The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

But 283 days after the ship had last been reported seen, these men miraculously emerged in Brazil.

The trial threatened to expose the secret nature not only of those charged but also of an empire whose self-professed mission was spreading civilization.

Sir Walter Raleigh had envisioned: “Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world.”

Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

Yet Byron was enraptured by the mystique of the sea. He was fascinated by books about sailors, like Sir Francis Drake, so much so that he brought them onboard the Wager—the stories of maritime exploits stashed in his sea chest.

“The captain had to be father and confessor, judge and jury, to his men,” one historian wrote. “He had more power over them than the King—for the King could not order a man to be flogged. He could and did order them into battle and thus had the power of life and death over everyone on board.”

One sailor described a man-of-war as a “set of human machinery, in which every man is a wheel, a band, or a crank, all moving with wonderful regularity and precision to the will of its machinist—the all-powerful captain.”

Byron confronted an inescapable truth of the wooden world: each man’s life depended on the performance of the others. They were akin to the cells in a human body; a single malignant one could destroy them all.

This funnel, known as the Drake Passage, makes the torrent even more pulverizing. The currents are not only the longest-running on earth but also the strongest, transporting more than four billion cubic feet of water per second, more than six hundred times the discharge of the Amazon River.

Too often for a commander, as Sobel put it, “the technique of dead reckoning marked him for a dead man.”

Magellan called the region Patagonia. The name may have derived from the inhabitants’ feet—pata means “paw” in Spanish—which, as legend has it, were mammoth; or perhaps the name was borrowed from a medieval saga that featured a monstrous figure known as “the Great Patagon.”

By portraying the natives as both magnificent and less than human, Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.

“Below forty degrees latitude, there is no law,” a sailors’ adage went. “Below fifty degrees, there is no God.”

In the British Navy, volunteer and pressed seamen stopped being paid after their ship was decommissioned, and, as two of the castaways argued, the loss of the Wager meant that for most of them, their earnings had likely ceased: they were suffering for nothing.

“When persons have surmounted great difficulties, it is a pleasure for them to relate their story; and if we give ourselves this satisfaction, who has any cause to be offended? Are we, who have faced death in so many shapes, to be intimidated, lest we should give offence to the—Lord knows whom?”

Five and a half years. That’s how long the three men had been gone from England. Presumed dead, they had been mourned, and yet here they were, like three Lazaruses.

London was the pulsing heart of an island empire built on the toll of seamen and slavery and colonialism.

They were not accused of negligible misconduct but, rather, of a complete breakdown of naval order, from the highest levels of command to the rank and file. And though they had each tried to shape their stories in ways that justified their actions, the legal system was designed to strip these narratives down to the bare, hard, unemotive facts.

Ferreting out and documenting all the incontrovertible facts of what had happened on the island—the marauding, the stealing, the whippings, the murders—would have undercut the central claim on which the British Empire tried to justify its rule of other peoples: namely, that its imperial forces, its civilization, were inherently superior.

Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.