Byron’s spirits were crushed. To get clear of the land, they were heading back south, in the opposite direction of the island of Robinson Crusoe—and back into the vortex of the storms.

  CHAPTER 6

  Alone

  As the squadron tried to claw past the rim of South America, the storms intensified into what Byron dubbed the “perfect hurricane,” though there were really many tempests, each succeeding the other with an escalating force that seemed destined to destroy the entire expedition, once and for all. Because of the depletion of men, the Wager’s gunner, John Bulkeley, was now regularly in charge of two consecutive watches—eight straight hours of being hammered by the winds and waves. Sounding like the neophyte Byron, he wrote in his journal, “We had…the largest swell I ever saw.” The Severn’s veteran captain similarly observed, in a report to the Admiralty, that it was a “greater sea than I ever saw before”—virtually the exact phrase used by the Pearl’s commander, George Murray. Suddenly these men of the sea lacked not only the power to manage it but even to describe it.

  Each time the Wager went over a wave, Bulkeley felt the ship hurtling on an avalanche of water, cascading into a chasm devoid of light. All he could discern behind him was a looming mountain of water; in front of him nothing but another terrifying mountain. The hull rocked from gunwale to gunwale, tipping so far over that the yards sometimes dipped underwater as the topmen aloft clung spiderlike to the web of ropes.

  One night, at eleven p.m., a wave overwhelmed the squadron. “A raging sea took us on the starboard bow, and broke in clear fore and aft,” the Centurion’s Schoolmaster Thomas wrote in his journal, adding that the wave struck with such violence that the ship lay completely on her side, before slowly righting. “It threw down and half drowned all the people on the deck.”

  If Bulkeley didn’t keep himself fastened at all times, he would be catapulted through the air. One seaman, thrown into the hold, snapped his femur. A boatswain’s mate was upended and shattered his collarbone, then shattered it again during a subsequent fall. Another seaman broke his neck. When Thomas was on the Centurion’s quarterdeck, trying to observe the dim stars in order to fix their position, a wave knocked him off his feet. “Down I came on my head and right shoulder with such violence as quite stunned me,” he wrote. Barely conscious, he was carried to his hammock, where he lay for more than two weeks—a convalescence that was anything but peaceful, his bed a menacing swing.

  One morning, when Bulkeley was at the Wager’s helm, he was also nearly swept away by a monstrous wave—a wave that, as he put it, “carried me over the wheel.” In the deluge one of the four transport boats, the cutter, was sent careening across the deck. The boatswain, John King, wanted to heave it overboard. But Bulkeley ordered him, “Do nothing with her,” not until he’d consulted Captain Cheap.

  Cheap was in his great cabin, where it was as if a tornado had passed through, everything tossed about. Bulkeley, in his journal, often carped about the Wager’s officers—the boatswain was wicked, the master useless, the lieutenant more useless—and he’d begun to harbor certain reservations about his new captain. Pacing with a silver-headed cane, which clacked like a pirate’s wooden leg, Cheap seemed increasingly hell-bent on conquering the elements and fulfilling his glorious mission. Bulkeley didn’t trust this aspect of Cheap, complaining in his journal that the captain often did not consult with his officers, and would lash out at anyone who expressed misgivings.

  After Bulkeley apprised him of the situation with the cutter, Cheap ordered him to try to salvage it, and to lower the boom for the jib, which was swinging dangerously. Bulkeley later noted with satisfaction in his journal that he was the one who rescued the cutter and secured the jibboom.

  Because of the ferocity of the winds, the Wager and the other ships sometimes had to furl their sails, tossing for days with bare poles at the mercy of the waves. The vessels were uncontrollable in such a state, and at one point Commodore Anson, in order to turn the Centurion, was forced to send several topmen to stand on the yards, hold on to ropes, and use their bodies to catch the wind. The gale blew against their faces and chests and arms and legs, each a threadbare sail. With extraordinary daring, the men resisted the wind with their frosted, concaved bodies long enough to allow Anson to maneuver the ship. But one topman lost his grip and was cast into the churning ocean. It was impossible to come about in time to rescue him, and the men watched as he stroked after them, trying frantically to catch up, waging a heroic, solitary war against the waves, until he receded in the distance—though they knew he was still out there, swimming after them. “He might continue sensible for a considerable time longer, of the horror attending his irretrievable situation,” Reverend Walter noted.

