‘ENOUGH TO DESTROY A MAN’ - A Brief History of the Circumnavigators - page 132

nearly two-thirds of her men being dead but very few of the rest
able to perform their duty.' 10 Rats were everywhere, feeding on the
corpses and even gnawing toes and fingers from the sick. The
Gloucester's crew was so weak that, although they had brought their
ship within a couple of miles of the anchorage, they could not pre-
vent her being carried offshore by winds and current. It took them
another six days to wear back into the harbour.
The pleasant island which had succoured Alexander Selkirk for
four years now restored the health and spirits of such of Anson's
men as had been tough enough or lucky enough to survive thus far.
Philip Saumarez was anxious to see the island which had already
gained a place in the mythology of the sea:
On the first appearance, [he recorded] strangers would natur-
ally conclude it to be a barren inhospitable island affording a pro-
spect of broken inaccessible mountains and rocky precipices, but on
nearer approach are easily reconciled to it when surprised with the
discovery of trees and verdure with which it is clothed, with sever-
al streams of water discharging themselves from below into the seas
and forming agreeable cascades in their falls . . .
For the desperate crewmen the principal attraction of Juan
Fernandez was fresh food:
We found great relief from our feeding on fish which this bay is
plentiful stored with in great variety. There are cod of prodigious size,
cavallies, groupers, large bream, silver fishes, congers, albacores with
many others, and a black fish, somewhat resembling a carp, called by
our predecessors a 'chimney sweeper', with great quantities of big fish
of a voracious kind which often interrupted our fishing, it being ob-
servable that no fish would approach the baits while they were near to
these, and I may also add sharks of an enormous largeness which often