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.
The adventures of this little band of seamen, accidentally marooned in
this manner, were most remarkable. They are almost unknown to history,
although a century and more ago much was written about the _Wager_. The
heroism and manliness of this group of actors go far to redeem many
other episodes of the disaster which were profoundly shameful, and they
are the chief reason for recalling the cruise of the long-boat. Said
Isaac Morris, one of them:
We found ourselves on a wild, desolate part of the world, fatigued,
sickly, and destitute of provisions. However, we had arms and
ammunition and while these lasted we made a tolerable shift for a
livelihood. The nearest inhabited place of which we knew was Buenos
Ayres, about three hundred miles to the northwest: but we were
then miserably reduced by our tedious passage through the Straits
of Magellan, and in a poor condition to undertake so hazardous
a journey. Nothing remained but to commit ourselves to kind
Providence, and make the best of the melancholy situation until our
health became recruited.
We were eight in number thus abandoned by our comrades, for
whose preservation we had risked our lives by swimming ashore
for provisions, and our names Guy Broadwater, Samuel Cooper,
Benjamin Smith, John Duck, Joseph Clinch, John Andrews, John
Allen, and myself. After deliberating on our unhappy circumstances
and comforting each other with imaginary hopes, we came to the
resolution of taking up our quarters on the beach where we landed
until becoming strong enough to undergo the fatigue of a journey to
Buenos Ayres.
There was no senseless chatter about mutiny, no selfish bickering.
They were sturdily resolved to stick together and make the best of a
bad bargain. For a month they lived in a burrow in the sand, knocking
a seal on the head whenever they needed food. As preparation for the
journey they made knapsacks of sealskin, filled them with the dried
flesh, and used the bladders for water bottles. Muskets on their
shoulders, they trudged for sixty miles, when no more fresh water could
be found, and they retreated to their camp to await the rainy season.
Now they built a sort of hut under the lee of a cliff and varied the
diet of seal by catching armadillos and stewing them in seaweed. Their
patience was amazing, and Seaman Isaac Morris wrote of this weary
inaction:
Nothing remarkable happened to us in the course of these three
months. Our provision, such as it was, did not cost us much
difficulty to procure, and we were supplied with fire-wood from
a small coppice about seven miles distant. We seldom failed of
bringing home something every night and generally had a hot supper.
The time passed as cheerfully as might be with poor fellows in such
circumstances as ours.
Again they set out on foot, in the month of May, after burdening their
backs with seal and armadillo meat, and traversed a barren, open
country until incessant cold rains chilled them to the bone and no
supplies of any kind were obtainable. There was prolonged argument,
and the majority was for returning once more to the hut they had left
behind as the nearest refuge. Back they toiled over the same old trail,
cast down, but not disheartened, and still loyal comrades who “bound
themselves never to quit each other unless compelled by a superior
force.” They had a certain amount of order and discipline, four of
them out hunting for food on one day and remaining in camp the next
day while the other four ranged the country for deer and the coast for
seal. Wild dogs were numerous, and several litters of puppies were
adopted until every man had a brace of them as his faithful friends and
helpers. Several young pigs were also taken into the family, and they
trotted contentedly along with the dogs.
The eight seamen lived in this strangely simple and solitary manner
until seven months had passed, and then they concluded to make another
attempt to escape from the bondage of circumstances. Not an Indian
had been seen, and there was no reason to believe that they had been
discovered or observed. They merited good fortune, did these stanch and
courageous castaways, but the curse of the _Wager_ had followed them.
While they were getting together supplies for another journey toward
Buenos Aires, Samuel Cooper, John Andrews, John Duck, and Isaac Morris
went some distance along the beach to hunt seals. Late in the day they
were returning to the hut when the dogs were seen to be running and
barking in much agitation. The four men hurried to the hut, which was
empty and plundered of muskets, powder, and ball, sealskin clothes,
dried meat--everything they possessed.
Scouting outside, one of the sailors shouted to Morris:
“Aye, Isaac, something much worse has happened, for yonder lie poor Guy
Broadwater and Benjamin Smith murdered.”
One poor fellow was found with his throat cut, and the other had been
stabbed in the breast. Their bodies were still warm, and, afraid the
assassins might be somewhere near, the four men ran hard and hid in a
rocky bight a mile away until next morning, for they had no firearms
left. Of the four who had been overtaken in this tragedy, Joseph Clinch
and John Allen had vanished, nor was any trace of them discovered. It
was sadly agreed that Indians must have killed two and carried the two
others away with them. The four survivors were deprived not only of
their comrades, but of their precious muskets and the means of making
fire. Never were men left more naked and defenseless in a hostile
wilderness. In this plight Samuel Cooper, John Andrews, John Duck, and
Isaac Morris trudged off for the third time to look for the mouth of
the River Plate and Buenos Aires.