  The celebrated eighteenth-century poet William Cowper later read Walter’s account and penned “The Castaway,” in which he imagined the seaman’s fate:

  Wash’d headlong from on board,

  Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,

  His floating home for ever left.

  ………………

  His comrades, who before

  Had heard his voice in ev’ry blast.

  Could catch the sound no more:

  For then, by toil subdued, he drank

  The stifling wave, and then he sank.

  No poet wept him; but the page

  Of narrative sincere,

  That tells his name, his worth, his age,

  Is wet with Anson’s tear.

  Bulkeley and the other survivors sailed on. Not only were they suffering from scurvy; they were now running low on fresh supplies. Each biscuit had become “so much worm-eaten,” Thomas wrote, that “it was scarce anything but dust, and a little blow would reduce it to that immediately.” No livestock remained, and the salted “beef and pork was likewise very rusty and rotten, and the surgeon endeavored to hinder us from eating any of it, alleging it was, though a slow, yet a sure poison.” Some of the ships had only a few remaining casks of drinking water, and Captain Murray confessed that “if it had not pleased God” to take so many of his people from disease they would all be dead from thirst. One sailor on the Centurion became so demented that he had to be chained in irons. And the men’s ships—their last protection against the forces of nature—began to break apart.

  * * *

  On the Centurion, it was the topsail that first split, blowing almost to pieces. Then several of the shrouds, the thick vertical ropes supporting the masts, snapped, and soon after that the heads—the boxlike toilets on the deck—were destroyed by waves, forcing the men to relieve themselves in buckets or by leaning dangerously over the railing. Then a bolt of lightning hit the ship. “A quick, subtle fire ran along our deck,” Midshipman Keppel wrote, “which, bursting, made a report like a pistol, and struck several of our men and officers, who with the violence of the blow were black and blue.” The “crazy ship,” as Reverend Walter called the Centurion, had begun to heel abnormally. Even the proud lion was loosening from its mount, trembling.

  On the other ships, the officers catalogued their own “list of defects,” which went on for pages, citing broken backstays, clew lines, buntlines, leech lines, halyards, braces, tackles, ladders, stoves, hand pumps, gratings, and gangways. The captain of the Severn reported that his ship was in the utmost distress—all her sails torn and the sailmaker needed to repair them dead.

  One day Bulkeley heard the Gloucester firing its guns in alarm: a yard on its mainmast had cracked in two. Anson ordered Captain Cheap to send John Cummins, the Wager’s talented carpenter, to help repair it. Cummins was Bulkeley’s closest friend, and the gunner watched as Cummins set out in one of the small transport boats, bouncing about in the harrowing waves, until he was hauled, half-drowned, onboard the Gloucester.

  Though the Wager was an eyesore, she was sacred to Bulkeley, and every day she was being devoured even more than the other ships. She was pelted and gouged. She pitched, she heaved, she groaned, she splintered. Then one day, after colliding with a wave, the mizzen, a vital mast, toppled over like an axed tree, crashing down with its rigging and sails into the sea. All that was left was a stump. Thomas predicted that a ship in such a condition would inevitably perish in these waters. The Wager, laboring in the waves, fell farther and farther behind the rest of the squadron. The Centurion circled back to the Wager, and Anson—using a speaking trumpet that allowed him to communicate with Captain Cheap across the waves and over the roar of the wind—hollered to ask why he didn’t set the topsail on another mast to help propel the ship.

  “My rigging is all gone, and broke fore and aft, and my people almost all taken ill and down,” Cheap shouted back. “But I will set him as soon as possible.”

