THE "GLOUCESTER" ABANDONED. 57 



When the packages, however, were more carefully examined on board the Gloucester, 

 a considerable quantity of doubloons and dollars, to the amount of near 12,000, was 

 discovered concealed among the cotton. Before leaving the South American coast, Anson 

 sent fifty-nine prisoners, in two well-equipped launches taken from his prizes, to Acapulco, 

 where they arrived safely, and spoke highly of the treatment they had received. 



Anson was now on his way to the China Seas, to intercept, if possible, the Manilla 

 galleon, of which he had received some tidings. On the voyage it became necessary to 

 abandon the Gloucester. Besides the loss of masts, which were literally rotted out of her, 

 she was tumbling to pieces from sheer rottenness ; and when her captain reported on her 

 condition, she had seven feet of water in the hold, although his officers and men had been 

 kept constantly at the pumps for the past twenty-four hours. Her crew had become 

 greatly reduced in numbers, and out of her total complement of ninety-seven, officers 

 included, only sixteen men and eleven boys were capable of keeping the deck. The 

 removal of the Gloucestefs people, and such stores as could most easily be taken, occupied 

 two days. It was with difficulty that the prize-money taken in the South Seas was 

 secured ; the prize goods were necessarily abandoned. " Their sick men, amounting to 

 nearly seventy, were conveyed into the boats with as much care as the circumstances of that 

 time would permit ; but three or four of them expired as they were hoisting them into 

 the Centurion" The Gloucester was set on fire in the evening, but did not blow up till 

 six o'clock the following morning. 



At Tinian, one of the Ladrone Islands, Anson stopped some time, refreshing his 

 worn-out crew, and strengthening the ship. The island abounded in cattle, hogs, and 

 poultry, running wild ; in oranges, limes, lemons, cocoa-nuts, and bread-fruit. " The 

 country did by no means resemble that of an uninhabited and uncultivated place ; but had 

 much more the air of a magnificent plantation, where large lawns and stately woods 

 had been laid out together with great skill, and where the whole had been so artfully 

 combined, and so judiciously adapted to the slopes of the hills and the inequalities of the 

 ground, as to produce a most striking effect, and to do honour to the invention of 

 the contriver." These compliments to Nature may often be paralleled in writers of the 

 last century. When they had dropped anchor, such was the weakness of the crew that 

 it took them five hours to furl their sails. " All the hands we could muster capable of 

 standing at a gun," says the narrator, " amounted to no more than seventy-one, most 

 of whom, too, were incapable of duty, except on the greatest emergencies. This, 

 inconsiderable as it may appear, was the whole force we could collect in our present 

 enfeebled condition from the united crews of the Centurion, the Gloucester, and the Tryal, 

 which, when we departed from England, consisted of near a thousand hands." Some 

 Indians ashore fled when they landed, leaving their huts, one of which, used as a large 

 storehouse, was converted into a hospital for the sick, one hundred and twenty-eight in 

 number. Numbers of these were so helpless that they had to be carried from the boats, 

 the commodore assisting, as he had before at Juan Fernandez, and the officers following 

 suit. The poor invalids soon felt the benefit of the abundant fresh fruits and water; and 

 although twenty-one were buried in the first and succeeding day, they did not lose above 

 ten more during the two months of their stay at the island. 

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