Price: £400.00

• Date: 1748
• Condition: AAA
• Colour: BW
• Size (cm): 22.9 x 40.7

Title: 'A chart shewing the track of the centurion round the world'. Publication: A voyage round the world in the years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV, George Anson. Engraver: R W Seale

A world map showing the route of 'a squardron of His Majesty's ships, sent upon an expedition to the South-Seas', commanded by Captain George Anson.

George Anson, commander of a Pacific squadron, was given orders by the Admiralty to raid Spanish possessions along the South American coast and disrupt their trade. What was to be a reasonably short trip turned out to be a circumnavigation of the globe and including the sacking of Paita (Peru) and the captured of the Spanish galleon Nostra Seignora de Cabadonga (which was loaded with silver and two important maps that detailed the route Manila galleons had followed across the Pacific for almost two hundred years). Captain Anson's mission took him 45 months and cost, 6 ships lost, 1000 men lost to scurvy, 300 men lost to typhus and dysentery, and unknown number to shipwrecks and only 4 in action.