Lost ships and lonely seas

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

Admiral Pizarro had journeyed overland to Chile, and in the very leisurely course of time he returned to Buenos Aires to set sail for Spain in his flag-ship, having achieved nothing more than a wild-goose chase in quest of the daring Anson. The towering, ornate Asia was refitted as completely as possible, but there was a great lack of seamen. More than half her crew had died of scurvy or deserted during the long voyage and the year at an anchorage. Press-gangs combed the streets and dives of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, but the ship could not find a proper complement, and, as a last resort, eleven Indians were unceremoniously thrown on board. They had been captured while raiding the outposts of the thinly held Spanish settlements, and were of a fighting tribe which preferred death to submission to the cruel and rapacious invader.

One of these eleven Indians was a chief by the name of Orellana and a man to be considered noteworthy even in that age of high adventure. When dragged aboard the Spanish flag-ship, he and his fellows were, of course, handled like dogs,

being treated with much insolence and barbarity by the Spaniards, the meanest officers among whom were accustomed to beat them on the slightest pretences. Orellana and his followers, though apparently patient and submissive, meditated a severe revenge. He endeavored to converse with such of the English as understood the Spanish language and seemed very desirous of learning how many of them were on board and which they were. But not finding them so precipitate and vindictive as he expected, after distantly sounding them, he proceeded no farther in respect to their participation, but resolved to trust his enterprise to himself and his ten faithful followers.

In short, these eleven unarmed Indians were planning an uprising in a sixty-gun ship with a crew of nearly five hundred Spaniards. It was an enterprise so utterly insane that the level-headed English seamen refused to consider it. They regarded Orellana and his ten comrades as poor, misguided wretches who knew no better and who had been driven quite mad by abuse. Of all the tales of mutiny on the high seas this must be set down as unparalleled, and it seems to fit in, as a sort of climax, with the varied and almost endless adventures of the people who were wrecked in the Wager.

The eleven Indians first stole a few sailors’ knives, which was fairly easy to do, and then they manufactured the singular weapon still in use on the plains of the Argentine and which Midshipman Morris described as follows:

They were secretly employed in cutting out thongs from raw-hides, to the ends of which they fixed the double-headed shot of the small quarter-deck guns. This, when swung round their heads and let fly, is a dangerous weapon and, as already observed, they are extremely expert with it. An outrage committed on the chief himself, precipitated the execution of his daring enterprise; for one of the officers, a brutal fellow, having ordered him aloft, of which he was incapable of performance, then, under pretence of disobedience, cruelly beat him and left him bleeding on the deck.

It was a day or two after this, in the cool of the evening, when the Spanish officers were strolling upon the poop, that Orellana and his ten companions came toward them and drifted close to the open doors of the great cabin in which Admiral Pizarro and his staff were lounging, with cigars and wine. The boatswain roughly ordered the Indians away. With a plan of action carefully preconceived, the intruders slowly retreated, but six of them remained together, while two moved to each of the gangways, and so blocked the approaches to the quarter-deck. As soon as they were stationed, Orellana yelled a war whoop, “which is the harshest and most terrific noise that can be imagined.”

With knives and with the deadly bolas, or thonged missiles, the eleven Indians made a slaughter-house of the flag-ship’s spacious poop. Spanish sentinels of the guard, seamen on watch, boatswain’s mates, and the sailors at the steering tackles, sailing masters and dandified officers, were mowed down as by a murderous hurricane before they could find their wits or their arms. In the fury of this first onslaught twenty of the ship’s company were laid dead on the spot and as many more were disabled. Those who survived were in no mood to mobilize any resistance. Some tumbled into the great cabin, where they extinguished the candles and barricaded the doors, while others flew into the main-shrouds and took refuge in the tops or in the rigging.

It was sheer panic which spread forward along the decks until it reached the forecastle. The officers were killed or in hiding, and the leaderless sailors assumed that the English prisoners were leading the upheaval. A few of the wounded men scrambled forward in the darkness and told the watch on deck that the after guard had been wiped out and the ship was in the hands of mutineers. Thereupon the Spanish seamen prudently locked themselves in the forecastle or swarmed out on the bowsprit and into the fore rigging. Orellana and his ten Indians were completely in possession of the sixty-gun flag-ship, the admiral, and the crew of almost five hundred Spaniards. For the moment they had achieved the impossible.