A Vessel Arrives at Macao – Great Excitement Amongst the European Merchants – Strange Secrets – A Best-Seller
On the 23rd September 1771, Nathaniel Barlow, going about his daily business in the merchant community of Macao, was much animated by the arrival in the port of a small and bedraggled ship. It was, he reported later, “a vessel of uncommon appearance.” It had
sixty five persons on board, most of them military. The Commanding Officer bore the rank of Colonel and the title of Baron de Benyorsky, which he held under the Queen of Hungary. There were in the vessel five persons in womens apparel.1
So great was the excitement created by the arrival of this ship and its curious crew that Mr Barlow despatched a letter to London, where it was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle for 1772. In a journalistic act of caution worthy of marvel and respect today, the editor headlined it with the words: “The following extraordinary account, in a Letter from Canton, dated Nov 19, 1771, is said to be authentic.” His caution, although unjustified for the letter in question, could nevertheless be applied to several of the later accounts which emerged on the same subject.
Barlow’s letter contained a very brief statement from the uncommon vessel’s commanding officer, Baron Benyovszky, on the circumstances of the voyage that had just been completed. Benyovszky said he had been sent into exile to Kazan in Russia almost two years previously. Determining to escape, he and several companions had overpowered their jailers, and “directed their rout to Kamschatka, on the sea coast of Tartary, where the Colonel knew a friend, on whose assistance their hopes depended.” His most convenient friend most conveniently came up with the goods – a vessel on which the Baron could embark with eighty-five of his fellow-prisoners. They then set out on a lengthy sea-voyage which took them first down the coast towards China, then eastwards until he saw part of America, and then westwards again, towards Manila in the Philippine Islands, and finally, defeated by contrary winds, he arrived in Macao, “being five months on his passage from Kamschatka.”
Barlow was also able to include in his report a later variant of this account, as supplied by Benyovszky “to a Gentleman in Canton.” This second account was in fact an affidavit provided to the authorities in Macao; it stated that the Baron had sailed from Kamchatka on board the ship, with the intention of reaching the Mariana Islands. “A great tempest and very strong wind” drove them towards Japan, along which country they coasted until they reached Formosa and then crossed to China to reach Macao. The human cost of this voyage? “Went out with 85 men, came back with 62.”
The factual basis of this voyage, the observant reader will note, was a little shaky from the very start. It was evident that Benyovszky was not telling the full story. There were perhaps many reasons for that – not the least of which was the danger of being extradited back to Russia as escaped prisoners, either by the Portuguese authorities in Macao, or the Chinese ones in neighbouring Canton. As the days went by, it became obvious that much of what went on in this lengthy voyage was not being divulged. What was the fate of the twenty-three members of the crew who never arrived? What was their actual route from Kamchatka? How on earth did such a large band of escaped prisoners cross four thousand miles of unforgiving land and sea, from Kazan to Kamchatka, without being apprehended? And, last but not least, what of the “five persons in womens apparel” – were they women or were they not?
Our man in Macao, Nathaniel Barlow, in a private letter that was published at a much later date,2 offered a supplementary glimpse of Benyovszky’s dealings there. Far from shedding further light on the route of the voyage, the Baron had become extremely secretive. He had been, he now said,
as far north as 63 degrees; had with him Lord Anson’s Voyages, translated into the Sclavonian language, which he repeatedly said was of greatest use to him, being guided in a great measure by them. In his apartment were several mathematical instruments, especially a quadrant, and a cross-staff. On requesting for a sight of his drafts [of the log-books], he with great reluctance produced one, but, unluckily, a gentleman in company telling him that one of us was a sea-captain, he immediately withdrew, and carried with him the draft, by which we lost the opportunity of knowing more particulars of this very extraordinary voyage. The vessel is fifty feet long, and sixteen broad, built entirely of fir.
This was indeed a very extraordinary voyage. The facts which later became evident were these: in May of 1771, just as the ice was beginning to recede from the shores of Kamchatka, in the far east of Russia’s Far East, around seventy exiles, sailors, clerks and trappers had overpowered the military garrison, stolen a small ship, the St Peter, and set off for a better life. Over the course of the following five months, with almost no navigational guidance at all, ship and crew sailed in what could best be described as The Sea of Uncertainty, before edging their way south-westwards across the rim of the North Pacific. They endured violent storms, they suffered from hunger and thirst and scurvy, and they despaired of ever knowing where they were. Coming across the coast of Japan more by accident than by design, they attempted to trade peacefully for the bare necessities of life with the residents of small coastal towns. Their coin of exchange was a large smelly cargo of Siberian furs which, with some foresight, they had earlier liberated from the storehouses of Kamchatka. Eventually they reached Formosa and then the coast of China and were guided into the busy port of Macao. After a delay of three months, the majority of those who had survived took passage on ships heading for Mauritius and France. And, in a surprise move, a handful of those who reached France chose to return to Siberia.
It was a very extraordinary man who led them. In September 1771, Maurice Benyovszky was only 25 years old. He was the recognised leader of a motley band of seventy or more desperate men and women, possibly also a dog. The leaky ship in which they sailed was a galliot, a flat-bottomed boat of about eighty tons and with scarcely room to swing a cat. It was more suited to coastal trading than criss-crossing the North Pacific. To have sailed for almost five months in such a vessel, with so many people on board, with a bare minimum of navigational instruments, and a book of adventurer’s tales in lieu of a chart, under the command of a young man with no obvious experience of the high seas – and yet to have arrived more or less unscathed is very extraordinary.
Extraordinary, finally, is the fact that, within days of the ship’s arrival in Macao, some fifteen of the passengers and crew died a sudden death. Of those adventurers who remained alive after the voyage, several wrote their own accounts of their journey from Kamchatka. But their voices went largely unheard in the decades which followed. Those scraps, documents and reports which have come down the years tell only a rather brief tale of adventure.
A fuller and much more enthralling story of the voyage did not become public until almost twenty years later. Baron Benyovszky’s Memoirs and Travels, which were also said to be authentic, were published posthumously in London in 1790. It became an overnight best-seller in Britain, France, Germany and beyond.
This, too, was very extraordinary because much of what was described in this book was simply untrue.
