A French ship, bound from Lima to Spain, finally carried them homeward as passengers, and they saw the shores of England in November, 1745, or more than five years after the Wager had been lost in the Gulf de Panas on the coast of Patagonia. The boyish midshipman who had behaved so well through all vicissitudes was of gentle blood and breeding, and in England he was known as the Honorable John Byron, second son of the fourth Lord Byron. When he landed at Dover with two of his shipmates his troubles were not quite at an end, and to quote his own words:
We directly set off for Canterbury upon post-horses, but Captain Cheap was so tired by the time he got there that he could proceed no farther that night. The next morning he still found himself so much fatigued that he could ride no longer; therefore it was agreed that he and Mr. Hamilton should take a post-chaise and that I should ride. But here an unlucky difficulty was started; for upon sharing the little money we had, it was found to be not sufficient to pay the charges to London, and my proportion fell so short that it was, by calculation, bare enough to pay for horses, without a farthing for eating a morsel upon the road or even for the very turnpikes. Thus I was obliged to defraud by riding as hard as I could through the toll-gates, not paying the least regard to the men who called out to stop me. The want of refreshment I bore as well as I could.
When I got to the Borough of London I took a coach and drove to Marlborough Street where my friends lived when I left England but when I came there I found the place shut up. Having been absent so many years, and having, in all that time, never a word from home, I knew not who was dead or who was living or where to go next, or even how to pay the coachman. I recollected a linen-draper’s shop, not far from thence, at which our family used to deal. I therefore drove thither and, making myself known, they paid the coachman. I then inquired after our family and was told that my sister had married Lord Carlisle and was at that time in Soho Square. I immediately walked to the house and knocked at the door. But the porter, not liking my figure which was half French and half Spanish, with the addition of a large pair of boots covered with dirt, was going to shut the door in my face but I prevailed upon him to let me in.
I need not acquaint the reader with what surprise and joy my sister received me. She immediately furnished me with money to appear like the rest of my countrymen. Till that time I could not properly be said to have finished all the extraordinary scenes in which I had been involved by a series of adventures, for the space of five years and upwards.
The Honorable John Byron became a British vice-admiral and was also the grandfather of the poet, who transmuted some of the exploits of the midshipman of the Wager into the pages of Don Juan. As one of the most famous fighting sailors of his era, Admiral Byron earned the nickname of “Foul Weather Jack,” because he contended so constantly with gales and head winds, and it is to this that Lord Byron refers in his “Epistles to Augusta”:
A strange doom is thy father’s son’s, and past
Recalling as it lies beyond redress,
Reversed for him our grandsire’s fate of yore,
He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.
You will find that Stevenson mentions him in that same tribute to the English admirals: