was by any means supplied, and all that was then done was extremely short of his necessities and expectation. For Admiral Balchen, who succeeded to the command at Spithead, after Sir John Norris had sailed to the westward, instead of three hundred able sailors, which Mr. Anson wanted of his complement, ordered on board the squadron a hundred and seventy men only; of which thirty-two were from the hospital and sick quarter, thirty-seven from the _Salisbury_, with three officers of Colonel Lowther's regiment, and ninety-eight marines, and these were all that were ever granted to make up the forementioned deficiency. But the commodore's mortification did not end here. It has been already observed that it was at first intended that Colonel Bland's regiment, and three independent companies of a hundred men each, should embark as land-forces on board the squadron. But this disposition was now changed, and all the land-forces that were to be allowed were five hundred invalids to be collected from the out-pensioners of Chelsea College. As these out-pensioners consist of soldiers who from their age, wounds, or other infirmities, are incapable of service in marching regiments, Mr. Anson was greatly chagrined at having such a decrepid detachment allotted him; for he was fully persuaded that the greatest part of them would perish long before they arrived at the scene of action, since the delays he had already encountered necessarily confined his passage round Cape Horn to the most rigorous season of the year. Sir Charles Wager too joined in opinion with the commodore, that invalids were no ways proper for this service, and sollicited strenuously to have them exchanged: but he was told that persons who were supposed to be better judges of soldiers than he or Mr. Anson, thought them the properest men that could be employed on this occasion. And upon this determination they were ordered on board the squadron on the 5th of August; but instead of five hundred, there came on board no more than two hundred and fifty-nine; for all those who had limbs and strength to walk out of Portsmouth deserted, leaving behind {16} them only such as were literally invalids, most of them being sixty years of age, and some of them upwards of seventy. Indeed it is difficult to conceive a more moving scene than the embarkation of these unhappy veterans: they were themselves extremely averse to the service they were engaged in, and fully apprised of all the disasters they were afterwards exposed to; the apprehensions of which were strongly marked by the concern that appeared in their countenances, which was mixed with no small degree of indignation, to be thus hurried from their repose into a fatiguing employ, to which neither the strength of their bodies, nor the vigour of their minds, were any ways proportioned, and where, without seeing the face of an enemy, or in the least promoting the success of the enterprize, they would, in all probability,