Anson's Voyage Round the World

The circumnavigation of 1740–44: eight ships sail against the Spanish Pacific, one comes home, and the treasure galleon is taken off the Philippines after three years of scurvy and shipwreck. The chaplain Richard Walter compiled the narrative from Anson's own papers; it was the most read voyage book of the eighteenth century and drove the reform of naval diet. The loss of Wager off Patagonia is here, before the mutineers got home to tell their side. Fifty-nine plates of open water, wreck and harbor, from The Ninth Wave to The Shipwreck, give the voyage its visual weather across two centuries of marine painting by Turner and Aivazovsky.