Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.
'God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends that plague thee thus!
Why lookst thou so?' With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS!
4
A voyage round the world could be a worse experience than
even Coleridge's imagination could conceive. And this was so, not
primarily because of the hazards of tempest or concealed reef (al-
though these continued to claim countless lives) but because two
problems remained to be solved - scurvy and longitude. On a diet
of biscuit and salt meat sailors could not avoid suffering the effects
of vitamin deficiency after about four weeks. And the calculation of
westing and easting were so complex and inaccurate that a captain
could not know his position in badly-charted seas. But the eight-
eenth century
had
dawned - the century that later historians would
call the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The spirit of enquiry
would drive men of science and men of the sea to seek and eventu-
ally find answers to these problems. Yet, many were the tragic deaths
and great the suffering among mariners before ships could find their
way round the world with confidence and survive long spells at sea
without the inevitability of disease.
One of the many English lads who must have thrilled to read
the broadsheets announcing Woodes Rogers's return in 1711 was
a fourteen-year-old Staffordshire boy called George Anson. Within
weeks this 'sea-struck' young man with no family naval connections
had engaged himself as a volunteer to Captain Chamberlen aboard
HMS
Ruby.
Thus began a long and extremely distinguished naval ca-
reer. Anson served throughout a quarter of a century of peace and
war and, by 1739, had reached the rank of commodore. That was the
year he was appointed to command an expedition which lifted him