  Anson said he would make sure that the Wager’s carpenter, Cummins, who had been trapped on the Gloucester because of the weather, was sent back. When Cummins arrived, he immediately went to work with his mates, attaching a forty-foot boom to the stump and jury-rigging a sail. This steadied the ship some, and the Wager sailed on.

  * * *

  Amid these travails, the one superior whom Bulkeley never criticized was Anson. From the outset, the commodore had been dealt a sinister hand—a woefully organized expedition—but he had done all he could to preserve the squadron and bolster the men’s spirits. Ignoring stifling naval hierarchies, he toiled alongside the crew, assisting with the most arduous tasks. He shared his private stores of brandy with the ordinary seamen to relieve their suffering and cheer them up. When a bilge pump on a vessel broke, he sent over the one from his own ship. And when he had no more supplies to dole out, he encouraged the men and boys with his words—which, given his taciturn nature, seemed all the more stirring.

  But there were simply too few healthy men and boys to manage the ships. The Centurion, which once had more than two hundred people serving on each watch, was reduced to six seamen per watch. Captain Cheap reported of the Wager, “My ship’s company at that unhappy juncture were almost all sick…and they so fatigued with the excessive length of the voyage, the long course of bad weather, and the scarcity of fresh water that they were very little able to do their duty.” Some vessels could not even raise a sail. Captain Murray wrote that his crew had resisted the elements with a “resolution not to be met with in any but English seamen,” yet now, being “quite jaded and fatigued with continual labour and watching, and pinched with the cold and want of water…they became so dejected as to lay themselves down in despair, bewailing their misfortunes, wishing for death as the only relief to their miseries.”

  * * *

  On April 10, 1741, seven months after the squadron had departed England and more than four weeks since it had entered the Drake Passage, the Severn and the Pearl began to trail behind the other ships. Then they disappeared. “Lost sight of the Severn and Pearl,” Bulkeley wrote in his journal. Some suspected that these ships’ officers had given up and turned back around Cape Horn, retreating to safety. Thomas claimed they seemed to “lag designedly.”

  The squadron—down to five ships, of which only three were men-of-war—strove to stay together. To signal their location, they hung lantern lights and fired their guns nearly every half hour. Bulkeley knew that if the Wager became separated from the fleet, not to mention Commodore Anson, there would be nobody to rescue them from sinking or from a shipwreck. They might be forced to spend their days, as Reverend Walter put it, “on some desolate coast, without any reasonable hope of ever getting off again.”

  The Centurion was the first to disappear in the murk. After Bulkeley spotted its flickering lights on the night of April 19, he wrote in his account, “This was the last time I ever saw the Commodore.” He discerned the other ships in the distance, but they, too, were soon “gone,” the sound of their booming guns smothered by the wind. The Wager was alone at sea, left to its own destiny.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Gulf of Pain

  David Cheap, commander of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, would never turn back. His company continued to wither, and his own body was hollowed out by what he, to avoid the stigma of scurvy, preferred to call “rheumatism” and “asthma.” His ship, the first man-of-war under his charge, was not just deformed, with its missing mast, torn sails, and bad leaks; it was alone upon the quaking sea. Despite all this, he sailed on, determined to find Anson at the rendezvous. If Cheap failed at this challenge, was he truly a captain after all?

  Once this goal had been achieved, and once the remaining men in Cheap’s party recuperated, they would proceed with the plan that Commodore Anson had confided in him: an assault on Valdivia, a town on the southwestern coast of Chile. Because the Wager was carrying much of the squadron’s armaments, the success of the first strike against the Spanish—and perhaps of the entire expedition—depended on him miraculously making it to the rendezvous. The very hopelessness of the situation offered a peculiar human appeal: if Cheap prevailed, he would become a hero, his feats celebrated in the yarns and ballads of seamen. Never again would those landlubbers back home doubt what he was made of.

