Anson's Voyage Round the World: The Text Reduced

In 1740, Commodore George Anson led a squadron of eight ships out of Portsmouth on what would become one of the most catastrophic and consequential voyages in British naval history. This is the account written by his chaplain, Richard Walter, drawing on Anson's own papers, a document that helped forge the legend of the man who would become the Father of the Navy. The expedition was meant to harass Spanish possessions in the Pacific. What they found instead was death: Cape Horn's impossible weather, scurvy wiping out crews by the hundreds, and enemy ships waiting in the void. When the shattered fleet finally returned, years later, with only a handful of vessels and roughly five hundred men from an original eighteen hundred, something remarkable had been accomplished. This edition trims the original 1748 masterpiece by half while preserving the vivid particulars that made it a cornerstone of sea literature: the terror, the endurance, the strange fortune that favouring Providence bestows upon determined men.