The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

Cheap knew what a cracking ship the Centurion was. Swift and stout, and weighing about a thousand tons, she had, like the other warships in Anson’s squadron, three towering masts with crisscrossing yards—wooden spars from which the sails unfurled. The Centurion could fly as many as eighteen sails at a time.

To increase the chances of surviving a barrage of cannonballs, the hull had a double layer of planks, giving it a thickness of more than a foot in places. The ship had several decks, each stacked upon the next, and two of them had rows of cannons on both sides—their menacing black muzzles pointing out of square gunports.

Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled. Most of the wood was hard oak, but it was still susceptible to the pulverizing elements of storm and sea.

The average man-of-war was estimated by a leading shipwright to last only fourteen years. And to survive that long, a ship had to be virtually remade after each extensive voyage, with new masts and sheathing and rigging. Otherwise, it risked disaster. In 1782, while the 180-foot Royal George—for a time the largest warship in the world—was anchored near Portsmouth, with a full crew onboard, water began flooding its hull. It sank. The cause has been disputed, but an investigation blamed the “general state of decay of her timbers.” An estimated nine hundred people drowned.

To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.

(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)

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.