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The Centurion has her guns going under a red English flag. Her crews had been drilled all through a crossing that killed most of the men who started it. They got off 3 broadsides for every one the galleon fired.

Commodore George Anson sailed in 1740 with six ships and about 1,900 men. His orders were to raid Spain's Pacific coast in wartime, around Cape Horn, in the wrong season. The plan was optimistic, and the sea cut it down fast. 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, far more than any enemy did. It killed them horribly: old wounds opening again, gums closing over teeth, men dying of the 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. It was 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 sat lower in the water than a warship should, because she was not primarily a warship. The fight lasted about 90 minutes. Anson's gun crews had been drilled through the long crossing into something the galleon had never met. They fired three broadsides to her one, and left 67 Spanish dead against a handful of British. 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 share of 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. Anson himself rose to First Lord of the Admiralty, and spent his credit rebuilding the institution that had nearly killed him. He gave the navy proper uniforms, the Marines, the standing Western Squadron, and the relentless drill 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, one column of smoke, and the coast Anson had cruised off for weeks lying low and blue behind them. The loneliest big battle of the century, fought over the loneliest cargo.