English naval officer and politician George Anson (1697–1762), who became Baron Anson and First Lord of the Admiralty, was born in Staffordshire, the second son of a minor country gentleman.
Many eighteenth-century naval officers were younger sons of genteel or noble families. Family connections helped ensure that ability and merit were noticed. In Anson's case, the helpful relationship came from his uncle Thomas Parker, who went on to become the first Earl of Macclesfield) and lord chancellor.
When Anson entered the Navy in 1712, his uncle was already lord chief justice. While his influence may have given his nephew a helping hand, Anson also demonstrated a degree of ability as he moved through the ranks. From Lieutenant (May 1716), he moved on to Commander (the sloop Weasel, June 1722) after service in the Mediterranean and the battle of Cape Passaro off Sicily.
After cruising the North Sea in the Weasel, he was promoted to command the frigate Scarborough, a station ship protecting trade and suppressing piracy in South Carolina, in 1724. Two stints there (1724 to 1730 and 1732 to 1735) left him plenty of time to move into colonial society and invest in local property.
In December 1737, he was sent to protect British interests in West Africa in the 60-gun fourth-rate HMS Centurion on a deployment that also took in the West Indies.
When Anson returned to England in 1739, Anglo-Spanish relations were in crisis.
War would require amphibious expeditions against Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
At first, English plans to attack Spanish interests were on a grand scale. While the main force would go to the Caribbean, a powerful expedition would travel via the Cape of Good Hope to seize and hold the Philippines.
At the same time, another flotilla would round Cape Horn to raid Spanish America's Pacific coast and encourage the colonists to rebel against Spain. Once the ex-colonies were independent, the grateful settlers might negotiate favourable commercial treaties with their liberators.
However, as the months passed, this ambitious scheme to dismember Spain's colonial empire and establish British predominance in the Pacific shrank dramatically.
The expedition to the Philippines was dropped, and Anson was chosen to command a smaller squadron against the remote, ill-defended Pacific coastline.
He was directed to plunder Spanish settlements, attack Panama if the Caribbean expedition established a foothold on the other side of the isthmus and capture the annual Manila galleon.
Along the way, he was to foment rebellion by the native population or by Spanish colonists against imperial authority, which, in turn, might lead to British commercial access to new markets.
To accomplish those objectives, Anson had the Centurion, the 50-gun fourth rates Gloucester and Severn, the 40-gun Pearl, the 28-gun Wager, the 8-gun sloop Tryal and two storeships.
Although he was promised five hundred regular infantry, Anson ended up embarking a mixture of new recruits, invalids and pensioners from Chelsea Hospital.
Preparations for the expedition were slow and frustrating.
An inept administration and contrary winds meant the squadron did not finally sail until 18 September 1740. The delays gave the Spanish time to learn the expedition's objectives and send a powerful squadron to intercept Anson's flotilla.
After narrowly evading the Spaniards off the coast of Patagonia, Anson passed through the Strait of Le Maire on 7 March 1741. He began to beat around Cape Horn in the worst season of the year to tackle the worst waters in the world.
While Anson's ships struggled towards the Juan Fernández Islands, the weather took an even higher toll on the Spanish squadron. It was almost completely shattered and in no condition to attack the British expedition.
Anson's Centurion and the Tryal arrived at Juan Fernández in mid-June, with the Gloucester and the storeship Anna joining them over the next month. The Wager had been wrecked on the desolate coast of southern Chile, with the Severn and Pearl forced back into the Atlantic by stormy seas off Cape Horn.
Their passage around the Horn was an epic of endurance.
Still, the losses effectively ruled out most of the tasks Anson had been assigned.
Of the 961 men who had sailed in the three remaining warships, 335 remained. Scurvy, cold, and deprivation had killed the rest, and Anson lacked the numbers to work the Centurion properly.
Still, he was determined to do what he could.
After he left Juan Fernandez in September, a series of hit-and-run raids along the Pacific coast of South America took some prizes.
Although he burnt the port town of Paita in northwest Peru, he arrived off Acapulco too late to intercept the inward-bound Manila galleon.
On that basis, there seemed to be no alternative to returning home the way Drake had gone.
On the passage across the Pacific, scurvy broke out again, and the unseaworthy Gloucester had to be burnt. Her crew transferred to the Centurion, which limped into Tinian in the Marianas on 28 August.