With them trooped sixteen dogs and two pigs, and it must have been an
odd caravan to behold. They carried their provender on the hoof this
time. By following the sea-coast, they found pools of fresh water among
the sand-dunes, where the heavy rains had not yet filtered into the
ground, and a dead whale washed up on the beach served for several
hearty meals. They got along without great difficulty until ten days of
travel found them mired in endless swamps and bogs, which they could
find no way of crossing. Again they retreated to the starting-place at
the hut, but the amiable pigs were no longer in the troop. There were
not so many dogs, and their number steadily dwindled; for there would
have been no bill of fare without them.
Three months more the four unconquerable seamen lingered in their
exile, at their wits’ ends to plan a way of escape, because the exodus
to Buenos Aires had been given up as hopeless. Then they discovered
a large trunk of a fallen tree on the beach, and conceived the wild
notion of fashioning some kind of boat of it and hoisting a sail of
sealskins sewed together with sinews. They had no tools whatever,
barring a pocket-knife or two, but this could not discourage the handy
mariners. John Duck happened to remember that during the first journey
toward Buenos Aires eleven months before, he had thrown away his musket
because the lock was broken. It occurred to one of them that the iron
of the barrel might be pounded into something like a hatchet, and what
did the quartet do but take a little seal meat and water and walk sixty
miles to look for that musket. They found it, which was still more
wonderful, and beat half the length of the barrel flat, using stones as
hammer and anvil, and whetted an edge on the rough rocks.
They were about to attack the project of making a boat when a dozen
horses came galloping along the beach, and there were Indians on their
backs. They were as astonished as the British seamen, but had no
intention of shedding blood, and promptly whisked their prisoners up
behind them. At a great pace the Indian horsemen rode several miles
inland to a camp where a dozen of them were rounding up wild horses.
It affords a glimpse of what the life had been in that hut on the
Patagonian coast to hear Isaac Morris say:
“We were treated with great humanity; they killed a horse, kindled a
fire, and roasted part of it, which to us who had been eating raw flesh
three months was most delicious entertainment. They also gave each of
us a piece of an old blanket to cover our nakedness.”
Two hundred miles back into the mountainous interior, where white men
had never been seen, the wandering party of horse-hunting Indians
carried the four sailors. These were sporting savages with a taste for
gambling, and it is chronicled that “in this place we were bought and
sold four different times, for a pair of spurs, a brass pan, ostrich
feathers and such trifles, which was the low price generally set on
each of us; and sometimes we were played away at dice, so that we
changed masters several times in a day.”
A few weeks later the band of nomad Indians was joined by other
parties, and together, with a train of fifteen hundred horses, they
moved by easy stages far inland, almost a thousand miles from the
coast, and came in four months’ time to the capital, or chief town of
the tribe, where the king claimed the seamen as his own property. He
spoke a little Spanish, and hated the Spaniards so cordially that his
friendly regard was offered these wanderers because they had served in
an English man-of-war of a squadron sent against the enemy. They were
slaves, it is true, but this condition was tempered with kindness, and
for eight months they lived and labored among these wild horsemen of
South America. When the season of spring arrived, the tribe broke camp
for the long pilgrimage to the pampas and the chase of the wild horses
which supplied food and raiment.
The customary route to the sea passed within a hundred miles of Buenos
Aires, and the sailors persuaded their masters that it was worth while
trying to obtain ransom for them. At last there was a tangible hope
of extricating themselves, but it brought joy only to three of the
four comrades. Poor John Duck happened to be a mulatto born in London,
and his brown skin won the fancy of the Indians, who insisted that he
was of their own blood. Therefore they refused to part with him and
he was sold for a very high price to another chief in a region even
more remote, and this was the last of him. His three shipmates were
very sorrowful at leaving him, no doubt, and it must have been an
incident deeply moving when they shook hands and went their opposite
ways, for they had suffered manifold things together and carried it
off magnificently. And in their minds there must have been the memory
of that vow they had sworn together “never to quit each other unless
compelled by a superior force.”
The chief was faithful to his word in sending a messenger to Buenos
Aires, where the Spanish governor expressed his willingness to buy
three English prisoners at the bargain price of ninety dollars for the
lot.
In this manner were Midshipman Morris and Samuel Cooper and John
Andrews delivered from their captivity in the wilds of Patagonia,
though they were not yet to see the long road home to England. The
Spanish governor of Buenos Aires behaved toward them like a very
courteous gentleman, but felt it his bounden duty to labor with them
for the good of their souls. “He sent for us several times,” Midshipman
Morris tells us, “and earnestly urged us to turn Catholics and serve
the king of Spain; to which we answered that we were Protestants and
true Englishmen and hoped to die so. Many tempting offers were made to
seduce us but, thank God, we resisted them all.”
