look closer

Centurion under the red ensign, her gun crews drilled sharp by a voyage that killed most of the men who started it.

The plan Commodore George Anson sailed with in 1740 was already optimistic, and the sea edited it hard: six ships and about 1,900 men to raid Spain's Pacific coast, in wartime, around Cape Horn, in the wrong season. The Horn wrecked or turned back half the squadron; scurvy did the real work. The disease killed over 1,300 of Anson's people in the first two years, more than any enemy could have, and it killed them horribly, old wounds reopening, gums closing over teeth, men dying of effort at the pumps. By the time the flagship Centurion limped across the Pacific to the coast of China, she was the expedition: one ship, and a crew so thin that officers stood watches as topmen. What kept them aboard was the galleon. Once a year Spain sent a ship from Acapulco to Manila carrying the silver of the American mines to buy the silk and porcelain of Asia: the richest single cargo that moved on any ocean, and every sailor in Europe knew it. On 20 June 1743, off Cape Espiritu Santo in the Philippines, the Centurion found her: the Nuestra Señora de Covadonga, lower in the water than a warship should be, because she was not primarily a warship. The fight lasted about 90 minutes. Anson's gun crews, drilled through the long crossing into something the galleon had never met, fired three broadsides to her one; 67 Spanish dead against a handful of British, and the colors came down with the year's treasure underneath them: 1,313,843 pieces of eight, counted twice. Anson came home in 1744 by finishing the circumnavigation, and London got the spectacle it loves best: the silver paraded through the City to the Tower in a convoy of 32 wagons. His purse from the prize made him one of the richest officers in the navy's history; the published account of the voyage became the century's great sea bestseller; and the man himself rose to First Lord of the Admiralty, where he spent his credit rebuilding the institution that had nearly killed him: proper uniforms, the Marines, the standing Western Squadron, the culture of relentless drill that his gun crews had improvised off Espiritu Santo. And the 1,300 scurvy graves argued too. The naval surgeon James Lind, running the first controlled trial four years later, cited Anson's voyage on page one; the cure was in the citrus, and the Royal Navy, eventually, listened. Samuel Scott painted the 90 minutes as they must have looked from a respectful distance: two ships alone on the whole Pacific, one column of smoke, no land, no witnesses. The loneliest big battle of the century, fought over the loneliest cargo.