As the rest of the squadron looked on helplessly, Cheap summoned every able man on the Wager to his station, shouting commands. To reduce sail, the topmen labored up the teetering masts. As one topman who experienced a gale recalled, “The force of the wind was literally breathtaking. Up on the yardarm, our feet on the footrope, we clutched whatever we could hold on to. We had to turn our heads to take a breath, or the wind simply jammed the air down our throats. The rain stung our faces and our bare legs like hard pellets. It was almost impossible to open my eyes.”

  Cheap instructed his topmen to furl the uppermost sails and reef the main. He needed the perfect balance: enough canvas to propel the ship from the rocks but not so much as to capsize it. Even trickier, he needed every member of the ship to perform flawlessly: Lieutenant Baynes showing some rare gumption; the confident gunner, Bulkeley, proving his seamanship; the boyish Midshipman Byron mustering his courage and lending a hand with his pal Henry Cozens; the often unruly boatswain, John King, dutifully keeping the crew at their posts; the helmsmen maneuvering the bow amid the vise of currents; the forecastle men controlling the sails; and the carpenter, John Cummins, and his mate James Mitchell preventing damage to the hull. Even the inexperienced waisters must join the efforts.

  As Cheap braced himself on the quarterdeck, his face doused by the freezing spray, he marshaled these forces, struggling to save the ship. His ship. Each time the Wager began to edge away from the island, the currents heaved her back toward it. The waves burst against the towering rocks, grinding and spewing. The roar was deafening. As a seaman put it, the island seemed to have been designed for one purpose—“crushing the lives of fragile mortals.” But Cheap remained composed and harnessed every element of the ship, until gradually, remarkably, he coaxed the Wager to safety.

  Unlike victories in battles, such feats against the natural elements, which were often more dangerous, garnered no laurels—that is, none beyond what a captain described as that pride among the ship’s company over having performed a vital duty. Byron marveled that they were “very near being wrecked upon the rocks,” and yet “we endeavoured all in our power to make up our lost way and regain our station.” The hard-bitten Bulkeley appraised Cheap an “excellent seaman,” adding, “As for personal bravery, no man had a larger share of it.” In that moment, the final surge of joy most of them would ever experience, Cheap had become the man he always pictured himself—a lord of the sea.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Storm Within the Storm

  Storms continued to batter the ships day and night. John Byron stared in awe at the waves that broke over the Wager, bandying the 123-foot vessel about as if it were no more than a pitiful rowboat. Water seeped through virtually every seam of the hull, flooding the lower decks and causing the officers and crewmen to abandon their hammocks and berths; there was no longer any realm “under the weather.” The men’s fingers would burn from gripping the wet ropes, and the wet yards, and the wet shrouds, and the wet steering wheel, and the wet ladders, and the wet sails. Byron, drenched by the pouring rains as well as the waves, was unable to keep a dry thread on his body. Everything seemed to drip, to shrivel, to decompose.

  During that March of 1741, as the squadron plowed through the howling darkness toward the elusive Cape Horn (where were they exactly on the map?), Byron endeavored to maintain his station on watch. He spread his feet like a bowlegged gaucho and held on to anything secure—otherwise he would be hurled into the frothing sea. Lightning blitzed the sky, flashing before him and then turning the world even blacker.

  The temperature kept dropping until the rains hardened into sleet and snow. Cables became encrusted with ice and some of the men succumbed to frostbite. “Below forty degrees latitude, there is no law,” a sailors’ adage went. “Below fifty degrees, there is no God.” And Byron and the rest of the crew were now in the Furious Fifties. The wind in these parts, he noted, blows with “such violence that nothing can withstand it, and the sea runs so high that it works and tears a ship to pieces.” It was, he concluded, “the most disagreeable sailing in the world.”

