Bulkeley, in his Preface, shows a keen awareness that a charge of mutiny hung over him. The taking of the longboat, the arrest of Captain Cheap after the killing of Cozens, would not sit well with Cheap’s fellow officers who would make up the courtmartial. Highlighting this concern is Bulkeley’s choice of an apt quotation from Edmund Waller on the title page of A Voyage to the South-Seas:

A Voyage had been published with the Admiralty’s tacit permission. And from July 1743 to February 1744 lengthy extracts were published monthly in The London Magazine: making the gunner an honest-jack-tar celebrity and, no doubt, increasing the book’s sales.

On 15 June 1744 Anson and the Centurion, having sailed in a thick fog through an enemy French squadron cruising in the Channel, came to anchor at Spithead. She had circumnavigated the globe, harried the Spanish along the South American coast, and taken a Spanish treasure ship. Anson, an unknown captain when he had sailed from England, was now a national hero and also, with his share of the prize money, a very wealthy man. On 4 July the treasure, estimated at more than £500,00, was paraded through the streets of London in thirty-two wagons guarded by the Centurion’s seamen and officers. Preceded by a kettle-drum, trumpets and French horns, the first wagon flew the English colours over the Spanish ensign. In these euphoric celebrations the grim accounting of those who had sailed and those who had returned was forgotten: 1,900 men had sailed and 1,400 had died; four from enemy action, a few from accidents and drowning, and the rest from disease, mainly scurvy.

Bulkeley had always treated the Admiralty with punctilious circumspection. In 1745 he wrote to the Board of Admiralty asking for consent (‘lest your lordships should imagine I had flown from justice’) to sail an old warship, at the request of some London merchants, from Plymouth to London for refitting. Consent was given, and with Bulkeley in command the old vessel sailed from Plymouth escorting three merchantships. During the passage up Channel the small convoy was sighted by two fast French privateers who bore down upon them.