  Watch after watch, bell after bell, he continued sailing, scraping, battling, until three weeks had passed since his separation from the squadron. With skill and daring, and a touch of ruthlessness, he had navigated the Wager around Cape Horn, joining that elite club, and he was now hastening along the Pacific, heading northeast off the Chilean coast of Patagonia. In several days, he would arrive at the rendezvous. Imagine Anson’s expression when he saw the lost Wager and realized that his former lieutenant had saved the day!

  Yet the Pacific did not live up to its peaceful name. As the Wager headed north off the coast of Chile, all the previous storms seemed to have combined into one climatic fury. God was ever the yarn spinner. Some of the men appeared ready to “cut and run,” just as the officers and crews of the Pearl and the Severn were suspected of doing. But Cheap—his eyes inflamed, his teeth loosening—was unwavering. He demanded that his crew brace the sails, clamber up the masts amid vicious gusts of wind, and work the manual pump, which required lowering saucers on a long chain into the water-filled hold and then hauling them upward—a backbreaking ritual that had to be repeated over and over again. Cheap relied on the midshipman Alexander Campbell to strong-arm the crew and enforce his orders. “My attachment to the Captain was zealous,” Campbell acknowledged. One seaman later shouted curses at the midshipman and vowed retribution.

  Cheap relentlessly drove the men onward—drove them even as they dumped overboard a growing number of corpses. “Let the fate of particular persons be what it will,” Cheap proclaimed, “but let the honour of our country be immortal.”

  * * *

  As they forged on, John Byron—who noted Cheap’s “stubborn defiance of all difficulties,” and how he was unfazed by the “apprehensions which so justly alarmed all”—peered over the edge of the quarterdeck. Ever alert to nature, he noticed, floating on the rushing water, little green strands. Seaweed. He anxiously told the gunner, Bulkeley, “We can’t be far off the land.”

  * * *

  John Bulkeley thought that their course was madness. According to Master Clark, the navigator, they remained safely west of the Patagonian coast of Chile, but his dead reckoning had been wrong before. And if they kept on a northeast tack they might become entangled with an unknown lee shore and not be able turn around in time to avoid wrecking. The carpenter, Cummins, remarked that given the “condition the ship was in, she was not fit to come in with the land,” especially with “all our men being sick.” Bulkeley went and asked Lieutenant Baynes, the superior officer on duty, why they did not alter their course and turn west back out to sea.

  The lieutenant seemed evasive. When Bulkeley pressed him again, Baynes replied that he had spoken to Cheap, and that the captain was intent on making it to the rendezvous in time. “I would have you go to him, he may be persuaded by you,” Baynes said fecklessly.

  Bulkeley had no need to seek a meeting with Cheap. The captain, undoubtedly hearing of the gunner’s grumblings, soon summoned him and asked, “What distance do you reckon yourself off the land?”

  “About sixty leagues,” Bulkeley responded, which was roughly two hundred miles. But the currents and swells were driving them rapidly eastward toward the coastline, he noted, adding, “Sir, the ship is a perfect wreck. Our mizzenmast gone…and all our people down.”

  For the first time, Cheap divulged Anson’s secret orders, and he insisted that he would not deviate from them and threaten the operation. He believed a captain must fulfill his duties: “I am obliged and determined.”

  Bulkeley thought that the decision was “a very great misfortune.” But he bowed to his superior’s orders, leaving the captain alone with his clacking cane.

  * * *

  On May 13, at eight in the morning, Byron was on watch when several of the pulleys for the foresails broke. As the carpenter, Cummins, hurried forward to inspect them, thunderclouds cloaking the horizon parted ever so slightly, and in the distance he could see something shadowy and misshapen. Was it land? He approached Lieutenant Baynes, who squinted but didn’t see anything. Maybe Baynes was suffering from blindness induced by lack of vitamin A. Or maybe it was Cummins’s eyes that had been deceived. After all, Baynes reckoned that the ship was still more than 150 miles from shore. He told Cummins that it was “impossible” for him to have discerned land, and he made no report of the sighting to the captain.