  He knew that the squadron needed every man and boy to persevere. But almost immediately after the Wager passed through the Strait of Le Maire, on March 7, he noticed that many of his companions could no longer rise from their hammocks. Their skin began to turn blue, and then as black as charcoal—“a luxuriance,” as Reverend Walter put it, “of fungous flesh.” Their ankles swelled hideously, and whatever was consuming them progressed up their bodies, into their thighs and their hips and their shoulders, like some corrosive poison. When Schoolmaster Thomas suffered from the affliction, he recalled, he initially felt just a small pain in his left big toe, but soon noticed hard nodes and ulcerous sores spreading across his body. This was accompanied, he wrote, “with such excessive pains in the joints of the knees, ankles and toes, as I thought, before I experienced them, that human nature could never have supported.” Byron later caught the dreadful disorder, and found that it engendered “the most violent pain imaginable.”

  As the scourge invaded the sailors’ faces, some of them began to resemble the monsters of their imaginations. Their bloodshot eyes bulged. Their teeth fell out, as did their hair. Their breath reeked of what one of Byron’s companions called an unwholesome stench, as if death had already come upon them. The cartilage that glued together their bodies seemed to be loosening. In certain cases, even old injuries reemerged. A man who had been injured at the Battle of the Boyne, which took place in Ireland more than fifty years earlier, had his ancient wounds suddenly break out anew. “Still more astonishing,” Reverend Walter observed, one of this man’s bones that had healed after fracturing at the Boyne now dissolved again, “as if it had never been consolidated.”

  Then there were the effects on the senses. One moment, the men might be overcome with visions of bucolic streams and pastures; then, realizing where they were, they would sink into complete despair. Reverend Walter noted that this “strange dejection of the spirits” was marked by “shiverings, tremblings, and…the most dreadful terrors.” One medical expert compared it to “the falling down of the whole soul.” Byron saw some of the men descend into lunacy—or, as one of his companions wrote, the disease “got into their brains, and they ran raving mad.”

  They were suffering from what a British captain had dubbed “the plague of the sea”: scurvy. Like everyone else, Byron didn’t know what caused it. Striking a company after at least a month at sea, it was the great enigma of the Age of Sail, killing more mariners than all other threats—including gun battles, tempests, wrecks, and other diseases—combined. On Anson’s ships, scurvy appeared after the men were already ailing, leading to one of the most severe maritime outbreaks. “I cannot pretend to describe that terrible distemper,” the ordinarily phlegmatic Anson reported, “but no plague ever equaled the degree we had of it.”

  * * *

  One night, during the endless storm, as Byron struggled to sleep in his soaked, rattling berth, he heard the eight bells and strove to get on deck for another watch. As he staggered through the labyrinth of the ship, it was difficult to see—lamps had been extinguished for fear that they might topple and catch fire. Even the cook was not permitted to light his stove, forcing the men to eat their meat raw.

  When Byron emerged on the quarterdeck, feeling the cold blast of wind, he was startled to find only a few dozen people on watch. “The greatest part of the men,” Bryon wrote in his account, had been “disabled through fatigue and sickness.”

  The ships were in danger of running out of hands to operate them. The surgeon Henry Ettrick—who, after the Centurion’s chief surgeon died, was relocated there from the Wager—tried to stanch the outbreak. Down on the Centurion’s orlop deck, cloaked in a smock, he took out his saw and cut open several corpses, trying to pinpoint the cause of the disease. Perhaps the dead would save the living. According to reports of his findings, the victims’ “bones, after the flesh was scraped off, appeared quite black,” and their blood seemed to have a peculiar color, like that of a “black and yellow liquor.” After several dissections, Ettrick proclaimed that the disease was induced by the frigid climate. Yet when it was pointed out to Ettrick that scurvy was just as prevalent in tropical climates, he conceded that the cause might remain an “entire secret.”

  * * *

  The outbreak raged on, a storm within the storm. After Ettrick had moved to the Centurion, the Trial’s surgeon, Walter Elliot, had been relocated to the Wager. Byron described him as a generous, active, and very strong young man, who seemed destined to survive the longest. Elliot was devoted to Captain Cheap, who was now battling scurvy himself. “It was a very great misfortune,” Elliot remarked, that their captain “should be ill at such a time.”

