A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  The man appointed to lead this expedition was none other than the Honourable John Byron, erstwhile midshipman of the Wager who, if his own account is to be believed, had experienced an amazing number of exciting and amorous adventures during his return to England after being shipwrecked on the coast of Chile. This rumbustious captain, known to his men as ‘Foul-Weather Jack’, had enjoyed an eventful naval career and received steady promotion. Now he was elevated to the rank of commodore and in June he hoisted his broad pennant in the Dolphin. As the only surviving officer of Anson’s expedition, Byron was the obvious choice to lead a new Pacific venture. But he knew full well how hazardous that venture was. So did his superiors. That was why they had authorised Byron to keep his plans secret from his officers and men until the last possible moment and then to offer them the choice of continuing with the voyage on double pay or being shipped home on the first available vessel. The inducement worked. When, somewhere in the South Atlantic, Byron called his ships’ crews together and presented them with the facts, only one man opted to return to England.

  Had Byron made a serious attempt to carry out his instructions, his ships, which left Portsmouth on 2 July, would have been at sea for several years. In fact, Byron’s expedition entered the record books as the fastest circumnavigation so far achieved. He was back in England after only twenty-two months, having made no attempt to explore the South Atlantic, visit the coast of California or search for the North-West Passage, and having crossed the Pacific in a hundred and thirty days. Two factors seem to have influenced him in treating his orders so cavalierly: he was concerned for the health of his crew and he wanted to rediscover the Solomon Islands.

  Byron was a humanitarian and popular with his crews but, even had he not been, efficiency would have demanded that he took every precaution to prevent his sailors falling sick. The nightmare memory of weak, dying men lashed into action to force the Wager through the storms of Cape Horn must have been vivid to him even after a quarter of a century. Little though he understood the causes of scurvy and fever, he took every precaution to avoid them. Foremost among those precautions was the constant provision of fresh food and water. The equipment the Dolphin took on board at Woolwich included a machine for sweetening ‘stale and noxious water’. This apparatus, invented by a Lieutenant Orsbridge, apparently worked by forcing air through the water and, when it was used during the voyage, Byron ‘found it answer very well’.5 Another innovation recommended by the Admiralty was ‘portable soup’, a kind of glutinous cake made up of meat extract which, when boiled up with peas and legumes provided a tolerably palatable substance which, if it had little nutritional value, at least was a welcome change from salt meat and weavily biscuit. The ships set out with bulging larders and the usual complement of penned animals for slaughter. They put into Rio de Janeiro for restocking and subsequently made landfalls as often as possible, where they experimented with whatever foodstuffs were available. Birds, fish, wild pig, berries, grasses, fruit – it was all trial and error. Some substances proved poisonous; others made the men sick; some were just inedible; but there were items that Byron and his surgeons found to be, or believed to be, excellent remedies for various ailments, notably, of course, scurvy. Reading the nautical journals of this period, it is interesting to see just how absorbed captains were in exploring the healing possibilities of strange plant and animal foodstuffs. Each made his own discoveries and swore by them. For Byron, coconuts appeared to be a sovereign remedy:

  It is astonishing the effect these nuts alone had on those afflicted with that dreadful disease [scurvy]. Many that could not stir without the help of two men, and who were in the most violent pain imaginable, their limbs as black as ink, and thought to be in the last stage of that disorder were in a few days by eating those nuts (tho’ at sea) so far relieved as to do their duty, and even go aloft as well as they had done before.6

  Byron, therefore, kept to a minimum the length of time that his ships spent at sea or tacking off barren coasts, and this helped to determine his route.

  His reasons for seeking the long-lost Solomons were both exotic and pragmatic. The El Dorado whose rumoured existence had excited captains and geographers since the voyages of Mendafia and Quiros supposedly lay close to the Pacific route which a ship would take if borne along by the trade winds. Byron could, therefore, make a crossing which would avoid those hideous experiences which had befallen the Centurion and still solve one of the great puzzles of South Sea exploration. Given the choice between searching for either of two places which might not exist, the Solomon Islands must have seemed preferable as an objective to the Straits of Anian.

  When Byron set out at the beginning of July he made course for the west coast of Africa. Having rewatered at the Cape Verde Islands, he tried to pick up the trade winds which would carry him across to Brazil. But, like thousands of other sailors before and since, he found himself trapped by the variable equatorial winds and currents. Whole days were spent becalmed or on long tacks and only after six weeks at sea, in heat so sweltering that fresh meat was putrid within a couple of hours of being slaughtered, did the Dolphin and Tamar thankfully drop anchor in Rio roads. There was some sickness aboard the Tamar but the men quickly recovered after a few days ashore.

  The situation was far worse aboard another English ship which put in while Byron’s ships were there. This was the East-Indiaman Kent. She had left her home port a month before the Dolphin and Tamar and made a direct Atlantic crossing. Yet she arrived off Brazil a month after Byron’s ship, by which time many of her crew were down with scurvy. Her most prestigious passenger was Robert Clive, returning to India for the third time to crown a dazzling career in the service of the East India Company. Much to Byron’s embarrassment this public hero now applied to transfer from the Kent to the Dolphin, believing that the naval vessels were bound for the East and would reach India long before the Company ship. A request from Lord Clive was virtually an order. Probably Byron was able to extricate himself only by sharing his secret instructions with the would-be passenger.

