Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean Read online

  The first task after the ocean voyage was to fill their water casks. Two boats went ahead of the ships, taking soundings as they went. With a light head wind the ships could make little progress under sail and had to be towed into a deep, sheltered cove where they could anchor close to the source of the fresh water. From the local Portuguese they learnt that French ships bound to and from the Pacific often used the same place to wood and water. The two weeks spent at Grande were filled with activity, interrupted at intervals by heavy tropical downpours and tempered in fine weather by the extreme heat. Repairs were carried out on the masts of the Duke, and both ships had to be heeled over and careened. The sailors spent a profitable time catching a variety of fish with nets and lines, and most mornings local villagers arrived with canoes full of fruit, chickens and corn ‘to exchange for such things as we could spare’.

  Edward Cooke went across the bay to the small town of Angra dos Reis with presents for the local Governor. ‘At our first landing, the Portuguese fired several shot, taking us for French; but were afterwards sorry for it, and received us very kindly.’ Cooke was told that some French ships had called in recently and plundered the town of plate and valuables. Although the town had two churches, a Franciscan monastery and a guard house with twenty soldiers, most of the inhabitants lived in low mud houses thatched with palm leaves. The Governor and the friars proved to be generous hosts and invited the privateers to attend a religious ceremony to mark the Conception of the Virgin Mary. Rogers, Courtney and some of their officers, accompanied by the ships’ musicians, joined the local congregation for the church service. The musicians were installed in the gallery and enlivened the service with noisy sea shanties performed with trumpets, oboes and violins. Afterwards the musicians led a procession through the town: a statue of the Virgin Mary decked with flowers was carried on the shoulders of four men and this was followed by forty monks; next came the Governor with Rogers and Courtney, and they were followed by the rest of the privateer officers, and the chief inhabitants of the town, everyone carrying large, lighted candles. After the ceremony the privateers were lavishly entertained by the friars in the monastery and then by the Governor in the guard house. ‘They unanimously told us, they expected nothing from us but our company, and they had no more but our music.’

  The only blot on this pleasant interlude was caused by the impetuous Carleton Vanbrugh. A local canoe was spotted leaving the island one morning and it was suspected that two Irishmen, who had deserted the ship and fled into the woods, were using it to escape to the mainland. Vanbrugh took some men in a pinnace to intercept the canoe and gave the order to fire at the people in it. One of the Indians in the canoe was wounded by the shot and later died, in spite of the best efforts of the ships’ surgeons. Once again the council met and formally reprimanded Vanbrugh for disobeying orders ‘and acting contrary to what he was shipped for’. Several days later he was transferred from the Duke to the Dutchess ‘for the good of our intended voyage’.

  They sailed from Grande on 3 December with a strong north-easterly wind setting them on the way to Cape Horn. As the weather got steadily colder the six tailors on board the two ships were kept busy making warm clothes from blankets, and altering spare clothes from the officers for the use of those sailors who had made little or no provision for the conditions they were going to face.

  Fresh gales alternated with light airs and thick fog. They sighted an albatross and a great number of seals and porpoises. On 23 December they passed close by the Falkland Islands and two days later saw a distant sail which they chased for a while, believing her to be a French ship homeward bound from the Pacific but they lost her when they had to beat into a fierce headwind. On 1 January 1709 the weather moderated, and with relatively smooth water they were able to drink in the New Year with the aid of a large tub of hot punch on the quarterdeck. While the musicians played, every man downed a pint and drank to friends back home, a good voyage and a safe return.

