Most men of high destinies have high-sounding names. Pymn and Habakkuk may do pretty well, but they must not think to cope with the Cromwells and Isaiahs. And you could not find a better case in point than that of the English Admirals. Drake and Rooke and Hawke are picked names for men of execution. Frobisher, Rodney, Boscawen, Foul-Weather Jack Byron, are all good to catch the eye in a page of naval history.
CHAPTER XII
THE CRUISE OF THE WAGER’S LONG-BOAT
The story of the man-of-war Wager was by no means finished when young Midshipman Byron rode into London and was welcomed as one risen from the dead. It will be recalled that about twenty of the crew persisted in the attempt to sail homeward by way of the Strait of Magellan. They had been at sea only a few days when the cutter, the smaller of their two boats, was knocked to pieces among the rocks, and the survivors were therefore jammed into the long-boat, which had room for no more than half of them. How they managed to stay afloat is a mystery that cannot be fathomed, with the gunwales only a few inches above water and scarcely any space to row or steer or handle sail. They quarreled continually, and “hardly ten testified any anxiety about the welfare of the voyage but rather seemed ripe for mutiny and destruction.” Eleven of the company soon preferred to quit this madhouse of a boat and to face a less turbulent death ashore, and at their own request they were landed on the coast of Patagonia.
The long-boat, still overcrowded to a degree that meant incredible discomfort and danger, blundered on her course, with only the sun and stars for guidance. A little flour and some other stores had been taken from the wreck, and now occurred a curious manifestation of human selfishness, of the struggle for survival reduced to the lowest terms. The officers had endeavored to ration the food, share and share alike, but the ugly temper of the men made such prudent precautions impossible, and some obtained more provisions than others. The situation was described by one of them in these words:
The people on board began to barter their allowance of provisions for other articles. Flour was valued at twelve shillings a pound, but, before night, it rose to a guinea. Some were now absolutely starving for want—and the day following, George Bateman, a lad of sixteen, expired, being reduced to a perfect skeleton. On the 19th, Thomas Capell, aged twelve years, son of the late Lieutenant Capell, died of want. A person on board had above twenty guineas of his money, along with a watch and a silver cup. The latter the boy wished to sell for flour; but his guardian told him it would buy clothes for him in the Brazils.
“Sir,” cried the miserable youth, “I shall never live to see the Brazils, I am now starving—almost starved to death; therefore give me my silver cup, for God’s sake, to get me some victuals, or buy some for me yourself.”
But all his prayers and entreaties were vain, and Heaven sent death to his relief. Those who have not experienced such hardships will wonder how people can be so inhuman as to witness their fellow creatures starving before their faces without affording them succor, but hunger is void of all compassion.
They actually sailed through the Strait of Magellan and reached the Atlantic after two months of suffering during which twenty men died of famine and disease. Landing wherever possible, they found seal and fish or traded with wandering Indians for dogs and wild geese to eat. Of the survivors no more than fifteen were able to stand or to crawl about the boat. A happier fate was granted them when they coasted along the wilderness of the Argentine and found thousands of wild horses, which kept them plentifully supplied with meat. At length they came to the Rio Grande and the town of Montevideo, and thirty of them were alive, or half the number that had made the voyage in the long-boat.
Among those who died almost within sight of rescue was Thomas MacLean, the cook, a patriarch of eighty-two years, presumably one of those soldier pensioners who had been snatched from his well-earned repose at Chelsea Hospital. This is one of the most extraordinary facts of the whole story, that this tough old veteran of a red-coat, his age past four score, should have lived all those months, during which the great majority of the younger officers and men of the Wager had been blotted out by privations which seemed beyond human endurance.
While the long-boat was standing along the coast, on this last stretch of the journey, there came a time when there was no food or water left. There was no small boat to send ashore, so nine of the strongest men offered to swim to the beach and see what they could find. Over they went, feeble as they were, and all reached shore except one marine, who had so little strength to spare that he sank like a stone. Those in the long-boat let several empty water-casks drift to the land and tied to them some muskets and ammunition wrapped in tarred canvas. A gale blew the long-boat out to sea and disabled her rudder. Tacking back with great difficulty, she found it impossible to lay to and bring off the eight men, and another cask was floated off to them, containing a letter of farewell, and more ammunition, and the boat made sail, and vanished to the northward.