30 NOVEMBER 1774
Dearest Elizabeth,
Resolution has made great progress these past three weeks, aided by favourable westerlies and a following sea. During one four-day period, for each 24 hours we logged between 140 and 183 miles, the latter figure being an exceptional distance. This course has taken us from New Zealand almost to the coast of South America. What a fine ship Resolution has proved to be!
It is now my intention to steer for the western entrance to the Straits of Magellan and sail down and chart the western and southern coasts of Tierra del Fuego. If this ambition is successful, it will be of more advantage to navigation than anything I could expect to achieve in a higher latitude. We will then pass through the Strait le Maire, a pathway to the South Atlantic which I well remember from Endeavour’s voyage (although sailing in the opposite direction).
I have thus done with the South Pacific Ocean and have proven beyond all doubt that no landmass exists in its high latitudes. I flatter myself that no one can think that I have left it unexplored, or that more could have been done in one voyage towards obtaining that end than has been done in this. By the New Year, barring any mishap, we should be in the South Atlantic and hence truly homeward bound. But first there is further exploring in the high latitudes of that vast ocean, pursuing lands described but of course never visited by that great Scotch fraudster, Alexander Dalrymple. Such lands as may lie deep in the South Atlantic I believe will be mere fragments, and of a bleak and inhospitable nature. Although it is my duty to chart such scraps, it is also my anticipation that they will amount to little.
I am still wracked with worry over the fate of Furneaux and Adventure. Whether the vessel foundered off Cape Palliser, or was attacked by Maoris, or simply returned home, we have no way of knowing. Furneaux’s failure to leave a message stating his intentions constitutes a dereliction of duty, I believe. It would have been so simple an act, yet he still did not think to do so, causing us endless anxieties regarding Adventure’s fate.
From the South Atlantic we will bear north bound for Cape Town, the first outpost of civilisation we will have visited since we were last in that very colony, in October 1772. A full two years and much hard sailing ago. I hope against hope that waiting in Cape Town will be news from you, dearest Beth, since I did advise you that our return course would take us back to Southern Africa. Cape Town is a port-of-call whose facilities are extensive, in contrast to the pestilent cesspool that is Batavia, which it was Endeavour’s misfortune to experience on my earlier voyage. How I now regret that we did not return to England via Cape Horn and Cape Town in 1771. That course may well have saved lives.
For you and our three sons, Christmas is approaching. You will doubtless be savouring the autumn days in London, with the oaks, elms and chestnuts on the common clinging to their last leaves, and the morning mists drifting on the river. I picture in my mind James and Nathaniel playing conkers and roasting chestnuts, two of my favourite autumn pastimes when I was a boy in Great Ayton. I am greatly looking forward to taking you all to Yorkshire after my return. There I will introduce our boys to Christiana, Margaret and my father, and show James, Nathaniel and George my rural haunts. I will climb Roseberry Topping with them, and show them the views of the Tees Valley. And I will take them to Whitby, where they can meet my good friends, the Walkers.
Last week marked my 46th birthday, an advanced age for a Royal Navy mariner. The advent of that date reminded me not only of my own mortality, but the fact that I have missed so much of my family’s life. My love of the sea and determination to discover, explore and chart new lands cannot conceal the fact that for these past 20 years I have neglected those other, equally vital considerations. There is the distressing fact too, that my health has suffered during this voyage, and continues to give me concern. The bilious colic and the constipation, although intermittent, have not left me. I often sleep poorly.
Consequently, I have been giving serious thought to my life subsequent to this voyage, and have come to an individual decision that, while wishing to remain in the King’s Navy as one of its most loyal servants, I will seek some shore-based service which will permit me to live at home. There I will relish the company of you and our children, while writing a full and honest account of the two great voyages I have made. There can be no more global voyaging for me. I have done all that I was instructed to do, and to the best of my ability. It is my hope that the Navy will provide me with a pension which will support me in this ambition. Naturally, I have spoken of this to no one. For the time being my energies must go into the satisfactory culmination of this circumnavigation, returning Resolution to England with no further loss of life.