  On 5 January the weather changed for the worst. As the wind increased to storm force the two ships found themselves in the midst of ominous great waves. Both ships were heavily reefed and Rogers noted that the Duke coped well with the heavy seas, but he was dismayed to see that the Dutchess was in serious trouble. While the crew were lowering her mainyard the sail fell to leeward into the sea, dragging the ship over so that she took in a great deal of water. In danger of sinking from the weight of water in her, the crew let loose the spritsail and managed to wear ship so that she could run downwind. For a while she scudded before the wind, followed by the Duke, but at around 9 p.m., just as the officers of the Dutchess were gathering for a meal in the great cabin, a breaking sea smashed through the stern windows, ‘and hove the first lieutenant halfway between the decks, with several muskets and pistols that hung there, darting a sword that was against a bulkhead of the cabin through my man’s hammock and rug, which hung against the bulkhead of the steerage, and had not the bulkhead of the great cabin given way, all we who were there must inevitably have drowned before the water could have been vented’.7

  The ship’s yawl was stove in on the deck and Cooke thought it a miracle that no one was killed by the shutters, bulkhead and weapons which were driven through the ship with prodigious force, ‘but God in his mercy delivered us from this and many other dangers’. A few men suffered bruises and everything in the ship was soaked with icy water, including all their clothes, hammocks and bedding. While they tried to sort out the chaos below deck the Dutchess continued to run before the wind. Rogers was worried that if they continued their southerly course they would find themselves among ice because it was so bitterly cold. He was told by one of his lookouts that the Dutchess was flying an ensign in her maintopmast shrouds as a signal of distress. He continued to keep his ship in close contact with the Dutchess throughout the night and about three in the morning the weather began to moderate and he was able to get within hailing distance. He was greatly relieved to hear that they had not lost any men. The next day there was still a huge sea running but Rogers and Dampier were able to get across to the Dutchess in the yawl, ‘where we found ’em in a very orderly pickle, with all their clothes drying, the ship and rigging covered with them from the deck to the maintop’.

  Earlier in the voyage two men had been killed by falls from the rigging and now they suffered the first two losses from sickness. On 7 January John Veale, a landsman in the Duke, died after suffering swellings in his legs, and on 14 January the Dutchess buried a man who had died from scurvy. By this date they reckoned they were clear of Cape Horn. On the 10th they had obtained a latitude reading of 61 degrees 53 minutes, which they believed was the furthest anyone had yet been to the south. As they entered the Pacific and headed north an increasing number of men began to fall ill, a few showing the symptoms of scurvy and many suffering from the freezing cold.

  Scurvy was the scourge of long-distance ocean passages and would continue to be so for many years to come. It had plagued the voyages of Vasco da Gama and Magellan, and it would take a terrible toll on the sailors of Anson’s voyage of 1740–4, when nearly two-thirds of the men in the squadron died from the disease. The physical effects were graphically described by Pascoe Thomas, who was a teacher of mathematics on Anson’s flagship, the Centurion. He described how hard nodes and black spots appeared on his limbs

  till almost my legs and thighs were as black as a negro; and this accompanied with such excessive pains in the joints of the knees, ankles and toes, as I thought before I experienced them, that human nature could never have supported. It next advanced to the mouth; all my teeth were presently loose, and my gums, over-charged with extravasated blood, fell down almost quite over my teeth; this occasioned my breath to stink much.8

  The physical breakdown of the body was accompanied by extreme lethargy. Particularly depressing was the reopening of old wounds and the fracturing of bones broken years before.

  Although the cause of scurvy (a lack of vitamin C in the diet) was not established until the 1930
s, experienced seafarers were aware of the link between scurvy and diet. Some ships of the East India Company were being supplied with lemon juice in the seventeenth century and although the Royal Navy did not make a regular practice of supplying ships bound on overseas voyages with lemons and lemon juice until the 1790s, most long-distance seafarers knew that fresh fruit and vegetables were an effective cure. Woodes Rogers was certainly aware of this. When he came to write his account of his voyage he recorded, ‘The general distemper in such long runs is the scurvy; and the methods to prevent the ill effects of it are so well known, that they may easily be provided against.’9 His journal entries make it clear that he and his fellow officers knew that the sooner they reached Juan Fernández and got the sick men ashore with access to fresh food, the better would be their chance of survival.

