Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Had Byron made a serious attempt to carry out his instructions,
his ships, which left Portsmouth on 2 July, would have been at sea for
several years. In fact, Byron's expedition entered the record books
as the fastest circumnavigation so far achieved. He was back in Eng-
land after only twenty-two months, having made no attempt to ex-
plore the South Atlantic, visit the coast of California or search for the
North-West Passage, and having crossed the Pacific in a hundred and
thirty days. Two factors seem to have influenced him in treating his
orders so cavalierly: he was concerned for the health of his crew and
he wanted to rediscover the Solomon Islands.
Byron was a humanitarian and popular with his crews but, even
had he not been, efficiency would have demanded that he took every
precaution to prevent his sailors falling sick. The nightmare memory
of weak, dying men lashed into action to force the
Wager
through
the storms of Cape Horn must have been vivid to him even after
a quarter of a century. Little though he understood the causes of
scurvy and fever, he took every precaution to avoid them. Foremost
among those precautions was the constant provision of fresh food
and water. The equipment the
Dolphin
took on board at Woolwich
included a machine for sweetening 'stale and noxious water'. This
apparatus, invented by a Lieutenant Orsbridge, apparently worked
by forcing air through the water and, when it was used during the
commended by the Admiralty was 'portable soup', a kind of glutin-
ous cake made up of meat extract which, when boiled up with peas
and legumes provided a tolerably palatable substance which, if it
had little nutritional value, at least was a welcome change from salt
meat and weavily biscuit. The ships set out with bulging larders and
the usual complement of penned animals for slaughter. They put into
Rio de Janeiro for restocking and subsequently made landfalls as of-
ten as possible, where they experimented with whatever foodstuffs
were available. Birds, fish, wild pig, berries, grasses, fruit - it was all
