



Produced by Al Haines








[Illustration: Frontispiece]

To THE WISE MAN ALL THE WORLD'S A SOIL--BEN JONSON



[Illustration: Title page]

  A VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD
  _in the years 1740-4 by_
  LORD ANSON



  LONDON: PUBLISHED by J. M. DENT & SONS Ltd.
  AND IN NEW YORK BY E. P. DUTTON & CO



{vii}

INTRODUCTION

The men-of-war in which Anson went to sea were built mostly of oak.
They were painted externally yellow, with a blue stripe round the upper
works.  Internally, they were painted red.  They carried cannon on one,
two, or three decks according to their size.  The biggest ships carried
a hundred cannon and nearly a thousand men.  The ship in which this
famous voyage was made was of the middle size, then called the
fourth-rate.  She carried sixty cannon, and a crew of four hundred men.
Her lower gun deck, a little above the level of the water, was about
140 feet long.  She was of about a thousand tons burthen.

Though this seems small to us, it is not small for a wooden ship.  It
is not possible to build a long wooden ship.  The _Centurion_, though
short, was broad, bulky, and deep.  She was fit for the sea.  As she
was built more to carry cannon than to sail, she was a slow sailer.
She became slower as the barnacles gathered on her planks under the
water.  She carried three wooden masts, each fitted with two or three
square sails, extended by wooden yards.  Both yards and masts were
frequently injured in bad weather.

The cannon were arranged in rows along her decks.  On the lower gun
deck, a little above the level of the water, she carried twenty-six
twenty-four-pounders, thirteen on a side.  These guns were
muzzle-loading cannon which flung twenty-four-pound balls for a
distance of about a mile.  On the deck above this chief battery, she
carried a lighter battery of twenty-six nine- or twelve-pounder guns,
thirteen on a side.  These guns were also muzzle-loading.  They flung
their balls for a distance of a little more than a mile.

On the quarter-deck, the poop, the forecastle, and aloft in the tops
(the strong platforms on the masts), were lighter guns, throwing balls
of from a half to six pounds' weight.  {viii} Some of the lightest guns
were mounted on swivels, so that they could be easily pointed in any
direction.  All the guns were clumsy weapons.  They could not be aimed
with any nicety.  The iron round shot fired from them did not fit the
bores of the pieces.  The gun-carriages were clumsy, and difficult to
move.  Even when the carriage had been so moved that the gun was
accurately trained, and when the gun itself had been raised or
depressed till it was accurately pointed, the gunner could not tell how
much the ball would wobble in the bore before it left the muzzle.  For
these reasons all the effective sea-fights were fought at close range,
from within a quarter of a mile of the target to close alongside.  At a
close range, the muskets and small-arms could be used with effect.

The broadside cannon pointed through square portholes cut in the ship's
sides.  The ports were fitted with heavy wooden lids which could be
tightly closed when necessary.  In bad weather, the lower-deck gun
ports could not be opened without danger of swamping the ship.
Sometimes, when the lower-deck guns were fought in a gale, the men
stood knee deep in water.

In action the guns were "run out" till their muzzles were well outside
the port, so that the flashes might not set the ship's side on fire.
The shock of the discharge made them recoil into a position in which
they could be reloaded.  The guns were run out by means of side
tackles.  They were kept from recoiling too far by strong ropes called
breechings.  When not in use, and not likely to be used, they were
"housed," or so arranged that their muzzles could be lashed firmly to
the ship's side.  In a sea way, when the ship rolled very badly, there
was danger of the guns breaking loose and rolling this way and that
till they had knocked the ship's side out.  To prevent this happening,
clamps of wood were screwed behind the wheels of the gun-carriages, and
extra breechings were rove, whenever bad weather threatened.

The great weight of the rows of cannon put a severe strain upon the
upper works of the ship.  In bad weather, during excessive rolling,
this strain was often great enough to open the seams in the ship's
sides.  To prevent this, and other costly damage, it was the custom to
keep the big men-of-war in harbour from October until the Spring.  In
the {ix} smaller vessels the strain was made less by striking down some
of the guns into the hold.

The guns were fired by the application of a slow-match to the priming
powder in the touch-holes.  The slow-matches were twisted round wooden
forks called linstocks.  After firing, when the guns had recoiled,
their bores were scraped with scrapers called "worms" to remove scraps
of burning wad or cartridge.  They were then sponged out with a wet
sponge, and charged by the ramming home of fresh cartridges, wads, and
balls.  A gun's crew numbered from four to twelve men, according to the
size of the piece.  When a gun was trained aft or forward, to bear on
an object before or abaft the beam, the gun's crew hove it about with
crows and handspikes.

