Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
executed (some would say 'murdered') was a member of Hatton's
household.
The fleet, reduced to three ships, because the
Swan
and the
Christopher
had been scuttled, and the
Mary
broken up for parts at
St Julian's Bay, set sail on 17 August. Six days later they lay at an-
chor within the Straits of Magellan. They had an easy passage and
emerged, on 6 September, into what Magellan had called
Mar Paci-
fico.
But for these first Englishmen the ocean failed to live up to its
name. They ran straight into a north-westerly gale, which almost put
an abrupt and tragic end to the voyage:
The day being come the sight of sun and land was taken from
us so that there followed as it were a palpable darkness by the space
of 56 days without the sight of sun, moon or star as . . . we thus . . .
continued without hope at the pleasure of God in the violent force of
the wind's intolerable working of the wrathful seas and the grisely be-
holding (sometimes) of the cragged rocks and fearful height, and mon-
strous mountains being to us a lee shore where into we were continu-
ally drawn by the winds and carried by the mountain-like billows of
the sea . . . If at any time we had a little opportunity to seek some har-
bour for refuge to come to anchor and rest till God in mercy might
. . . give us more safe sailing at the seas, such was the malice of the
mountains that they seemed to agree together in one consent and join
their forces together to work our overthrow and to consume us, so
that every mountain sent down upon us their several intolerable winds
with that horror that they made the bottom of the seas to be dry land
where we anchored, sending us headlong upon the tops of mounting
and swelling waves of the seas over the rocks, the sight whereof at our
going in was as fearful as death
.
2
On the morning of 30 September the little
Marigold
foundered.
On the decks of the other vessels the cries of men threshing around
