ted company
from the general, being in a miserable plight. So we both proceeded for
Port Desire, where we arrived on the 26th of May.

Sec. 2. _Disastrous result of the Voyage to Sir Thomas Candish_.[64]

Various accounts of the disappointments and misfortunes of Sir Thomas
Candish, in this disastrous voyage, are still preserved, but the most
copious is contained in his own narrative, addressed to Sir Tristram
Gorges, whom he constituted sole executor of his will. In this, Sir
Thomas attributes his miscarriage to the cowardice and defection of one
of his officers, in the following terms:--"The running away of the
villain Davis was the death of me, and the decay of the whole action,
and his treachery in deserting me the ruin of all."

[Footnote 64: This portion of the voyage is taken from the supplement in
the Collection of Harris, to the circumnavigation of Sir Thomas
Candish.--E.]

In this letter he complained also of mutinies, and that, by adverse
winds at S W. and W.S.W. he had been driven 400 leagues from the shore,
and from the latitude of 50 deg. to that of 40 deg. both S. He says also, that
he was surprised by winter in the straits, and sore vexed by storms,
having such frosts and snows in May as he had never before
witnessed,[65] so that forty of his men died, and seventy more of them
sickened, in the course of seven or eight days. Davis, as he says,
deserted him in the Desire, in lat. 47 deg. S. The Roebuck continued along
with him to lat. 36 deg. S. In consequence of transgressing his directions,
Captain Barker was slain on land with twenty-five men, and the boat
lost; and soon afterwards other twenty-five men met with a similar fate.
Ten others were forsaken at Spiritu Santo, by the cowardice of the
master of the Roebuck, who stole away, having six months provisions on
board for 120 men, and only forty-seven men in his ship. Another mutiny
happened at St Sebastians by the treachery of an Irishman, when Mr
Knivet and other six persons were left on shore.

[Footnote 65: Sir Thomas Candish seems not to have been aware, that the
month of May, in these high antarctic or southern latitudes, was
precisely analogous with November in the high latitudes of the north,
and therefore utterly unfit for navigation.--E.]

Intending again to have attempted passing through the straits, he was
tossed up and down in the tempestuous seas of the Southern Atlantic, and
came even at one time within two leagues of St Helena,