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)
Next day, the weather proving very bad, all hands went ashore to
procure some sustenance, except two in each boat, which were left as
boat-keepers; this office we took by turns; and it was now my lot to be
upon this duty with another man. The yawl lay within us at a grapnel;
in the night it blew very hard, and a great sea tumbled in upon the
shore; but being extremely fatigued, we in the boats went to sleep,
notwithstanding, however, I was at last awakened by the uncommon motion
of the boat, and the roaring of the breakers every where about us. At
the same time I heard a shrieking, like to that of persons in distress;
I looked out, and saw the yawl canted bottom upwards by a sea, and
soon afterwards disappeared. One of our men, whose name was William
Rose, a quarter-master, was drowned; the other was thrown ashore by
the surf, with his head buried in the sand; but by the immediate
assistance of the people on shore, was saved. As for us in the barge,
we expected the same fate every moment; for the sea broke a long way
without us. However we got her head to it, and hove up our grapnel, or
should rather say kellick, which we had made to serve in the room of
our grapnel, hove overboard some time before, to lighten the boat. By
this means we used our utmost efforts to pull her without the breakers
some way, and then let go our kellick again. Here we lay all the next
day, in a great sea, not knowing what would be our fate. To add to our
mortification, we could see our companions in tolerable plight ashore,
eating seal, while we were starving with hunger and cold. For this
month past, we had not known what it was to have a dry thread about us.
The next day being something more moderate, we ventured in with the
barge, as near as we could to the shore, and our companions threw us
some seal's liver; which having eat greedily, we were seized with
excessive sickness, which affected us so much, that our skin peeled off
from head to foot.
Whilst the people were on shore here, Mr. Hamilton met with a large
seal, or sea-lion, and fired a brace of balls into him, upon which the
animal turned upon him open-mouthed; but presently fixing his bayonet,
he thrust it down its throat, with a good part of the barrel of the
gun, which the creature bit in two seemingly with as much ease as if it
had been a twig. Notwithstanding the wounds it received, it eluded all
farther efforts to kill it, and got clear off.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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