Before the tender sailed for the Downs, Anson discovered that the dockyard men had scamped their work in the _Centurion_. They had supplied her with a defective foremast "Not fitt for Sarves." High up on the mast was "a rotten Nott eleven inches deep," a danger to spar and ship together. The dockyard officials, who had probably pocketed the money for a good spar, swore that the Nott only "wants a Plugg drove in" to be perfection. Dockyard men at this time and for many years afterwards deserved to be suspended both from their duties and by their necks. Soon after the wrangle over the spar, there was a wrangle about the _Gloucester's_ beef. Forty-two out of her seventy-two puncheons of beef were found to be stinking. With some doubts as to what would happen in the leaf if such things happened in the bud, Anson got his squadron to sea. Early in the voyage his master "shoved" his boatswain while he was knotting a cable, and the boatswain complained. "The Boatswain," says the letter, "is very often Drunk and incapable of his Duty." Later in the voyage, when many hundreds had died, Mr. Cheney, who hit Mr. McKie, became boatswain in his stead. The squadron sailed from England on September 18, 1740, with six ships of war manned by 1872 seamen and marines, twenty-four of whom were sick. At Madeira, on November 4, after less than seven weeks at sea, there were 122 sick, and fourteen had been buried. Less than eleven weeks later, at St. Catherine's in Brazil, there were 450 sick, and 160 had been buried. From this time until what was left of the squadron reached Juan Fernandez, sickness and death took continual toll. It is shocking to see the _Centurion's_ muster lists slowly decreasing, by one or two a week, till she was up to the Horn, then dropping six, ten, twenty, or twenty-four a week, as the scurvy and the frost {xvi} took hold. Few but the young survived. What that passage of the Horn was like may be read here at length; but perhaps nothing in this book is so eloquent of human misery as the following entries from Anson's private record:-- "1741. 8 May.--Heavy Flaws and dangerous Gusts, expecting every Moment to have my masts Carry'd away, having very little succor, from the standing rigging, every Shroud knotted, and not men able to keep the deck sufficient to take in a Topsail, all being violently afflicted with the Scurvy, and every day lessening our Number by six eight and Ten. "1741. 1st Sept.--I mustered my Ship's Company, the number of Men I brought out of England, being Five hundred, are now reduced by Mortality to Two hundred and Thirteen, and many of them in a weak and Low condition." Nothing in any of the records is so eloquent as the remark in Pascoe Thomas's account of the voyage:-- "I have seen 4 or 5 dead Bodies at a time, some sown up in their Hammocks and others not, washing about the Decks, for Want of Help to bury them in the Sea."