At Tinian, one of the Ladrone Islands, Anson stopped some time, refreshing his worn-out crew, and strengthening the ship. The island abounded in cattle, hogs, and poultry, running wild; in oranges, limes, lemons, cocoa-nuts, and bread-fruit. “The country did by no means resemble that of an uninhabited and uncultivated place; but had much more the air of a magnificent plantation, where large lawns and stately woods had been laid out together with great skill, and where the whole had been so artfully combined, and so judiciously adapted to the slopes of the hills and the inequalities of the ground, as to produce a most striking effect, and to do honour to the invention of the contriver.” These compliments to Nature may often be paralleled in writers of the last century. When they had dropped anchor, such was the weakness of the crew that it took them five hours to furl their sails. “All the hands we could muster capable of standing at a gun,” says the narrator, “amounted to no more than seventy-one, most of whom, too, were incapable of duty, except on the greatest emergencies. This, inconsiderable as it may appear, was the whole force we could collect in our present enfeebled condition from the united crews of the _Centurion_, the _Gloucester_, and the _Tryal_, which, when we departed from England, consisted of near a thousand hands.” Some Indians ashore fled when they landed, leaving their huts, one of which, used as a large storehouse, was converted into a hospital for the sick, one hundred and twenty-eight in number. Numbers of these were so helpless that they had to be carried from the boats, the commodore assisting, as he had before at Juan Fernandez, and the officers following suit. The poor invalids soon felt the benefit of the abundant fresh fruits and water; and although twenty-one were buried in the first and succeeding day, they did not lose above ten more during the two months of their stay at the island.
One of the drawbacks of a stay at Tinian was the roadstead, which, with its coral bottom, afforded a bad anchorage during the western monsoons. This was convincingly proved to the people of the _Centurion_. In the third week of September the wind blew with such fury that all communication with the shore was cut off, as no boat could live in the sea raised by it. The small bower cable, and afterwards their best bower, parted. The waves broke over the devoted ship, and the long-boat, at that time moored astern, was on a sudden canted so high that it broke the transom of the commodore’s cabin on the quarter-deck, and was itself stove to pieces, the poor boat-keeper, though extremely bruised, being saved almost by a miracle. The end of all this was that the ship was driven to sea, leaving Anson, several officers, and a great part of the crew on shore, amounting in the whole to one hundred and thirteen persons. The poor wretches on the ship expected each moment to be their last, as they were altogether too few and weak to work a large vessel.