Thereafter, it is my intention that my life will be shared with you and our children, at Assembly Row. Until then, dearest, I am, Your loving husband, James
On 17 December they sighted Cape Desado, on Desolation Island, then proceeded south-east. The South American coast here was a maze of small high islands, and James kept Resolution some distance from the coast until a few days before Christmas, when they moved closer to the shore of Tierra del Fuego. It appeared bleak and threatening, with spikes of jagged rock soaring from the sea. James was chary of landing anywhere here. But mindful of the long sweep of ocean they had just endured and the need for rest and provisioning, he decided that they should seek a haven somewhere on this coast, however inhospitable it appeared. When they espied a narrow passage between two rock towers, James ordered the helmsmen to enter it. Minutes later the wind fell away, leaving them at the mercy of a powerful current.
‘Leadsman! A sounding!’ James shouted from the quarterdeck. Resolution was drifting helplessly. From around the decks, the crew stared at the surrounding rocks fearfully. This was a terrible shore on which to end their lives.
The leadsman’s call came: ‘One hundred and seventy fathoms!’
Impossible to anchor at such a depth. James’s response was immediate. ‘Hoist out the boats!’
The 16 oarsmen pulled, for all their worth, and Resolution slowly followed the towing boats, just bettering the current. Two hours later, off the starboard bow, they spied a sandy cove. As night began to fall, the ship was dragged slowly towards it. Off the cove the leadsman called a sandy bottom at 30 fathoms. Resolution’s kedge anchor and a hawser were carried out, holding the ship at a temporary anchorage. The next day the boats were put out and found a more suitable one, off a shingle beach, overlooked by a wooded valley. A clear stream flowed through the valley, in which a colony of geese had made their home, so the location offered the Resolutions all they sought: fresh meat, water and wood. Wales measured the bay’s co-ordinates as 55 degrees 25 minutes south and 69 degrees 40 minutes west.
Two days before Christmas, late in the evening, the marine sentry showed midshipman Vancouver into the Great Cabin. The young man was visibly upset. Getting to his feet, James said, ‘What is it?’
Vancouver swallowed. ‘It’s Wedgeborough, sir. He became drunk, went to the head, and hasn’t returned. We fear that he’s fallen overboard and drowned, sir.’
James cursed under his breath. Wedgeborough was a sot. He had fallen overboard while drunk before, off Erromanga, and had had to be rescued. He had recklessly killed a man on Tanna. And now he was drowned. Then he felt a surge of sorrow. Yes, Wedgeborough might have been an irresponsible fool, but he didn’t deserve to die like this, so far from home. He was the expedition’s fourth fatality. But again, James consoled himself, none had died from the scurvy. He clapped a comforting hand on Vancouver’s shoulder.
CHRISTMAS EVE 1774
The day had been warm and still, the daylight hours long. The shore party which James led had shot more than 60 of the big geese at point-blank range, the creatures having no fear of firearms. ‘Not so much sitting ducks as sitting geese,’ Clerke observed wryly. The birds were brought back to the ship, where they were handed in to the galley to be prepared for next day’s Christmas dinner.
On Christmas Eve a party of Fuegans came alongside the ship in a canoe and indicated that they wished to come aboard. The crew stared in astonishment as the male natives climbed up onto the deck, leaving their women and infants in the canoes. The men were short, squat and bow-legged, and all walked awkwardly, their toes turning inwards. They looked malnourished, shivered from the cold, and wore only pieces of sealskin over their shoulders.
As they walked about the deck, some of the sailors held their noses. The Fuegans’ bodies were smeared with dirt mixed with seal fat which had turned rancid. Their long hair was thick with the same substances. Their leader, a hunched fellow with long matted hair, pointed to himself and said, ‘Yamesk-una.’ He carried a harpoon made of bone.
From the quarterdeck, Johann Forster stared at the group, then turned away in revulsion. ‘They are simian,’ he declared. ‘They lack only tails, or else I should immediately classify them as members of the monkey tribe.’
‘Cheerful little people, nevertheless,’ said Clerke.
They were looking around, grinning at the crew, touching the mast and rails in wonder. Their leader looked up at James and grinned, showing several missing teeth.
James nodded in agreement with Clerke’s summation. ‘Yes, though it would seem they have little to be cheerful about.’ He shook his head. ‘Now is their summer. Imagine what it is like in this land in winter. Wretched.’
He walked down onto the main deck and greeted them. ‘Welcome aboard, gentlemen.’ He gestured towards the companionway. ‘I invite you to join me in the Great Cabin.’
Forster looked at James in disbelief. ‘You are allowing these creatures to go below?’
James gave him a frosty look. ‘Certainly. As we are guests in their land, so we are obliged by the laws of hospitality to return the favour.’ He turned and winked at Clerke. ‘I shall make a point of first showing them your cabin, Forster.’ As he led the natives towards the companionway, Forster’s expression became apoplectic.
