The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

Faced with starvation and freezing temperatures, they built an outpost and tried to re-create naval order. But as their situation deteriorated, the Wager’s officers and crew—those supposed apostles of the Enlightenment—descended into a Hobbesian state of depravity. There were warring factions and marauders and abandonments and murders. A few of the men succumbed to cannibalism.

“We stand or fall by the truth; if truth will not support us, nothing can.”

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.

On the Wager, the marines mostly helped with heaving and hauling. And if there was ever an insurrection onboard, the captain would order them to suppress it.

And he might have to ram his prow over an enemy ship, so that his men could storm it with boarding axes and cutlasses and swords, as gunplay gave way to hand-to-hand combat.

By December, more than sixty-five members of the squadron had been buried at sea.

Nevertheless, the sickness did not release its grip, and at least eighty men and boys died on the island, their bodies buried in shallow, sandy graves. In a report to the Admiralty, Anson noted that since the squadron had left England 160 of its roughly 2,000 members had perished. And the fleet had not even begun the most perilous part of the journey.

Because the far-southern seas are the only waters that flow uninterrupted around the globe, they gather enormous power, with waves building over as much as thirteen thousand miles, accumulating strength as they roll through one ocean after another. When they arrive, at last, at Cape Horn, they are squeezed into a narrowing corridor between the southernmost American headlands and the northernmost part of the Antarctic Peninsula. This funnel, known as the Drake Passage, makes the torrent even more pulverizing. The currents are not only the longest-running on earth but also the strongest, transporting more than four billion cubic feet of water per second, more than six hundred times the discharge of the Amazon River. And then there are the winds. Consistently whipping eastward from the Pacific, where no lands obstruct them, they frequently accelerate to hurricane force, and can reach two hundred miles per hour. Seamen refer to the latitudes in which they blow with names that capture the increasing intensity: the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, and the Screaming Sixties.

Spain preferred to sail cargo to one coast of Panama and then haul it more than fifty miles across the sweltering, disease-ridden jungle to ships waiting on the opposite coast. Anything to avoid tempting the Horn.

We had to turn our heads to take a breath, or the wind simply jammed the air down our throats. The rain stung our faces and our bare legs like hard pellets.

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.

It reads, “Henry Cheap, AB, DD…at sea.” It was Captain Cheap’s young nephew and apprentice. His death no doubt rattled the Wager’s new captain more than any storm.

Commodore Anson, in order to turn the Centurion, was forced to send several topmen to stand on the yards, hold on to ropes, and use their bodies to catch the wind. The gale blew against their faces and chests and arms and legs, each a threadbare sail. With extraordinary daring, the men resisted the wind with their frosted, concaved bodies long enough to allow Anson to maneuver the ship. But one topman lost his grip and was cast into the churning ocean. It was impossible to come about in time to rescue him, and the men watched as he stroked after them, trying frantically to catch up, waging a heroic, solitary war against the waves, until he receded in the distance—though they knew he was still out there, swimming after them.

To further pacify the men, he released a bit more flour from their stores, noting that many people eat the powder “raw as soon as they are served it.”

and Cheap knew that if they didn’t lighten the already overloaded boats they would sink for a second time off Wager Island. And so the men were forced to do the unthinkable: throw overboard virtually all their supplies, including the precious casks of food. The famished men looked on as their last rations were swallowed by the voracious sea.