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by
David Grann
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January 24 - February 24, 2025
The philosophers Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu were influenced by reports of the expedition, and so, later, were Charles Darwin and two of the great novelists of the sea, Herman Melville and Patrick O’Brian.
The philosophers Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu were influenced by reports of the expedition, and so, later, were Charles Darwin and two of the great novelists of the sea, Herman Melville and Patrick O’Brian.
As Samuel Johnson once observed, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”
The conflict was the result of the endless jockeying among the European powers to expand their empires. They each vied to conquer or control ever larger swaths of the earth, so that they could exploit and monopolize other nations’ valuable natural resources and trade markets. In the process, they subjugated and destroyed innumerable indigenous peoples, justifying their ruthless self-interest—including the reliance on the ever-expanding Atlantic slave trade—by claiming that they were somehow spreading “civilization” to the benighted realms of the earth. Spain had long been the dominant empire
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Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.
Teredo navalis—a reddish shipworm, which can grow longer than a foot—ate through hulls. (Columbus lost two ships to these creatures during his fourth voyage to the West Indies.)
each vessel had to be loaded with tons of provisions, including some forty miles of rope, more than fifteen thousand square feet of sails, and a farm’s worth of livestock—chickens, pigs, goats, and cattle. (It could be fiercely difficult to get such animals onboard: steers “do not like the water,”
During the age of sail, when wind-powered vessels were the only bridge across the vast oceans, nautical language was so pervasive that it was adopted by those on terra firma. To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the
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(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)
The first medical textbook for sea surgeons, published in 1617, warned that plagues were God’s way of cutting “sinners from off the Earth.”
(As his book on Christianity asked, “How shall thy patience be crowned, if no adversity happen unto thee?”)
But Cheap and his colleagues had no such miraculous device. They were forced instead to rely on “dead reckoning”—a process using a sandglass to estimate time, and a knotted line dropped in the sea to approximate the ship’s speed. The method, which also incorporated intuition about the effects of winds and currents, amounted to informed guesswork and a leap of faith. Too often for a commander, as Sobel put it, “the technique of dead reckoning marked him for a dead man.”
Most likely, they were suffering from what is now known as refeeding syndrome, in which a starved person, after suddenly ingesting large quantities of food, can go into shock, and even die. (Scientists later noticed this syndrome when it befell prisoners released from concentration camps after World War II.)
Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.