While fresh fruit and rest ashore restored the survivors, another crisis arose when the Centurion disappeared during a storm in late September, blown out to sea with a handful of men aboard.
She reappeared in mid-October, which allowed Anson the chance to leave Tinian. When he arrived in Macau in November, he was down to 210 men and a single ship.
Still, over the next five months, he was able to have Centurion repaired and add a few more men to his crew.
When she sailed from Macau in April 1743 with less than half her usual complement, the Centurion was supposedly bound for England.
However, Anson was out to intercept the west-bound Manila galleon, which he managed to do on 20 June off Cape Espíritu Santo.
The Nuestra Señora de Covadonga was carrying 1,313,843 pieces of eight and 35,682 ounces of pure silver and put up a determined resistance in a ninety-minute action. She was, effectively, an armed merchantman up against an undermanned 60-gun ship of the line, and the result was more or less inevitable.
Anson returned to China, sold his prize in Canton (Guangzhou), and arrived back in England without further incident in June 1744 after a four-year circumnavigation with treasure worth a staggering £400,000, a single vessel and just 145 survivors from an original complement of 1955 men.
Most of those who died along the way succumbed to disease: 997 from scurvy and 300 from typhus or dysentery. Only four deaths resulted from enemy action.
The official account of the enterprise, A Voyage round the World by George Anson, became a best-seller when it appeared in May 1748 and was in its fifth edition by the end of the year. The book was officially written by Richard Walter, chaplain of the Centurion. However, the opinions expressed, including the analysis of Spanish power in the Pacific, were Anson's.
The book urged a survey of the Falklands as a preliminary step towards establishing a British base near Cape Horn and revived calls for the exploration of Patagonia's west coast in the hope of finding a more convenient harbour than Juan Fernandez. It delivered a favourable account of what might have been achieved if the squadron had left earlier.
In Anson's version of events, captured Spanish letters revealed hopeless decadence and confusion, disaffected Creoles, discontented Indians and defenceless ports. If he had captured Valdivia, there would have been a full-scale Indian uprising in Chile. It would have spread to Peru and transformed itself into a general insurrection across Spanish America.
A Voyage Round the World provided a depressingly graphic, if depressing, picture of the passage of scurvy through the crews. It also reveals that the cure was known even before James Lind's work later in the decade. As far back as 1593, Richard Hawkins had noticed the efficacy of oranges and lemons in a sailor's diet. Still, the problem of obtaining them in hostile waters where ports were closed to them would continue to dog Anson's successors.
Lind's controlled experiment in 1746 demonstrated that patients with scurvy fed oranges and lemons recovered quicker than those on other diets. Although Lind published his findings in 1753, his results were ignored in preference for less successful solutions advocated by more powerful lobbyists.
While Anson, like his privateering predecessors, made few geographical discoveries, he added nothing significant to geographical knowledge. Books like his helped maintain interest in the Pacific and the publicity surrounding the voyage led to a surge of activity there.
Geography, commercial and strategic concerns pointed to the Pacific as one of the most important objectives for the rival European powers. Anson became one of the key players as those considerations unfolded.
Anson was a national hero to the British public, particularly those who lined the way as thirty-two wagons laden with silver made their way from Portsmouth to the streets of London. He entered Parliament as the member for Hedon in Yorkshire in 1744.
There was also a downside to the story as a dispute over prize money resulted in lengthy litigation; Anson's three-eighths of the prize money delivered an estimated payout of £91,000. That was over one hundred and twenty times the £719 he earned as captain during the voyage's three- and nine-month duration).
In contrast, an ordinary seaman would have received around £300, the equivalent of twenty years' wages.
In between were the former officers from the Gloucester and Tryal. Things might have been different if Anson had formally promoted them to the equivalent rank once they came aboard the Centurion. However, he didn't.
According to the Admiralty's rules, the transfer meant they lost their position and became, effectively, ordinary seamen.
Since an officer's share was around £6,000, the litigation was inevitable.
While the courts initially decided in their favour, the surviving officers from the Gloucester and Tryal lost on appeal. Their former commander's victory over the French at Cape Finisterre may have influenced the decision.
Meanwhile, Anson was embarking on a political career and was already in touch with the Lord Chancellor, his uncle's friend Lord Hardwicke. However, he joined a group of opposition Whigs led by the Duke of Bedford. The latter became First Lord of the Admiralty when some of the Whig opposition joined the ministry in December 1744.