  On 20 January they could see the distant mountain ranges of Patagonia to the east and a week later they identified the island of St Mary (Isla Santa Maria) off the coast of Chile, which was near the same latitude as Juan Fernández. Despite having Dampier on board they had some doubts about the exact position of the island, ‘the books laying ’em down so differently, and not one chart agrees with another’. By now a lot of men in the Dutchess were ill from prolonged exposure to the cold and wet, and two more had died. Turning away from the mainland of South America, the two ships headed west, aiming for the small island which lay 400 miles out across the heaving waters of the Pacific Ocean.

  4

  A Man Clothed in Goat-Skins

  They sighted the island of Juan Fernández at 7 a.m. on 31 January 1709. The jagged outlines of the mountain peaks were clearly visible on the horizon twenty miles away to the south-west. At two in the afternoon, when the island was still some twelve miles away, Thomas Dover persuaded Rogers to let him take the pinnace ashore with a boat’s crew to get fresh provisions and to look for a suitable anchorage. Later in the day, as it grew dark, the men on board the two ships were surprised to see what appeared to be a fire on the shore of the island. It was too bright to be the lights of the pinnace and they could only assume that there must be French ships at anchor nearby. Throughout the night Rogers and Courtney kept their ships ready for action. Guided by a gun, musket fire and lights in the rigging of the Duke and Dutchess, the pinnace returned in the early hours. The men in the pinnace had seen the fire when they were still some way from the shore and had decided to turn back, which was just as well because around midnight the wind had begun to blow.

  At daybreak on 1 February they found that they had sailed past the island, so they tacked and headed back again, their progress hindered by sudden gusts of wind from the shore which were so fierce that they were forced to reef their topsails. Around midday they rounded a headland and saw before them a large bay, the only place on Juan Fernández which afforded any shelter for ships. The remaining coastline presented a forbidding wall of sheer black cliffs, broken here and there by dark inlets strewn with boulders against which the ocean swell surged and foamed. There was no sign of the French ships. Rogers sent the Duke’s yawl ashore with Captain Dover, Robert Fry (first lieutenant of the Duke) and six men, all armed as a precaution.

  The wind now dropped and they had to hoist out the remaining boats and tow the ships into the bay – which in the days of Basil Ringrose and Bartholomew Sharp had been called Windy Bay, but in 1741 was renamed Cumberland Bay or Bahia Cumberland.1 A mile from the shore they anchored in fifty fathoms. When the yawl failed to return Rogers despatched the pinnace with more armed men to see what had happened. He was concerned that the Spanish might have established a garrison on the island and seized the ship’s boat. However, the pinnace soon returned, laden with crayfish and ‘with a man clothed in goat-skins, who looked wilder than the first owners of them’. It was Alexander Selkirk, who had survived a solitary existence on the island for four years and four months, following his marooning by Captain Stradling of the Cinque Ports galley.

  Selkirk had seen the ships approaching the day before and, believing them to be English, he had lit the fire on the beach. Next morning, when he saw the yawl heading for the shore, he waved a white flag and shouted to attract attention. Hearing him speak in English, the men in the yawl asked him to show them the best place for anchoring the ships and landing. He gave them directions and then ran along the shore with incredible swiftness. When the crew of the yawl stepped ashore on the shingle beach he greeted them joyfully. They invited him to come out to the ships but ‘he first enquired whether a certain officer that he knew was aboard; and hearing that he was, would rather have chosen to remain in his solitude, than come away with him, ’till informed that he did not command’.2 Dampier was clearly the officer he had in mind, even though it was Stradling who had been the cause of his extended stay on the island. Selkirk was aged twenty-eight when he had been left on the beach and was now thirty-two. His physical fitness, his practical skills as a sailor and his combative, independent nature had ensured his survival. He invited Dover and Fry to see his dwelling, but ‘the way to it being hid and uncouth, only Capt. Fry bore him company; and having with much difficulty climbed up and crept down many rocks, came at last to a pleasant spot of ground full of grass and furnished with trees, where he saw two small huts, indifferently built, the one being the lodging room, the other the kitchen’.3