This obstinacy vexed the conscientious governor, and he sent the three
heretics on board of the man-of-war _Asia_, the flag-ship of Admiral
Pizarro’s squadron, which was then lying at Montevideo. Aboard the
_Asia_ the three Englishmen were confined more than a year, with
sixteen other unlucky seamen of their own race. They complained that
they were treated more like galley-slaves than prisoners of war, and it
was inevitable that they should try to escape. A sentry was tied and
gagged one night, and the Britons swam for the shore, a quarter of a
mile away. Most of them were overtaken in a boat, but Isaac Morris and
one sailor, naked as the day they were born, scrambled into the jungle,
and had such a piteous time of it that they were glad to surrender to
the laborers of the nearest plantation. Taken back to the ship, they
were thrust into the stocks, neck and heels, four hours a day for a
fortnight as a hint to discourage such rash enterprise.
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.
[Illustration: BRIG “TOPAZ” OF NEWBURYPORT, BUILT IN 1807
Original in the Marine Room, Peabody Museum, Salem. Painted by Anton
Roux, Marseilles]
The officers and crew, who had escaped into different parts of
the ship, were anxious only for their own safety, and incapable
of forming any plan for quelling the insurrection. The yells of
the Indians, indeed, the groans of the wounded, and the confused
clamors of the crew, all heightened by the obscurity prevailing,
greatly magnified the danger at first. The Spanish, likewise,
sensible of the disaffection of the impressed men, and at the same
time conscious of the barbarity their prisoners had experienced,
believed that it was a general conspiracy and that their own
destruction was inevitable.
A strange interval of silence fell upon the bloodstained ship as she
rolled, without guidance, to the impulses of a gentle sea, while the
canvas flapped and the yards creaked as the breeze took her aback.
The conquering Indians were vigilant and anxious, unable to leave the
quarter-deck, where they held the mastery, the Spanish crew lying low,
as it were, and wondering what might happen next. Orellana promptly
broke open the arms-chest, which had been conveyed to the poop a few
days previously as a safeguard against mutiny. In it he confidently
expected to find cutlasses enough to equip his men, and with these
weapons they would hew their way into the great cabin and cut down the
surviving officers. Alas! for the cleverly contrived plans, the chest
contained only muskets and pistols, and the Indians had never learned
how to use firearms.
Meanwhile that high and mighty personage Admiral Pizarro was using
animated language in the great cabin, and Spanish oaths are beyond all
others for crackling eloquence. His guests had begun to compose their
scrambled wits, and through the windows and port-holes they were able
to talk things over with their friends who were hiding in the gun-room
and between decks. From these sources it was learned that those unholy
devils, the English prisoners, were not concerned in the hurricane of
a rebellion, and that the prodigious affair was solely the work of the
eleven rampant Indians. The admiral looked less disconsolate, and his
officers breathed easier. It was resolved to storm the quarter-deck
before the storm gathered more headway.
There were pistols in the great cabin, but neither powder nor ball,
but a bucket was lowered to the gun-room on the deck below, and plenty
of ammunition was fished up. Cautiously unbarring the cabin doors,
they began to take pot-shots at the Indians, and were lucky enough to
shoot Orellana through the head. When his followers saw him fall and
discovered that he was dead, to a man these ten heroes leaped over the
bulwark and perished in the sea. They knew how to finish in style, and
the admiral was deprived of the pleasure of swinging them to a yard-arm
to the flourish of trumpet and drum.
Midshipman Isaac Morris and his two shipmates of the _Wager_ witnessed
this splendid undertaking, or bits of it, as they paced to and fro
under guard in the middle of the ship. It seemed as though they might
be granted a quieter life by way of a change, but when the flag-ship
reached Spain they were hustled ashore and put into a prison for a
fortnight, where they were chained together like common criminals and
fed on bread and water. After that they were marched off to an island
by a file of musketeers, and held for fourteen weeks in a sort of penal
colony among thieves and felons. The longest lane has a turning, and
there came at length a royal order providing that the three Englishmen
should be sent to Portugal. At Oporto the English consul gave them
quarters and a little money, and the end of the story is thus described
by Isaac Morris:
We embarked in the _Charlotte_, scow, on the 18th of April, 1746,
and under convoy of the _York_ and _Folkstone_ men-of-war, arrived
at London on the 5th of July following; three only of the eight men
left on the coast of Patagonia, Samuel Cooper, John Andrews, and
myself, being so happy as once more to see their native country.
The _Wager_ had sailed on her fatal voyage on September 18, 1740, and
had been lost in May of 1741. These three survivors had therefore spent
more than five years in the endeavor to reach home. By devious ways
three parties of the _Wager’s_ people had finally extricated themselves
from the toils of misfortune, Midshipman Byron and Captain Cheap, and
a few of those who had lived through the cruise in the long-boat, and
these three men who had been marooned. Left unfinished were those other
tragic stories, shrouded behind the curtain of fate, the four marines
and their farewell huzza, the crew of the barge who basely abandoned
their companions, and the eleven people who requested to be set ashore
in Patagonia sooner than endure the horrors of the long-boat. The wreck
of the _Wager_ is a yarn of many strands, an epic of salt water, and
still memorable, although the ship was lost almost two hundred years
ago.