Byron's Narrative of the Loss of the Wager: With an account of the great distresses suffered by himself and his companions on the coast of Patagonia from the year 1740 till their arrival in England 1746Byron, John
History
Byron's Narrative of the Loss of the Wager: With an account of the great distresses suffered by himself and his companions on the coast of Patagonia from the year 1740 till their arrival in England 1746
Byron, John
Chiloé (Chile); Patagonia (Argentina and Chile); Wager (Ship)
In this miserable hovel, one of our company, a lieutenant of invalids,
died this night; and of those who for want of room took shelter under
a great tree, which stood them in very little stead, two more perished
by the severity of that cold and rainy night. In the morning, the calls
of hunger, which had been hitherto suppressed by our attention to more
immediate dangers and difficulties, were now become too importunate to
be resisted. We had most of us fasted eight and forty hours, some more;
it was time, therefore, to make inquiry among ourselves what store of
sustenance had been brought from the wreck by the providence of some,
and what could be procured on the island by the industry of others:
but the produce of the one amounted to no more than two or three
pounds of biscuit dust reserved in a bag; and all the success of those
who ventured abroad, the weather being still exceedingly bad, was to
kill one sea-gull, and pick some wild cellery. These, therefore, were
immediately put into a pot, with the addition of a large quantity of
water, and made into a kind of soup, of which each partook as far as
it would go; but we had no sooner thrown this down than we were seized
with the most painful sickness at our stomachs, violent reachings,
swoonings, and other symptoms of being poisoned. This was imputed to
various causes, but in general to the herbs we made use of, in the
nature and quality of which we fancied ourselves mistaken; but a little
further inquiry let us into the real occasion of it, which was no other
than this: the biscuit dust was the sweepings of the bread-room, but
the bag in which they were put had been a tobacco bag; the contents
of which not being entirely taken out, what remained mixed with the
biscuit-dust, and proved a strong emetic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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