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In September 1740, during an imperial conflict with Spain, the Wager, carrying some 250 officers and crew, had embarked from Portsmouth in a squadron on a secret mission: to capture a treasure-filled Spanish galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans.” Near Cape Horn, at the tip of South America, the squadron had been engulfed by a hurricane, and the Wager was believed to have sunk with all its souls. But 283 days after the ship had last been reported seen, these men miraculously emerged in Brazil.
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.
It was January 1740, and the British Empire was racing to mobilize for war against its imperial rival Spain.
As Samuel Johnson once observed, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”
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.
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.
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.”)
On those fortunate days when Cheap could offer the castaways meat, a slice ordinarily for one person was divided among three. Even so, this was more sustenance than the men had enjoyed since being orphaned on the island. “Our stomachs are become nice and dainty,” Bulkeley wrote.
The men toiled even as many of them confronted the debilitating effects of malnourishment: their bodies thinned to the bone, their eyes bulging, their strawlike hair falling out. Bulkeley said of the castaways, “They are in great pain, and can scarce see to walk.” Yet they were compelled onward by that mysterious narcotic: hope.