  The doctor did everything in his power to help Cheap and Byron and the other ailing men. But what remedies existed were as worthless as the theories behind them. A number of people, believing there must be something in the nature of land vital to humans, claimed that the only cure was burying the sick up to their chins in soil. An officer on another voyage recalled the bizarre sight of “twenty men’s heads stuck out of the ground.”

  While Anson’s expedition was trapped at sea, the main medicine prescribed was Dr. Joshua Ward’s “pill and drop”—a purgative that was advertised as performing “many marvelous and sudden cures.” Anson, who refused to let his men undergo what he would not endure himself, took the pills first. Thomas wrote that most of the men who consumed them were seized “very violently, both by vomit and stool.” One sailor, after a single pill, began to pour blood from his nostrils and lay near the point of death. Ward turned out to be a quack; his potion contained poisonous amounts of the metalloid antimony and, some suspected, arsenic. The pills purged the sick of needed nutrients, likely contributing to many deaths. The surgeon Ettrick, who would later die of illness on the voyage, conceded despairingly that all his available treatments were useless.

  Yet the solution was so simple. Scurvy is brought on by a deficiency of vitamin C, owing to a lack of raw vegetables and fruits in one’s diet. Such a deprived person stops producing the fibrous protein known as collagen, which holds bones and tissues together, and which is used to synthesize dopamine and other hormones that can affect moods. (Anson’s men also appear to have been suffering from other vitamin deficiencies, such as insufficient levels of niacin, which can lead to psychosis, and of vitamin A, which causes night blindness.) Lieutenant Saumarez later sensed the power of certain nutrients. “I could plainly observe,” he wrote, “that there is a Je ne sais quoi in the frame of the human system that cannot be renewed, cannot be preserved, without the assistance of certain earthly particles, or in plain English, the land is man’s proper element, and vegetables and fruit his only physic.” All Byron and his companions needed to combat scurvy was some citrus, and when they had stopped at St. Catherine to gather supplies, there had been an abundance of limes. The cure—that unforbidden fruit which decades later would be furnished to all British seamen, giving them the nickname Limeys—had been right within their grasp.

  * * *

  As the squadron sailed on, Byron watched in anguish as many of the sick gasped for air. They appeared to be dry drowning. One after the other, they died—far from their families and from the graves of their ancestors. Some who attempted to stand, Reverend Walter reported, “died before they could well reach the deck; nor was it an uncommon thing for those who were able to walk the deck, and to do some kind of duty, to drop down dead in an instant.” Even those who were carried in their hammocks from one part of the ship to another died suddenly. “Nothing was more frequent than to bury eight or ten men from each ship every morning,” Millechamp wrote in his journal.

  Altogether, nearly 300 of the Centurion’s some 500 men were eventually listed as “DD”—Discharged Dead. Of the roughly 400 people on the Gloucester who had departed from England, three quarters were reported to have been buried at sea, including all its share of the invalid recruits. The captain, who was himself extremely ill, wrote in his logbook, “So miserable was the scene, that words cannot express the misery that some of the men died in.” The Severn had buried 290 men and boys, the Trial nearly half its crew. On the Wager, Byron saw the original company of some 250 officers and crew dwindle to fewer than 220, and then fall below 200. And those who were alive were nearly indistinguishable from the dead—“so weak and so much reduced,” as one officer put it, “that we could hardly walk along the deck.”

  The disease had consumed not only the bonds that glued together the seamen’s bodies but their vessels’ companies. The once-mighty squadron resembled ghost ships, where, according to one account, only vermin thrived: “So great a number of rats were seen between decks, as would appear incredible to any but an eye witness.” They infested sleeping quarters, ran across meal tables, and disfigured the dead, which lay about the deck awaiting burial. On one corpse the eyes were eaten out, on another the cheeks.