  Rio de Janeiro was now a highly civilised port of call where all the needs of Byron’s ships and men could be met and the commodore himself was received with a fifteen-gun salute and granted an impressive audience by the viceroy:

  . . . he received me with great form. About 60 officers were drawn up before the palace, as well as a captain’s guard, all extremely well clothed and very well looking men. The vice king with a number of persons of the first distinction belonging to the palace received me at the head of the stairs . . .7

  But the city had its hazards. One was the local version of the press gang:

  . . . as the Portuguese carry on a great trade from hence, they make it their business to attend every boat’s landing in order to entice away some of the crew. By this means I lost five seamen, who were made drunk and immediately sent away into the country, and care enough taken they should not return till after I sailed. The Tamar had lost 8 or 9 of her people, but by great good luck heard where they was detained and in the night sent and surprised them and got them every one back.8

  Despite such setbacks, the six weeks’ respite in Rio proved beneficial to Byron’s men though doubtless they would have made greater use of it had they realised that it was to be their last Europeanised port of call for over a year and that they were bound for some of the world’s emptiest and most inhospitable regions. Certainly they would not have sold their warm clothes and spare bedding to buy liquor and trinkets, as many now did (they were later issued with extra clothing – ‘slops’ – from the ships’ stores).

  The two frigates stood out from Rio on 21 October and set a southerly course through the squally, fog-laden waters off Patagonia. Around 43°S the entire ships’ companies fell prey to a rare group hallucination. At 4 o’clock on a stormy afternoon the cry ‘Land ho!’ went up. On the lee bow a long projection from the coast with two hills clearly appeared, contrary to the charts. Not wanting to find himself embayed, Byron altered course several
points to the south-east. As they neared the supposed shore, officers and crew clearly discerned trees and waves breaking on the beach. Then, suddenly, the sea was empty. What must, in reality, have been a fog bank dispersed. ‘Though I have been at sea now 27 years,’ Byron recorded, ‘never saw [I] such a deception before, and I question much if the oldest seaman breathing ever did . . .’9

  Byron had a hard job of it bringing his ships into the next haven, Port Desire. He found his charts and rutters ‘too deficient’. The Dolphin, lacking adequate ballast, was riding high in the water and very prone to being driven onto a lee shore. To add to his problems the weather in this region lived up to its reputation of unpredictability, as the commodore colourfully recorded:

  It is certainly the most disagreeable sailing in the world, forever blowing and that with such violence that nothing can withstand it, and the sea runs so high that it works and tears a ship to pieces . . . It continued to blow very hard till between 4 and 5 p.m. when the wind in a minute or two went once or twice all round the compass and then fell flat calm for about half an hour, the sea running very high, all in heaps.10

  John Byron had a fine way with words, even when writing an official log. Perhaps he possessed in lesser measure those gifts that were bestowed so abundantly on his grandson, Lord Byron, the poet. The captain also seems to have possessed something of the imaginative powers of his famous descendant. This emerges clearly from the bewildering episode of the Patagonian giants.

  The south-east coastal region of South America was originally populated by scattered Amerindian hunting communities. They were well-built people rather above average European height. Though theirs was basically a Stone Age culture, they had absorbed, probably from Spanish settlers to the north, the use of horses and, perhaps, some metal artefacts. Undoubtedly they welcomed the occasional visits of white men to their shores and saw them as bringers of prestigious and useful tools, weapons and decorative adornments. Early European visitors, ever ready to astonish their countrymen with tales of great marvels, had circulated exaggerated stories of these simple people. Pigafetta, the chronicler of Magellan’s voyage, had given the name patagones (‘big-feet’) to the people of this region and claimed that they were of remarkable stature. Later visitors had either confirmed or denied the existence of a Brobdingnagian race and the truth of the matter had become something of considerable speculation in scholarly circles. Byron had promised Lord Egmont that he would try to make contact with the Indians and establish their size once and for all.

  But that is precisely what he did not do. The report he sent home of his encounter with the Indians and the published accounts of the voyage which soon appeared gave rise to still more wildly inaccurate stories of ‘enormous goblins’ and ‘frightful Colossuses’. What happened was this: anchoring in a bay close by Cape Virgins (or Cape Virgin Mary as it was by now named on the charts), at the eastern end of Magellan’s Straits, the Englishmen saw a large group of the local people waving and beckoning to them. Byron landed two boatloads of men, drew them up in impressive battle order on the beach, then went forward alone to meet the strangers. There were men and women of all ages, some of whom were on horseback. They were loosely covered in animal skins worn ‘as a Highlander wears his plaid’, their faces were vividly painted, and they seemed nervous but friendly. Like all European travellers to ‘savage’ lands the Englishmen carried a supply of such baubles and gewgaws as were believed to appeal to primitive peoples. Byron distributed some beads. Then he motioned the people to sit down in a line, stretched a length of green ribbon along the row as far as it would go, cut it into lengths of about a yard and tied these strips round the men’s heads like bandanas. What the Indians made of all this is impossible to say but one did manage to make clear by signs that they would rather have tobacco and so Byron sent for some. He and the Patagonians conversed some more in sign language, then the commodore ordered a return to the boats and the encounter was over.

