The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

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.

We all impose some coherence—some meaning—on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done—or haven’t done.

A diplomat later quipped that Anson was so unknowing about the world that he’d been “round it, but never in it.”

On the Wager, the marines mostly helped with heaving and hauling. And if there was ever an insurrection onboard, the captain would order them to suppress it.

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.

There was a sinister design to these fictions. 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.

“My attachment to the Captain was zealous,” Campbell acknowledged. One seaman later shouted curses at the midshipman and vowed retribution.

Cheap’s rash shooting of Cozens, Byron noted, had nearly provoked “open sedition and revolt.” But eventually Bulkeley retreated, and the rest of the castaways followed suit.

As the historian Jill Lepore has noted, occupied peoples had “revolted again and again and again,” asking the “same question, unrelentingly: By what right are we ruled?”

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.