Yet within the confines of the Great Cabin, even James found the Fuegans’ bodily stench intolerable. He quickly pressed upon the leader three knives and several medallions, then ushered the group back up to the deck. They climbed down and joined their women and children in the canoes, then paddled away, some waving goodbye delightedly.
Below decks, the Christmas Eve drinking began, James having sanctioned the broaching of their very last cask of Madeira and another of port wine. While it was still twilight, riotous laughter, fiddler’s music and the skirl of bagpipes began to ring through the ship, while in the Great Cabin the officers and gentlemen sipped their port and reminisced about Christmases past. James recounted the visit he and Elizabeth had made to Great Ayton, three years earlier, to introduce her to his family; Pickersgill recalled his boyhood white Christmases in West Tansfield, also in Yorkshire. Clerke spoke of his snowbound Christmases on the family farm in Essex. There was acclamation in the cabin when James announced that he was naming this isolated anchorage Christmas Sound.
The port continued to flow, along with more reminiscences. Only Johann Forster failed to join in the festivities. Declining to drink, he became morose and silent. Attempting to jolly him along, Clerke put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Forster, what is it? What’s wrong?’
Inclining his head towards the cabin wall, the naturalist scowled. ‘Listen to that drunken carry-on. Don’t they realise that we are on the eve of our Lord’s birthday? That this is a sacred occasion?’
Clerke looked at the ceiling and sighed; the others shook their heads. Forster stood up. ‘I am going to bed,’ he said, patting his wig and giving the others his most disagreeable look. ‘Although I do not expect to get much sleep.’ He attempted a smile. ‘Merry Christmas to you all.’
On Christmas morning, bosun Gray reported that many of the crew were still inebriated and unable to carry out their duties. Angry at this over-indulgence, James ordered Gray to put the culprits ashore and leave them there until they became sober. It took them a whole day to do so and their heads still ached when they returned, shame-faced, to the ship.
They departed the fragmented coast on 28 December, now well provisioned and overlooked by the snow-capped alps of Tierra del Fuego’s interior. Resolution rounded Cape Horn a day later, and thereafter they took a north-east course for Staten Island, named by Dutchmen le Maire and Schouten in 1615.
On the last day of 1774 they anchored off a smaller, rocky but level island on the east coast of Staten, a home for innumerable penguins, sea lions and fur seals. The pinnace and launch were hoisted and launched, filled with armed men and rowed ashore.
The slaughter began immediately. Able seamen, midshipmen, marines and officers all waded into the colony, killing everything they encountered: penguins, sea lions, seals. Mindful of the need to conserve powder and ball, the assailants killed with their other weapons: Tongan clubs, Marquesan clubs, swords, bayonets, axes and knives. The cumbersome sea lions bellowed and trumpeted as they were stabbed, the seals and their babies shrieked as they were clubbed. From the air above, hundreds of gulls shat on the killers, but while the smell was unpleasant, it did not stop them. The orgy continued unabated. Hacking, stabbing, slashing, the Resolutions moved among the hapless creatures in a frenzy of killing. It was as if, having been liberated from their confinement on the ship, they would celebrate their release with uncontrollable bloodlust. Those with clubs moved about, providing the coup de grace for the wounded, crying animals. The air reeked with the smell of death and shit; blood poured from the stabbed and hacked creatures and ran down the crevices in the rocks and into the sea, turning the water crimson.
At last they stopped, exhausted and bloodied, grinning at each other with satisfaction at a job well done. The island was covered in corpses of all sizes, baby seals, adult seals, corpulent sea lions, little penguins. Then the processing began. The sea lions were dismembered on shore for their blubber, which was stuffed into puncheons and taken aboard for rendering into oil for heating and the lamps. The carcasses of the seals and penguins were tossed into the boats, carried out to the ship and processed on the deck. Resolution became an abattoir, her decks slippery with gore and blood, while squadrons of screaming skuas and gulls flew lower and lower then dived greedily on the viscera that was tossed overboard.
When the gutting and dismembering was over, the men returned to the island and threw themselves into the sea, ripping off their bloodied clothing, scrubbing it clean with handfuls of sand, then spreading it out on the rocks to dry. Then, clean and refreshed, they returned to the ship to celebrate the New Year.
The seal and penguin meat was salted, packed into barrels and stowed. The Resolutions would not go hungry during the voyage that lay ahead of them.