The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

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.

There were penguins, which Millechamp described as “half fish, half fowl,” and there were southern right whales and humpbacks, blowing their spouts. The impressionable Byron later wrote of these southern seas, “It is incredible the number of whales that are here, it makes it dangerous for a ship, we were very near striking upon one, and another blew the water in upon the quarterdeck and they are of the largest kind we ever have seen.” Then there was the sea lion, which he considered “rather a dangerous animal,” noting: “I was attacked by one when I least expected it, and had much ado to get clear of him; they are of a monstrous size and when angered make a dreadful roaring.”

Early description of common animals

Yet the solution was so simple. Scurvy is brought on by a deficiency of vitamin C, owing to a lack of raw vegetables and fruits in one’s diet. Such a deprived person stops producing the fibrous protein known as collagen, which holds bones and tissues together, and which is used to synthesize dopamine and other hormones that can affect moods. (Anson’s men also appear to have been suffering from other vitamin deficiencies, such as insufficient levels of niacin, which can lead to psychosis, and of vitamin A, which causes night blindness.) Lieutenant Saumarez later sensed the power of certain nutrients. “I could plainly observe,” he wrote, “that there is a Je ne sais quoi in the frame of the human system that cannot be renewed, cannot be preserved, without the assistance of certain earthly particles, or in plain English, the land is man’s proper element, and vegetables and fruit his only physic.”

Nutrients

“let us not be discouraged: did you never see a ship amongst breakers before? Let us try to push her through them. Come, lend a hand; here is a sheet, and here is a brace; lay hold. I don’t doubt but we may…save our lives.”