Captain Anson and the Earl of Sandwich joined Bedford at the Admiralty.
Although he was the junior board member, he exerted considerable influence as a distinguished sea officer and Sandwich's closest colleague.
Promotion to Rear Admiral in April 1745 and Vice-admiral three months later followed, and he took command of the Western Squadron in July 1746.
The voyage that brought him to prominence left Anson with well-developed ideas of how best to promote navigation and commerce.
His tortuous passage around Cape Horn meant he had firm ideas about the importance of establishing a way-station to the Pacific, where ships could refresh and refit. He saw the Falkland Islands as ideal for such purposes.
Early in 1749, the Admiralty equipped two ships to locate and explore the islands. From there, the vessels would proceed into the Pacific, calling at Juan Fernandez on the way. Spanish resentment put the scheme on hold.
While settlement plans were downplayed, the Spanish Minister Carvajal had read Anson's book. He very pertinently asked what else could be the point since the Islands were already known.
A dozen years later, the scheme was revived in another guise after an expedition to capture Manila as the first step to opening trade in the Pacific at large. While the mission succeeded, news of the result did not reach Europe in time to influence the peace settlement, and Manila reverted to Spanish hands.
When they lost that opportunity, the Admiralty reverted to Anson's scheme for the Falklands.
Two frigates would set out under Captain John Byron, allegedly bound for the East Indies. Byron had been a midshipman on the Wager on Anson's expedition.
Byron's orders directed him to survey the Falklands and locate a suitable site for a base. He should then examine North America's west coast, find Juan de Fuca's Strait, and return that way if he succeeded.
Apart from planning world-scale strategy, in 1745 and 1746, Anson and his colleagues amalgamated the squadrons in home waters into a single fleet, cruising in the western approaches to the English Channel.
From that position, the fleet satisfied all the vital strategic requirements. While protecting the islands against invasion, the squadron also monitored incoming trade and watched for French sorties from Brest, Lorient, and Rochefort.
Anson, Sandwich, Bedford, and Admiral Edward Vernon all played significant parts in developing the concept. Still, Anson proposed to unite different squadrons in July 1746 and put the idea into practice as commander-in-chief of the new force.
The decision was justified north of Cape Ortegal in May 1747 at the First Battle of Cape Finisterre. Anson intercepted two French convoys bound for India and America, enjoyed significant numerical superiority, and captured all the escorting warships and most of the merchant vessels in the convoys.
In July, the Vice Admiral became Baron Anson of Soberton and returned to the Admiralty, leaving his deputy, Sir Peter Warren, in command of the Western Squadron. When Warren fell ill with scurvy, Rear-Admiral Edward Hawke took over.
On 14 October, in the Second Battle of Cape Finisterre, intercepted a French convoy of 252 vessels escorted by eight ships of the line.
Hawke's fourteen vessels took six of the escorts and seven ships from the convoy. While most of the merchant vessels and two escorts escaped and made their way across the Atlantic, most were intercepted and captured in the West Indies. The losses were enough to persuade the French government that further efforts to fight convoys through the maritime blockade would end the same way.
Losses in the colonies, particularly in the West Indies, were enough to bring France back to the peace negotiations despite military successes on the continent. The psychological influence of the two battles of Cape Finisterre could be seen in the French reluctance to send men and supplies to Canada and other colonial outposts during the Seven Years' War (1756–1763).
While Anson's western squadron formed the basis of British naval strategy for the next century, he also initiated tactical innovations and manoeuvres. He took pains to keep his captains informed of his intentions.
Reforms at the Admiralty under Bedford as First Lord and Sandwich and Anson as significant players reshaped both the seagoing Navy and its administration ashore.
For a start, they defined the rank and status of officers at sea with the 1748 adoption of a formal hierarchy and the first uniforms for officers.
At the top of the hierarchy, issues highlighted at the battle of Toulon in 1744 saw significant changes to flag rank. Until this point, Admirals were chosen from the captains' list in order of seniority.
As a result, fleet commanders tended to be elderly.
A proposed compulsory retirement scheme for admirals and captains proved unacceptably radical, but a new rank created in 1747 delivered the same outcome by creating a notional status of rear-admiral based on seniority, without the necessity of assigning the incumbent to an actual command. So the Admiralty reached down the captains' list and selected the best candidates for active flag rank while effectively putting the old, infirm and unsuitable out to pasture.
