Channel in the Territory of Magellanes.
When the President of the Audience in Santiago, Don José Manso, sent for them to the capital, they went with a mule-train over the beautiful hills and plains, and, arriving in the city, the four officers (Captain Cheap, Hamilton, Campbell and Byron) were permitted to live in the house of a Scots physician, Patrick Gedd. Of the next twenty-four months Byron speaks with the appreciation of all travellers to whom Chileans have opened their hearts. Nor, indeed, were the Spanish officials unfriendly, for as it happened several Spaniards who had been taken prisoner by Anson in the Centurion, and set free, came to Santiago, and spoke warmly of the excellent treatment they had received.
Santiago, after the miseries of the Golfo de Peñas, appeared delightful to the young midshipman; he speaks of tertullias and bull-fights, country excursions, the fine fruit and agreeable women, and altogether he seems to have given and received such pleasant impressions that one must regard him as one of the first British diplomatic agents to Chile. The fact that the Wager had come on a hostile expedition, although the hostility was directed against Spain, perhaps added a shade of romance. When the party had been two years in Chile, the President gave them permission to embark in a French ship bound for Spain, and on December 20, 1744, Byron, Hamilton and Captain Cheap (Campbell electing to remain in Chile) set sail in the Lys frigate, the same vessel in which the distinguished Don Jorje Juan also travelled. Calling in at Concepción, or rather the port Talcahuano, they joined three other French vessels, the Louis Erasme, Marquis d’Antin and the Delivrance. The Lys now sprung a leak, returned for repairs to Valparaiso, while the three other vessels, proceeding, fell into the hands of English men-of-war.
The Lys put to sea again on March 1, 1745, after experiencing an earthquake in Valparaiso Bay, and rounded Cape Horn; was chased by English ships near Porto Rico, but got away to Santo Domingo. Thence they sailed again in August, sheltered by a French naval squadron of five ships, and finally reached Brest at the end of October. Here of course, with France and England now at war, the three Englishmen were prisoners, but were shortly allowed to cross to Dover. Byron’s money only allowed him to hire a horse for the London road; he had to ride hard through the turnpikes to escape payment and could afford no food. When he reached London the house of his family, of whom he had not heard a word for over five years, was shut, and it was only through remembering a nearby linen-draper that he got the address of his sister and hurried to her house in Soho Square, where the porter tried to shut the door upon his “half-French, half-Spanish figure.”
The narrative published in London in 1743 by John Bulkeley and John Cummins, respectively the gunner and carpenter of the Wager, tells the story of the longboat and cutter and of the eighty men who went south in those two craft. Bulkeley and Cummins seem to have been as bold and wordy a pair of sea-lawyers as ever trod a deck, and one cannot but sympathise with the lieutenant who represented them “in a very vile light” on their return home; but the relation has its place in history, carefully doctored as the journal of events appears to be.
Setting out on the morning of October 14, 1741, the longboat Speedwell carried fifty-nine men, the cutter twelve and the barge ten; the latter returned northward on the 22nd, and the cutter was destroyed among rocks early in November, with the loss of a seaman. The Speedwell was now alone, with seventy-two men in her, facing the cruel gales and the cold south as she crept with sail and oar towards Cape Pillar. On November 8, eleven men, exhausted with the struggle and seeing the boat overloaded, were set ashore at their own request, after Bulkeley had made them sign one of the documents which no dangers nor trials made him omit. On the 10th they believed that they identified the four Islands of Direction spoken of in Narborough’s book, by which they sailed, but lost their way when within the channels and suffered terribly from cold, rain and hunger, three men dying of starvation on November 30. In order to ascertain their true position they decided at length to return west to Cape Pillar, found it on December 5, and turned east once more. Now and again they found Indians who traded dogs to the starving crew, who thought the flesh “equal to the best mutton”; two more men died of want on the 8th and 9th and although droves of guanacos were sighted off the Narrows, they could not shoot any. A month later there were but fifteen men in reasonably good condition, but they had managed to row and sail the boat out of the Strait, were off the Patagonian coast, and were able to kill seals and get fresh water. On January 14 a party went ashore for food, and heavy seas drove the Speedwell from the coast, eight men being left behind; this was about 200 miles below Buenos Aires. On the 20th they were seen and given food by cattlemen on the Uruguayan coast, and reached Rio Grande (do Sul, in South Brazil) on the 28th. Several other men had died on the northward journey, and the survivors were starving when the hospitable people of Rio Grande opened their houses to them.
Here they remained until March 28, when Bulkeley, Cummins, and eleven others got a passage to Rio, while Lieutenant Beans tarried with the rest of the men for the next north-bound ship. From Rio the first party got on board a ship bound for Bahia and Lisbon, transhipping thence for England and arriving at Spithead on January 1, 1743. Before then, however, the Lieutenant and his men had reached home, on board an English vessel, and the Lords of the Admiralty awaited the sea-lawyers with a score of grim questions as to mutiny, desertion, etc., and with little regard for the romantic tale of the longboat. But as the record of a journey made in an open boat amongst the cruel rocks and currents of the Magellanic region, the story is probably unparalleled.
Juan and Ulloa
Amongst “Strangers on the Pacific Coast” during the eighteenth century should also be included the two Spanish naval officers, Don Antonio Ulloa and Don Jorje Juan, who left such valuable records in their “Voyage to South America” and in the highly illuminating “Secret Notices” presented to the King of Spain which were not published until many years later. Their place here is due to the fact, as they emphasised in the “Noticias Secretas,” that by this time Spain and her colonies had grown far apart in feeling. A native-born white population of “creoles,” as well as a large undercurrent of mestizos and some mulattos, had grown up, and the stream of Spanish-born who came to the country were frequently out of sympathetic touch. Spain felt this, and the commission of inspection and report which the King added to the two officers’ original duties shows how far the West Coast was still an unknown country.