The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

They were hailed for their ingenuity and bravery. As the leader of the party noted, it was hard to believe that “human nature could possibly support the miseries that we have endured.”

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.

Onshore, Cheap seemed doomed, unable to navigate past life’s unexpected shoals.

Anson corresponded even more sparingly, as if he doubted the ability of words to convey what he saw or felt.

One sailor described a man-of-war as a “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.”

being initiated into a mysterious civilization so strange that it seemed to one boy as if he were “always asleep or in a dream.”

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.

Because the concept of germs had not yet emerged, surgical instruments were not sterilized, and paranoia over the source of the epidemic ate at sailors like the disease itself. Did typhus spread through the water or through dirt? Through a touch or a look? One prevailing medical theory held that certain stagnant environments, like those on a ship, emitted noxious smells that caused disease in humans. Something, it was believed, really was “in the air.”

how far would he prove “faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly”?

Everything seemed to drip, to shrivel, to decompose.

“The difficulties we had to encounter in these visits to the wreck cannot be easily described,” Byron wrote.

Mitchell and his gang roved about the island with their long beards and hollowed eyes, demanding more liquor and threatening those who opposed them.

The accused men’s only defense seemed to be that they would have done anything, no matter how cruel or cunning, to avoid starvation.

“Where’s that villain?” There was no reply, but he spied Cozens amid the growing crowd. Cheap walked over and, with neither questions nor ceremony, placed the cool tip of the barrel against Cozens’s left cheek. Then, as he would later describe it, he “proceeded to extremities.”

faced with growing dissent, he turned the boat around, heading back the way they had come. One marine began to go mad, laughing hysterically, until he slumped over in silence, dead. Another man died shortly after, and then another. Their bodies were tossed into the sea.

It took the surviving party close to two weeks to retrace its path, only to then realize that they had found the strait all along. Now they had to start east all over again. Maybe Cheap was right—maybe they should have headed north.

Byron had even eaten the rancid, foul-smelling sealskins covering his feet.

“I believe no mortals have experienced more difficulties and miseries than we have.”