At the same time, Anson used the rank of Commodore to appoint up-and-coming officers to command long before they became eligible for promotion to flag rank.
The Admiralty also attempted to tackle another intractable difficulty at the other end of the hierarchy.
The fleet was effectively demobilised in peacetime. So an outbreak of hostilities saw an undermanned fleet until the press gangs delivered an adequate supply of skilled seamen. The French conscripted their crews from their seafaring communities, which gave them an initial advantage. Still, an Admiralty proposal to place a reserve of 3000 seamen on 'half pay' of £10 per annum was immediately denounced and dropped as politically impossible.
Reforms to the army's marine regiments were more successful after they came under Admiralty control in 1747. While the units were disbanded at the end of hostilities, Anson implemented a permanent corps of independent companies in 1755.
Anson's successes with the Western Squadron at the two battles of Finisterre in 1747 provided a large number of captured French vessels, which, in turn, prompted developments in the design and construction of British warships.
French ships of the line tended to be much larger than their British counterparts. French frigates were often much faster and better adapted to their role as scouts and escorts.
Much of the difference was a matter of underlying philosophy. The larger French vessels were expensive to build and maintain, and while the smaller and more economic British ships punched above their weight, borrowing French techniques would allow the construction of larger, better balanced, more seaworthy vessels.
Existing building was halted. Meanwhile, a committee of admirals met to develop new specifications for each rate and a committee of shipwrights worked towards new standard designs. Still, progress was slow, primarily due to navy surveyor Sir Jacob Acworth's resistance to innovation and reluctance to retire. Joseph Allin, a joint surveyor after 1746, proved to be less innovative than adventurous a designer than Anson hoped. When Acworth died in March 1749, progress in improving the design of British ships of the line was limited.
The relatively smaller, cheaper frigates were a slightly different story.
They were often designed by shipwrights or private builders rather than by the surveyor. Benjamin Slade, the master shipwright in Plymouth naval yard, investigated French designs and sent the Admiralty plans, models, and proposals. French vessels were faster but cramped, unseaworthy, and relatively flimsy, so the British designers adapted the best aspects of French designs.
Slade went on to achieve a harmonious synthesis of design elements in what later came to be regarded as the classic classes of first rates, including the famous 100-gun Victory.
At the same time, dockyard management needed attention.
The Admiralty Board adopted an almost revolutionary move: the Lords visited the dockyards themselves. They used their first-hand knowledge to tackle evidence of mismanagement, waste, and idleness. 'Task' or piece-work replaced the day wages in the yards.
While Anson is generally credited as the prime mover behind these reforms, they were primarily the result of teamwork.
First Lord Bedford made the final decisions based on Anson's professional experience and Sandwich's inquisitive nature, ferocious energy and political cunning.
Sandwich and Anson worked closely together, covering for each other when Anson was at sea or Sandwich was abroad as appointed British representative at the peace negotiations on the continent.
Sandwich continued to work closely with Anson after he succeeded Bedford as First Lord in February 1748 since both had a common rival on the board.
Captain Lord Vere Beauclerk, son of the Duke of St Albans and a grandson of King Charles II, was senior to both in terms of tenure on the board and ahead of Anson on the captains' list but retired in November 1749.
While the board worked as a team, Anson took the lead in tactics, training, rankings, discipline, and ship design.
Sandwich concentrated on administration and dockyard management, and the whole board acted together on strategic, legal and political questions.
Anson's star continued to rise in April 1748 with his marriage to the lord chancellor, Lord Hardwicke's eldest daughter Elizabeth Yorke, twenty-eight years his junior. Anson was the obvious successor when a political coup ousted Sandwich as First Lord in June 1751.
As First Lord, however, while Anson sat in the cabinet, there was an understanding that he would not continue Sandwich's pressure for higher funding. He abandoned Sandwich's dockyard reform, and navy estimates fell sharply until the outbreak of hostilities along unstable, ill-defined frontiers in North America prompted a turnaround in 1754.
Anson dispatched a squadron under Vice-Admiral Edward Boscawen to intercept and turn back French warships carrying reinforcements to Canada and authorised the use of force if necessary, even though war had not been declared.
Boscawen met the French squadron on 10 June 1755 off Newfoundland, captured two ships, and provoked a war without striking an effective first blow.
