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 _Gloucester’s_ 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