  A recent archaeological excavation has almost certainly identified the spot where Selkirk lived and kept a lookout for approaching ships.4 On a stretch of level ground high above Cumberland Bay and close to a freshwater stream, the archaeologists discovered post holes which correspond with the descriptions by Woodes Rogers and Edward Cooke of Selkirk’s dwelling place. His two huts were constructed from the branches of pimento trees which were covered with long grass and lined with goat skins. In the larger hut he slept on a bed raised from the ground. ‘In the lesser hut, at some distance from the other, he dressed his victuals.’ The post holes, the nearby stream and the suitability of the location with its commanding views over the anchorage suggested that this was likely to be the right place, but the archaeologists also unearthed a fragment of a pair of navigational dividers which could only have been left by a seaman, and most likely by a sailor like Selkirk who was a ship’s master or navigation officer. We know that when he was marooned he had with him ‘his clothes and bedding; with a fire-lock, some powder, bullets, and tobacco, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, some practical pieces, and his mathematical instruments and books’.5

  In their books of the voyage both Rogers and Cooke gave detailed accounts of how Selkirk had survived his solitary existence on the island.6 Both accounts dealt with the practical details of Selkirk’s existence but Rogers’ more thoughtful version also described how he learnt to overcome his loneliness by reading, singing psalms and praying ‘so that he said he was a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before, or than, he was afraid, he should ever be again’. Rogers noted that the castaway had so forgotten his language for lack of practice that he was difficult to understand, ‘for he seemed to speak his words by halves’. In addition Rogers drew some moral lessons from Selkirk’s experiences: in particular that ‘a plain and temperate way of living conduces to the health of the body and the vigour of the mind, both of which we are apt to destroy by excess and plenty’. Characteristically Rogers decided he must put an end to such reflections which were more appropriate for a philosopher than a mariner.

  The great advantage of Juan Fernández, as previous castaways and visiting buccaneers had discovered, was that it had an equable climate and abundance of food and fresh water. The brief winter only produced a light frost, occasional hail and much rain. The summers were not excessively hot, and the windy, changeable and often damp weather would have been nothing unusual for a Scotsman. The cabbage trees (Juania australis) produced bunched clusters of whitish leaves which looked and tasted like garden cabbages. Turnips seeded by previous visitors to the island now covered several acres. A variety of fish could be caught in the bay, though Selkirk c
ould not eat them ‘for want of salt because they occasioned a looseness’, so instead he caught the crayfish (like a small lobster), which were plentiful and could be boiled or made into a broth. Above all there were the goats which roamed the mountainous island in thousands. These provided Selkirk with good meat, with bedding and with clothing when his own clothes wore out. He made a coat, breeches and a cap of goat-skin ‘which he stitched together with little thongs of the same, that he cut with his knife. He had no other needle but a nail; and when his knife wore to the back, he made others as well as he could of some iron hoops that were left ashore, which he beat thin and ground upon stones.’7

  There were no venomous or savage creatures on the island but Selkirk was initially plagued by the rats which had come ashore from ships and multiplied. They would gnaw his feet and clothes while he slept, until he tamed the equally numerous cats which lay in large numbers around his dwelling and kept the rats at bay. Apart from the loneliness and melancholy which afflicted him for the first eight months, his main fear was being discovered by the Spanish because he believed they would murder him or make a slave of him and send him to the silver mines. He had seen several Spanish ships pass by but only two had dropped anchor and sent men ashore. On one of these occasions the Spaniards had seen him, shot at him and chased him into the woods. He had outstripped them, climbed to the top of a tree and, although they urinated at the foot of the tree, they failed to see him, and after killing several goats they returned to their ship.