  Each day, Byron and other officers inscribed, in their records, the names of their companions who had just “departed this life.” The captain of the Severn wrote, in a report to the Admiralty, that after the death of his ship’s master he had filled the role by promoting a seaman named Campbell—who had shown “great diligence and resolute behavior under all our difficulties and dangers”; moments later, the captain added to the same dispatch, “I have just received notice that Mr. Campbell is this day dead.” The Centurion’s midshipman Keppel, whose diseased, toothless mouth resembled a dark cave, grew so weary of cataloging the dead that he wrote apologetically, “I have omitted to insert in my log the deaths of several men.”

  One later passing was not neglected in the records. The entry, truncated with the standard abbreviations of “AB” for “Able Seaman” and “DD” for “Discharged Dead,” is now smudged but still legible, like a faded epitaph. It reads, “Henry Cheap, AB, DD…at sea.” It was Captain Cheap’s young nephew and apprentice. His death no doubt rattled the Wager’s new captain more than any storm.

  Byron tried to offer his deceased companions a proper sea burial, but there were so many corpses, and so few hands to assist, that the bodies often had to be heaved overboard unceremoniously. As the poet Lord Byron—who drew on what he referred to as “my grand-dad’s ‘Narrative’ ”—would put it, “Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.”

  * * *

  By late March, after nearly three weeks of futile attempts to get through the Drake Passage, the squadron was on the verge of what Reverend Walter called “total destruction.” Its only hope was to quickly get around the Horn and reach the nearest secure landfall: the Juan Fernández Islands, an uninhabited archipelago in the Pacific 350 miles off the western coast of Chile. “Getting thither was the only chance we had left to avoid perishing at sea,” Reverend Walter noted.

  For John Byron, that lover of sea literature, the archipelago offered more than a refuge: it was burnished in lore. In 1709, the English captain Woodes Rogers had stopped there while his crew was being ravaged by scurvy. As he detailed in his journal, later published as A Cruising Voyage Round the World, which Byron had eagerly read, Rogers was astonished to discover on one island a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk, who had been a castaway there for more than four years after being left behind by his ship. Through extraordinary ingenuity, he had managed to survive—learning to make a fire by scraping sticks together, and hunting animals and foraging for wild turnips. “When his clothes wore out,” Rogers explained, “he made himself a coat and cap of goat-skins, which he stitched together with…no other needle but a nail.” Selkirk read from a Bible that he had with him, “so that he said he was a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before.” Rogers called Selkirk “the absolute monarch of the island.” As a tale gets passed from one person to another, it ripples out until it is as wide and mythic as the sea. And Selkirk’s story provided the germ for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 fictional account of Robinson Crusoe—a paean not only to British ingenuity but also to the country’s colonial mastery of distant realms.

  As Byron and his shipmates were being pounded by the forces of nature, they became entranced by visions of Juan Fernández, visions no doubt made more dazzling by their scorbutic dreams. On that “long wished for island,” as Millechamp called it, they would find emerald fields and streams of pure water. Thomas, in his journal, compared the island to the Eden of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  One night in April, Byron and others in the squadron determined they’d made it far enough through the Drake Passage, and to the west of Cape Horn Island, that they could finally turn north—and head safely to Juan Fernández. But not long after the ships tacked north, the lookout on the Anna noticed, through the glancing moonlight, strange formations: rocks. The Anna’s crewmen fired their guns, twice, in warning, and soon the other ships’ watches also discerned the jutting lee shore, the glistening rocks rising, as one captain wrote in his logbook, “like two black towers of an extraordinary height.”

  Once more, the navigators’ dead reckoning had been wrong—this time by hundreds of miles. The ships were not west of the tip of the continent; rather, they were, having been driven eastward by the winds and the currents, pinned against it. The crew members managed to turn just in time and avoid being wrecked. But more than a month after entering the Drake Passage, they had still not escaped the “blind Horn’s hate.” Millechamp wrote in his journal, “Our seamen now almost all despairing of ever getting on shore voluntarily gave themselves up to their fatal distemper.” And they envied “those whose good fortune it was to die first.”