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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.
David Cheap, the first lieutenant of the Centurion, the squadron’s flagship,
It was January 1740, and the British Empire was racing to mobilize for war against its imperial rival Spain.
the captain under whom he served on the Centurion, George Anson,
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.”
The conflict was the result of the endless jockeying among the European powers to expand their empires. They each vied to conquer or control ever larger swaths of the earth, so that they could exploit and monopolize other nations’ valuable natural resources and trade markets.
Then, in 1738, Robert Jenkins, a British merchant captain, was summoned to appear in Parliament, where he reportedly claimed that a Spanish officer had stormed his brig in the Caribbean and, accusing him of smuggling sugar from Spain’s colonies, cut off his left ear. Jenkins reputedly displayed his severed appendage, pickled in a jar, and pledged “my cause to my country.” The incident further ignited the passions of Parliament and pamphleteers, leading people to cry for blood—an ear for an ear—and a good deal of booty as well. The conflict became known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
Yet the heart of the plan called for an act of outright thievery: to snatch a Spanish galleon loaded with virgin silver and hundreds of thousands of silver coins.
the Centurion and the other men-of-war in the squadron—including the Gloucester, the Pearl, and the Severn
Men-of-war were among the most sophisticated machines yet conceived: buoyant wooden castles powered across oceans by wind and sail.
they were devised to be both murderous instruments and the homes in which hundreds of sailors lived together as a family.
Sir Walter Raleigh had envisioned: “Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the wo...
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Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.
And where was that bastard of the fleet, the Wager? Unlike the other men-of-war, it was not born for battle but had been a merchant vessel—a so-called East Indiaman, because it traded in that region.
The Wager’s captain, Dandy Kidd,
The ship’s name seemed fitting: weren’t they all gambling with their lives?
Farewell to the debt collectors, the invidious bureaucrats, the endless frustrations. Farewell to all of it.
As on land, there was a premium on real estate, and where you lay your head marked your place in the pecking order.
The Wager’s boatswain, a burly figure named John King,
John Duck, was a free Black seaman from London.
Thomas Clark, the ship’s master and chief navigator,
the carpenter’s mate James Mitchell.
long, dangerous voyage inexorably exposed one’s hidden soul.
The lieutenant, Robert Baynes, was second-in-command on the Wager.
As navigators, Master Clark and his mates plotted the ship’s course and instructed the quartermaster on the proper heading; the quartermaster, in turn, directed the two helmsmen who gripped the double wheel and steered.
they were commanded by two Army officers: a sphinxlike captain named Robert Pemberton and his hotheaded lieutenant, Thomas Hamilton.
“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.”
the sea officer….He should be a man of letters and languages, a mathematician, and an accomplished gentleman.”
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
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he enjoyed dining in his berth with his fellow midshipmen, Isaac Morris and Henry Cozens.
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.
Dandy Kidd—whom another officer described as a “worthy and humane commander, and universally respected onboard his ship”—moved to the Pearl. Taking his place on the Wager was George Murray, a nobleman’s son who had been in charge of the Trial sloop.
the Wager’s gunner, John Bulkeley.
The Wager’s surgeon, Henry Ettrick,
(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)
“Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea,” one sailor recalled. “The man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss….There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”
A branch of the Guaraní Indians had once thrived there, hunting and fishing, but after European explorers made contact, in the sixteenth century, and after Portuguese settlers arrived, in the seventeenth century, they’d been decimated by disease and persecution—that endless toll of imperialism rarely, if ever, recorded in logbooks.
his devoted steward, Peter Plastow,
A lee shore—a shore lying in the direction that a ship was being blown—might
“dead reckoning”—a process using a sandglass to estimate time, and a knotted line dropped in the sea to approximate the ship’s speed.
the carpenter, John Cummins, and his mate James Mitchell
Walter Elliot, had been relocated to the Wager.
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.
“Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.”
As a tale gets passed from one person to another, it ripples out until it is as wide and mythic as the sea.
“Let the fate of particular persons be what it will,” Cheap proclaimed, “but let the honour of our country be immortal.”
Does this make Cheap a good, honorable and loyal man? If he survives this test around the cape, I am interested in seeing whether he remains so blindly loyal to his country. This is a clear difference between Cheap and his mentor figure Anson. An interesting flaw.
The men quietly cheered her on. Her fate was theirs, and she fought with all she was worth, proudly, defiantly, nobly.
“if the people’s lives were saved, he had no regard to his own.”
In the face of death, and the end of the Wager, it seems that Cheap has “woken up” to his true duty as a captain. Did he let his own greed come in the way of his duty? I think so. Even if it was slight. I need to see now how Cheap will survive this situation with the men he has left, if he survives at all. If he is a part of the party that makes it out of this, I believe he should face some punishment for ignoring his men warning him of land ho.
Still, there was something unnerving about his resolution, as if he believed that only in death could he reclaim his honor.
Already he was dealing with the fact that a group of drunks remained on the unsubmerged part of the wreck…and were the men on the beach looking at him differently? Did they blame him for being marooned?
