‘ENOUGH TO DESTROY A MAN’ - A Brief History of the Circumnavigators - page 116

5
'ENOUGH TO DESTROY A MAN'
For many years privateers and pirates continued to be the most
persistent circumnavigators. Driven by the basest human motives -
greed, violence and the desire to shake themselves free of society's
restraints - they scavenged the seven seas in single ships or packs
and, in doing so, made themselves masters of the oceans. But it was
not much of a life; certainly it lacked any of the romance with which
later writers were to invest voyages 'under the skull and crossbones'.
Rather did it qualify for Hobbes' definition of the existence of primit-
ive savages:
No arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual
fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish and short. 1
Nothing illustrates more clearly than the list 2 opposite the var-
ied and terrible risks that any seaman ran who signed on with a pri-
vateer. It is a catalogue prepared for the Admiralty showing the fate of
83 men out of a crew of 115 who sailed in the Speedwell in the years
1719-1722.
The captain of the Speedwell was George Shelvocke, as shifty a
man as ever trod upon neat's leather. He was a naval officer of some
thirty years' experience who was down on his luck when it was pro-
posed that he might take command of the Speedwell in an expedition
under the leadership of Captain John Clipperton in the Success. Nat-
urally, he accepted but he had no intention of carrying out the in-
structions of the little group of idle gentlemen and money-grubbing
traders promoting the enterprise. For one thing he was not prepared