  It is intriguing that Byron never committed himself to a measurement of these people; all the statements in his journal were vague: ‘. . . one of the most extraordinary men for size I had ever seen till then’; ‘these people . . . in size come the nearest to giants I believe of any people in the world’.11 In a private letter to Lord Egmont he was a little more specific but, strangely, quoted a second-hand observation: ‘Our people on board who were looking at us through their glasses said we looked like mere dwarfs to the people we were gone amongst.’12 It is as though he was providing his superiors with the kind of information they could develop and use in the way that best suited their purposes. Apparently the British government had reason to encourage the spread of fanciful tales about ‘Patagonian giants’, probably as a means of deflecting attention from their real interests in the region. Whatever the official motivation, returning members of the expedition and pirate authors soon cashed in on popular interest to publish wildly inaccurate accounts – and pictures – of a race of people varying from eight to twelve feet in height. This created a contentious debate in scholarly circles and did little to enhance the reputation of Foul-Weather Jack.13

  But that was all in the future when Dolphin and Tamar entered the Straits on 21 December. Byron devoted two weeks to an exploration of the eastern end of the straits, noting anything that might be of value to future settlers on the Falklands and to ships visiting them – tides, winds, anchorages, vegetation, animal and bird life, etc:

  Here is great plenty of wild celery and many herbs that must be excellent for seamen after a long voyage . . . here are abundance of ducks, geese, teal, snipes, etc – I thank God our ship’s company are all extremely healthy; this cold air has given them such voracious appetites that they could eat three times their allowance . . .14

  On 6 January 1765 Byron set off in search of the Falklands which no British mariner had visited for eighty years. He was in some doubt of his ability to locate the islands but six days’ sailing brought him to their northern shores. He discovered a well-sheltered, broad bay on Saunders Island and, while anchored there, he wrote to Lord Egmont, to inform his lordship that he had named the place Port Egmont. Byron vigorously praised the latest colony which he had now formally claimed in the name of his Britannic Majesty, King George III. It had fish and fowl in abundance. Fresh water was plentiful. The soil was excellent. ‘The land is all covered with wood sorrel and wild celery, which are the best antiscorbutics in the world.’15 Byron informed his lordship that he had proved their efficacy by having them boiled up and served with the portable soup (a process which robbed the vegetables of any efficacious properties they possessed). John Crosier, the Dolphin’s surgeon, planted a small garden for the benefit of the British settlers who were expected to be arriving within a year. To crown all, Byron said that he had dug in several places and discovered iron ore. He doubted not that experts would discover other metals on the islands.

  Ideal though the Falklands were in Byron’s estimation, he was anxious to get away. He had arranged to rendezvous at Port Desire with a storeship from England. By 6 February, therefore, he was back on the Patagonian coast where he found the Florida waiting for him. Unfortunately, she was badly damaged, though Byron’s description of her as ‘little better than a wreck’ is probably an exaggeration. It took all the expedition’s carpenters four days to effect the necessary running repairs. Then the convoy made its way into the Straits to find a quieter anchorage for the transfer of stores, for Port Desire was too exposed.

  It was here, in the eastern end of the Straits, that Byron had an odd encounter with no less a person than Louis Antoine de Bougainville. The faithful French coloniser had just returned to the Falklands with a fresh batch of settlers and was visiting the mainland for timber to build houses and store huts. Spotting the British ‘interlopers’, he shadowed them for several days, never coming close enough to exchange signals or making any attempt to send a boat across to his rivals. The nearest the two circumnavigators ever came to direct contact was when the Florida ran aground. The Fre
nch captain sent off a couple of boats to render assistance but Byron immediately despatched his own men to forestall them and politely decline their help. It is strange to picture these two fine captains circling each other suspiciously like wily and uncertain lions on the veldt. Neither had instructions covering the situation and, therefore, did not know what to do. Eventually, Bougainville found an anchorage and proceeded with his logging operation and Byron passed him on his journey westward. At about the same time the storeship was sent home with a detailed report for Lord Egmont.

  On 9 April Dolphin and Tamar reached the Pacific and made for the island of Más Afuera, rather than the larger Juan Fernandez so as to be less likely to be detected by the Spaniards. They found the shore-line rocky and pounded by a heavy surf, so that bringing off water was a hazardous enterprise. To minimise the risk Byron had his boatmen dressed in cork jackets, another innovation he was trying out for the Admiralty. Even thus equipped, one sailor refused to wade out through the waves to a waiting boat. His shipmates shouted to him that he would have to be abandoned if he refused to brave the breakers, since the boat could get no farther inshore. He replied that he would prefer a lonely life to certain death by drowning. At that point a midshipman jumped into the water with a rope’s end and swam ashore. Before the hesitant seaman knew what was happening, the officer threw a prepared noose round his waist and signalled the other sailors to pull. Byron laconically chronicled the end of this affair: