This voyage is the subject of a well-known apostrophe in The Pleasures of Hope, beginning—­

And such thy strength-inspiring aid that bore The hardy Byron from his native shore.  In torrid climes, where Chiloe’s tempests sweep Tumultuous murmurs o’er the troubled deep, ’Twas his to mourn misfortune’s rudest shock, Scourged by the winds and cradled by the rock.

Byron’s own account of his adventures, published in 1768, is remarkable for freshness of scenery like that of our first literary traveller, Sir John Mandeville, and a force of description which recalls Defoe.  It interests us more especially from the use that has been made of it in that marvellous mosaic of voyages, the shipwreck, in Don Juan, the hardships of his hero being, according to the poet—­

                                Comparative
  To those related in my grand-dad’s narrative.

In June, 1764, Byron sailed with two ships, the “Dolphin” and the “Tamar,” on a voyage of discovery arranged by Lord Egmont, to seek a southern continent, in the course of which he took possession of the largest of the Falkland Islands, again passed through the Magellanic Straits, and sailing home by the Pacific, circumnavigated the globe.  The planets so conspired that, though his affable manners and considerate treatment made him always popular with his men, sailors became afraid to serve under “foul-weather Jack.”  In 1748 he married the daughter of a Cornish squire, John Trevanion.  They had two sons and three daughters.  One of the latter married her cousin (the fifth lord’s eldest son), who died in 1776, leaving as his sole heir the youth who fell in the Mediterranean in 1794.

The eldest son of the veteran, John Byron, father of the poet, was born in 1751, educated at Westminster, and, having received a commission, became a captain in the guards; but his character, fundamentally unprincipled, soon developed itself in such a manner as to alienate him from his family.  In 1778, under circumstances of peculiar effrontery, he seduced Amelia D’Arcy, the daughter of the Earl of Holdernesse, in her own right Countess Conyers, then wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen, afterwards Duke of Leeds.  “Mad Jack,” as he was called, seems to have boasted of his conquest; but the marquis, to whom his wife had hitherto been devoted, refused to believe the rumours that were afloat, till an intercepted letter, containing a remittance of money, for which Byron, in reverse of the usual relations, was always clamouring, brought matters to a crisis.  The pair decamped to the continent; and in 1779, after the marquis had obtained a divorce, they were regularly married.  Byron seems to have been not only profligate but heartless, and he made life wretched to the woman he was even more than most husbands bound to cherish.  She died in 1784, having given birth to two daughters.  One died in infancy; the other was Augusta, the half sister and good genius of the poet, whose memory remains like a star on the fringe of a thunder-cloud, only brighter by the passing of the smoke of calumny.  In 1807 she married Colonel Leigh, and had a numerous family, most of whom died young.  Her eldest daughter, Georgiana, married Mr. Henry Trevanion.  The fourth, Medora, had an unfortunate history, the nucleus of an impertinent and happily ephemeral romance.