As this, and the other exercise of sponging, loading, and running out
the guns in the heat, stench, and fury of a sea-fight was excessively
hard labour, the men went into action stripped to the waist.  The decks
on those occasions were thickly sanded, lest the blood upon them should
make them too slippery for the survivors' feet.  Tubs of water were
placed between the guns for the wetting of the sponges and the
extinguishing of chance fires.  The ship's boys carried the cartridges
to the guns from the magazines below the water-line.  The round-shot
were placed close to hand in rope rings called garlands.  Nets were
spread under the masts to catch wreck from aloft.  The decks were
"cleared for action."  All loose articles about the decks, and all
movable wooden articles such as bulkheads (the partitions between
cabins), mess-tables, chests, casks, etc., were flung into the hold or
overboard, lest shot striking them should splinter them.  Splinters
were far more dangerous than shot.  In this book it may be noticed that
the officers hoped to have no fighting while the gun decks of the ships
in the squadron were cumbered with provision casks.

The ships of war carried enormous crews.  The _Centurion_ carried four
hundred seamen and one hundred soldiers.  At sea, most of this
complement was divided into two watches.  Both watches were subdivided
into several divisions, to each of which was allotted some special
duty, as the working of the main-mast, the keeping of the main deck
clean, etc., etc.  Many members of the crew {x} stood no watch, but
worked at special crafts and occupations about the ship.  A wooden ship
of war employed and kept busy a carpenter and carpenter's mates, a
sailmaker and sailmaker's mates, a cooper and a gunner, each with his
mates, and many other specially skilled craftsmen and their assistants.
She was a little world, carrying within herself all that she needed.
Her daily business required men to sail her and steer her, men to fight
her guns, men to rule her, men to drill, men to play the spy, men to
teach, preach, and decorate, men to clean her, caulk her, paint her and
keep her sweet, men to serve out food, water, and intoxicants, men to
tinker, repair, and cook and forge, to doctor and operate, to bury and
flog, to pump, fumigate and scrape, and to load and unload.  She called
for so many skilled craftsmen, and provided so much special employment
out of the way of seamanship, that the big crew was never big enough.
The special employments took away now one man, now another, till there
were few left to work the ship.  The soldiers and marines acted as a
military guard for the prevention of mutiny.  They worked about the
ship, hauling ropes, etc., when not engaged in military duty.

The hundreds of men in the ship's crew lived below decks.  Most of them
lived on the lower gun deck in the narrow spaces (known as berths)
between the guns.  Here they kept their chests, mess-tables, crockery,
and other gear.  Here they ate and drank, made merry, danced, got
drunk, and, in port, entertained their female acquaintance.  Many more,
including the midshipmen, surgeon, and gunner, lived below the lower
gun deck, in the orlop or cable tier, where sunlight could never come
and fresh air never came willingly.  At night the men slept in
hammocks, which they slung from the beams.  They were packed together
very tightly, man to man, hammock touching hammock.  In the morning,
the hammocks were lashed up and stowed in racks till the evening.

There was no "regulation" naval uniform until some years after the
_Centurion's_ return to England.  The officers and men seem to have
worn what clothes they pleased.  The ships carried stores of clothes
which were issued to the men as they needed them.  The store clothes,
being (perhaps) of similar patterns, may have given a sort of {xi}
uniformity to the appearance of the crews after some months at sea.  In
some of the prints of the time the men are drawn wearing rough, buckled
shoes, coarse stockings, aprons or short skirts of frieze, baize, or
tarred canvas, and short jackets worn open.  Anson, like most captains,
took care that the men in his boat's crew all dressed alike.  The
marines wore their regimental uniforms.

Life at sea has always been, and may always be, a harder life than the
hardest of shore lives.

Life ashore in the early and middle eighteenth century was, in the
main, both hard and brutal.  Society ashore was made up of a little,
brilliant, artificial class, a great, dull, honest, and hardworking
mass, and a brutal, dirty, and debased rabble.  Society at sea was like
society ashore, except that, being composed of men, and confronted with
the elements, and based on a grand ceremonial tradition, it was never
brilliant, and never artificial.  It was, in the main, an honest and
hardworking society.  Much in it was brutal, dirty, and debased; but it
had always behind it an order and a ceremony grand, impressive, and
unfaltering.  That life in that society was often barbarous and
disgusting cannot be doubted.  The best men in the ships were taken by
force from the merchant service.  The others were gathered by
press-gangs and gaol-deliveries.  They were knocked into shape by
brutal methods and kept in hand by brutal punishments.  The officers
were not always gentlemen; and when they were, they were frequently
incompetent.  The administration was scandalously corrupt.  The ships
were unhealthy, the food foul, the pay small, and the treatment cruel.
The attractions of the service seem to have been these: the chance of
making a large sum of prize-money, and the possibility of getting drunk
once a day on the enormous daily ration of intoxicating liquor.  The
men were crammed together into a dark, stinking, confined space, in
which privacy was impossible, peace a dream, and cleanliness a memory.
Here they were fed on rotten food, till they died by the score, as this
book testifies.

"We sent,"