Still, the next few years saw the British take Canada from the French, but elsewhere the fortunes of war were less satisfactory. By the spring of 1756, the Royal Navy was back on the defensive. While the French were preparing to invade Britain and assault Britain's bases in the Mediterranean, the Navy lacked the resources to counteract both threats.
While the threat in the English Channel was far more dangerous, they also needed to protect their base in Minorca.
Vice-admiral John Byng set out from Gibraltar on 6 April with a squadron of ten ill-prepared and undermanned ships of the line to cover Minorca.
His squadron had grown to thirteen vessels by the time he arrived off Port Mahon. French troops transported by the Toulon squadron had already overrun the island. The remaining British stronghold, St. Philip's Castle in Port Mahon, was under siege.
An indecisive action off the island on 20 May saw the British vanguard take a severe pounding from the more heavily armed French. Meanwhile, their rear, including Byng's flagship, HMS Ramilles, failed to engage the French at effective cannon range.
While half of Byng's ships were damaged, none were lost, and a Council of War after the action concurred that the fleet stood no chance of relieving Port Mahon. Byng ordered a return to Gibraltar, the Admiralty charged him with breaches of the Articles of War, and a court-martial found guilty and sentenced him to death. Byng faced a firing squad aboard HMS Monarch in Portsmouth harbour on 14 March 1757.
While Minorca fell into French hands after the battle, the Treaty of Paris saw the island handed back to Britain for the captured French outposts in the West Indies and Belle-Île off Canada.
British reverses during the war saw a change of government in November 1756, with new Prime Minister William Pitt'sbrother-in-law Lord Temple succeeding Anson at the Admiralty.
Anson had concentrated on the threat of invasion and had to accept some responsibility for the loss of Minorca.
Still, he was back at the Admiralty when the ministry was reconstructed in July 1757.
Pitt is often credited with the strategy that saw the British overrun Louisbourg in 1758, Quebec in 1759 and naval victories at Lagos off Portugal and Quiberon Bay. Still, as head of the seagoing Navy, Anson certainly played a significant part in the successes. The expedition that took Havana in 1762 was his scheme from the start.
He was back on the quarterdeck in 1758, taking over the western squadron. Hawke had resigned his command and returned to port over a misunderstanding which he saw as a personal slight.
Anson's last spell in command at sea brought another innovation, as he became concerned with the incidence of scurvy in the fleet blockading French ports.
Back at the Admiralty, he set up a system to supply fresh meat and vegetables to the ships on station. The resulting close blockade played a significant role in the victory of Quiberon Bay.
While Anson played a significant role in politics and public life, he preferred to work unobtrusively. He brought about gradual reform through unexciting administrative processes. His influence was easier to sense than to prove. He effectively covered his tracks from historical scrutiny by not keeping papers and not creating them. He hated correspondence, left an inescapable minimum to Admiralty secretary Philip Stephens, and surprised his wife by writing her a letter on one occasion.
Anson felt no need to make concessions to society, thanks to wealth, status and political consequences that stemmed from his naval successes rather than inheritance or good fortune.
His followers spread his message of devotion to duty, high standards of training and conduct, aggressive attack, and taking his subordinates into his confidence. The result was a distinctive ethos built on the assumption that a man's first duty was to the Navy.
As First Lord of the Admiralty, Anson's reforms turned the Navy into an efficient fighting instrument, maintained supremacy in home waters and prevented French relief expeditions from sailing to the West Indies and Canada. That transformation delivered the triumphs of the Seven Years' War He died at home in Hertfordshire on 6 June 1762.
Sources:
The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland;
Chambers Biographical Dictionary;
Alan Frost, Science For Political Purposes: The European Nations' Exploration of the Pacific Ocean 1764-1806;
The Hutchinson Dictionary of World History;
David Mackay, The Great Era of Pacific Exploration;
G. A. Mawer Incognita: The Invention and Discovery of Terra Australis;
The Oxford Companion to British History;
N. A. M. Rodger, The wooden world: an anatomy of the Georgian Navy;
O.H.K Spate The Pacific Since Magellan, Volume I: The Spanish Lake and Volume III: Paradise Found and Lost;
Avan Judd Stallard, Antipodes: In Search of the Southern Continent; The Times Atlas of World Exploration;
Glyndwr Williams. The expansion of Europe in the eighteenth century, overseas rivalry, discovery and exploitation;
Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail 1714–1792: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates.