The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

If only the captain had conferred with his officers at sea, he wrote, “we might probably have escaped our present unhappy condition.”

Presence of mind, and courage in distress, Are more than armies to procure success.

To prevent them from falling into a Hobbesian state with “every man against every man,” Cheap believed the castaways needed binding rules and rigid structures—and their commander.

Campbell wrote that, all this time, Cheap had “expressed the greatest concern for the safety of the people,” adding, “If it had not been for the Captain, many would have perished.”

Byron realized that, unlike the solitary castaway Alexander Selkirk, who had inspired Robinson Crusoe, he now had to cope with the most unpredictable and volatile creatures in all of nature: desperate humans.

They were a party of Kawésqar (Ka-WES-kar), which means “people who wear skins.” Along with several other indigenous groups, the Kawésqar had settled in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego thousands of years earlier.

(The Yaghan, a seafaring people whose territory was farther south, faced even Cape Horn storms in their canoes.)

“The pressing calls of hunger drove our men to their wits’ end,”

“the spirits of the dead were not at rest till their bodies were interred; and that they did not cease to haunt and trouble those who had neglected this duty to the departed.”

he was stubborn, he was vainglorious, and he’d led them into this hellfire and was now incapable of getting them out. Why should he be the one to determine what tasks they performed and what amount of food they were allotted? What gave him the right to rule with absolute power when there was no ship, no Admiralty, no government at all?

The shipwreck had laid waste to the old hierarchies: every man had now been dealt the same miserable hand.

When Anson had given him his captaincy, it was more than a promotion: it brought a measure of the respect and honor that Cheap had long coveted. And it meant that he had a chance to burnish himself in glory, as a leader of men. All of that was now being undermined, along with the outpost.

“They are in great pain, and can scarce see to walk.” Yet they were compelled onward by that mysterious narcotic: hope.

“The loss of the ship was the loss of him; he knew how to govern while he was a commander on board, but when things were brought to confusion and disorder, he thought to establish his command ashore by his courage, and to suppress the least insult on his authority.”

“We will support you with our lives as long as you suffer reason to rule,”

What was it that drove the enforcers of order to descend into disorder? Were they extreme outlaws? Or was there something rotten at the very core of the system, something that imbued their rebellion with nobility?

the real source of chaos on the island, the one really violating the ethos of the Navy, was Cheap himself, as if he were the true mutineer.

“We think him a gentleman worthy to have a limited command, but too dangerous a person to be trusted with an absolute one.”

“You have given yourself no manner of concern for the public good…but have acted quite the reverse, or else have been so careless and indifferent about it, as if we had no commander.”

Here Cheap was, defeated, bound, humiliated, and yet he remained composed, steady, and courageous. He had finally, like a true captain, mastered himself.

they had agreed to abandon their captain on Wager Island. It was necessary, they insisted, “in order to prevent murder.”

“We call this harbour the Port of God’s Mercy, esteeming our preservation this day to be a miracle,” Bulkeley wrote. “The most abandoned among us no longer doubt of an Almighty Being, and have promised to reform their lives.”

“Persons who have not experienced the hardships we have met with,” Bulkeley wrote, “will wonder how people can be so inhuman to see their fellow creatures starving before their faces, and afford ’em no relief. But hunger is void of all compassion.”

desperation can also breed unity—and

Cheap, spared what Byron described as the “riotous applications, menaces, and disturbance of an unruly crew,” seemed renewed, engaged, alive. “He now became very brisk,” Campbell observed, “went about everywhere to get wood and water, made fires, and proved an excellent cook.”

This is what it took for Cheap. He was not able to step up to the plate under "normal" circumstances. He had to be broken, almost killed and left for dead. I wish the rest of the crew had chance to see Cheap at this point. More lives could have been saved.

Cheap glanced at the outpost, their home for the past seven months. All that remained were some scattered, windbeaten shelters—evidence of a life-and-death struggle that would soon be wiped away by the elements.

