspired by de Brosses, whose writings Bougainville greatly admired. Since the French had been ousted from Canada and India they must seek new lands whereon to plant the Bourbon fleur de lys, and in the search they would make discoveries about untravelled oceans and the flora and fauna of distant lands which would add lustre to the reputation of French philosophy and science. Bougainville wanted to be in the forefront of this new enterprise. As soon as he received permission for his settlement, he set about recruiting colonists and accumulating grain, cattle and other necessaries. On the following 5 April, having established and provisioned his little settlement on East Falkland, he claimed the islands in the name of the French crown and returned to Europe for fresh provisions.

  All this activity had not been lost on France’s rivals. Early in 1764, the Admiralty commissioned two ships, the Dolphin and the Tamar, ostensibly for a voyage to the East Indies by way of the Cape. But the expedition’s commander received secret instructions of a very different nature.

  They represented the conviction, urged since the 1740s by George Anson and now enthusiastically taken up by the Earl of Egmont, First Lord of the Admiralty, that the Falklands provided the key to the Pacific. In a long, chauvinistic preamble the instructions laid claim on extremely tenuous grounds to various, for the most part unspecified, distant territories and affirmed the desirability of adding newly-discovered land to the British Empire:

  Whereas nothing can redound more to
the honour of this nation as a maritime power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the advancement of the trade and navigation thereof, than to make discoveries of countries hitherto unknown, and to attain a perfect knowledge of the distant parts of the British Empire, which though formerly discovered by his majesty’s subjects have been as yet but imperfectly explored; and whereas there is reason to believe that lands and islands of great extent hitherto unvisited by any European power may be found in the Atlantic Ocean between the Cape of Good Hope and the Magellan Strait, within latitudes convenient for navigation, . . .3

  The leader was instructed to claim the Falklands formally for Britain, seek out any other promising islands in the southern Atlantic, explore New Albion, on the west coast of North America, renew Francis Drake’s claim thereto and travel into the North Pacific in seach of the Straits of Anian. If he found no prospect of return via a north-west passage, he was to make for home via the Dutch East Indies or China and the Cape of Good Hope. The vessels made available by the Admiralty for this extended voyage were two well-fitted frigates. The Dolphin, in particular, was protected against the ravages of worm by having her hull sheathed in copper plates.*