They paused onshore to sleep, and when they awoke the next morning, they realized that the date was December 25. They celebrated Christmas with a feast of sea-tangle and cups of fresh streamwater—“Adam’s wine,” as they called it, because that was all God had given Adam to drink. Cheap toasted to the health of King George II, before they packed up and sailed on.

“We considered that if the boat sunk, we then should be free from the miserable life we led, and die all together.”

Was God seeing the things they did out here? Bulkeley still sought solace from The Christian’s Pattern, but a passage in it warned, “Hadst thou a clear conscience, thou could not fear death. It were better to avoid sin than to flee death.” Yet was it a sin to want to live?

Bulkeley had written in his journal, “I believe no mortals have experienced more difficulties and miseries than we have.”

Bulkeley had been the only person to keep a contemporaneous account on Wager Island, and King and some of his allies apparently feared what it might divulge about their roles in overthrowing Captain Cheap.

“If things were not carried on with that order and regularity which is strictly observed in the Navy, necessity drove us out of the common road,”

“We have strictly complied with the desire of the unfortunate Capt. Cheap, whose last injunction was to give a faithful narrative to your Lordships.”

“We had the example of a brave, humane, equal-minded, prudent commander,” an officer on the Centurion said of Anson, adding, “His temper was so steady and unruffled that the men and officers all looked on him with wonder and delight, and could not for shame betray any great dejection under the most imminent danger.”

“Unless we wish to end our days here in this wild place,” Anson told the men, “we must put our backs into the work before us, and each labour as much for himself as for his shipmates.”

THIS is a leader.

The commodore joined in the toil, putting himself, as one of the men recalled it, on the same level as “the meanest sailor in his crew.”

Anson, along with all the other senior officers, sharing in the hardest tasks made everyone “endeavour to excel, and indeed we soon found that our wo...

members of the Wager’s company had now perpetrated virtually every grave sin under the Articles of War—including treason.

London was the pulsing heart of an island empire built on the toll of seamen and slavery and colonialism.

Because of the sheer number of accounts—including those of dubious provenance—perceptions of the Wager affair varied from reader to reader. Bulkeley, whose journal kept being pilfered by hacks, was incensed when he realized that it was increasingly being regarded with suspicion, as if it, too, might be fake.

“The law is the guardian of the ideal of unmediated truth, truth stripped bare of the ornament of narration….The story that can best withstand the attrition of the rules of evidence is the story that wins.”

Eighteenth-century British naval law has a reputation for being draconian, but it was often more flexible and forgiving in reality. Under the Articles of War, many transgressions, including falling asleep on watch, were punishable by death, yet there was usually an important caveat: a court could hand down a lesser sentence if it saw fit. And although overthrowing a captain was a grave crime, “mutinous” behavior often applied to minor insubordinations not deemed worthy of severe punishment.

“They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts.” And all the former castaways’ accounts contained, at their core, certain incontrovertible facts. Neither side disputed that Bulkeley, Baynes, and their party had tied up their captain and left him on the island, or that Cheap had shot an unarmed man without any legal proceedings or even any warning. These were the facts!

These men knew the rules and regulations, knew exactly what they were doing, and after each violation had tried to create a paper trail to help them escape the consequences.

“Brother seamen, you see before you three lusty young fellows about to suffer a shameful death for the dreadful crime of mutiny and desertion. Take warning by our example never to desert your officers, and should they behave ill to you, remember it is not their cause, it is the cause of your country you are bound to support.”

The survivors of the Wager had every reason to expect to be hanged—or, as Bulkeley put it, to “fall by the violence of power.”

The official inquiry into the Wager affair was permanently closed. Cheap’s deposition detailing his allegations eventually disappeared from the court-martial files. And the upheaval on Wager Island became, in the words of Glyndwr Williams, “the mutiny that never was.”

They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions—with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.

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.

Just as people tailor their stories to serve their interests—revising, erasing, embroidering—so do nations. After all the grim and troubling narratives about the Wager disaster, and after all the death and destruction, the empire had finally found its mythic tale of the sea.