The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

captain, whose great cabin off the quarterdeck included a sleeping chamber, dining area, and a balcony overlooking the sea. As on land, there was a premium on real estate, and where you lay your head marked your place in the pecking order.

Real estate

The boatswain and his mates, the town criers, continued bellowing and blowing their whistles. They moved through the decks, holding lanterns and leaning over slumbering seamen, shouting, “Out or down! Out or down!” Anyone who didn’t rise would have his hammock cut free from the rope suspending it, sending his body crashing onto the deck. The Wager’s boatswain, a burly figure named John King, would not likely touch a midshipman. But Byron knew to stay clear of him. Boatswains, who were responsible for herding crews and administering punishments—including

Then came those assigned to the forecastle, a partial deck toward the bow, where they controlled the headsails and also heaved and dropped the anchors, the largest of which weighed about two tons.

Check this weight

On the night of November 19, the transfer of the Industry’s cargo was complete. Bulkeley wrote succinctly, in his journal,

My birthday !

a band sounded French horns and trumpets and kettle drums, the party marched over Fulham Bridge and through the city streets, past Piccadilly and St. James’s. At Pall Mall, Anson stood beside the Prince and the Princess of Wales, peering out at the delirious crowds—a scene that one observer compared to the Roman games. As the historian N. A. M. Rodger has noted, “It was the treasure of the galleon, triumphantly paraded through the streets

Look on the map

As Cheap, Byron, and Hamilton made their way back home, they sailed past Wager Island and round Cape Horn, as if they were journeying through their ravaged past. Yet in the everlasting mystery of the sea, this time the passage was relatively calm. When they reached Dover, Byron immediately set out for London on a loaned horse. Now twenty-two, he was dressed like a pauper, and with no spare change he sped past the tollgates. He later recalled that he had been “obliged to defraud, by riding as hard as I could through them all, not paying the least regard to the men, who called out to stop me.” Clattering along the muddy cobblestone roads, he raced through fields and hamlets, through suburbs spreading outward from London, the largest city in Europe with a population approaching 700,000. The city—that

1744 is the year 700,000 population London

to “do his utmost” during battle, prompting Voltaire to remark in Candide that the English believed it proper to “kill an admiral from time to time in order to encourage the

Candide read it again

Five years before the court-martial, Admiral Vernon had led, as planned, Britain’s massive assault with nearly two hundred ships on the South American city of Cartagena. But plagued by mismanagement, infighting between military leaders, and the constant menace of yellow fever, the siege had resulted in the loss of more than ten thousand men. After sixty-seven days of failing to capture the city, Vernon declared to his surviving crew that they were “surrounded with the toils of death.” He then ordered a humiliating retreat.

Cartagena battle

In 1713, the British South Sea Company had received from Spain what was known as an asiento—a license to sell nearly five thousand African people a year as slaves in Spain’s Latin American colonies. Because of this abhorrent new agreement, English merchants were able to use their ships to smuggle such goods as sugar and wool. As the Spanish increasingly retaliated by seizing vessels that sold forbidden goods, British merchants and their political allies began searching for a pretext to rally the public for war to expand Britain’s colonial holdings and monopolies on trade. And “the fable of Jenkins’s ear,” as Edmund Burke later dubbed it, provided a righteous sheen to their scheme. (The historian David Olusoga had noted that the unseemly aspects of the war’s origin have largely been “expunged from the mainstream narrative of British history.”)

The war of Jenkin's Ear

was one of hundreds of documented slave rebellions and indigenous insurrections that had taken place in the Americas—true mutinies. As the historian Jill Lepore has noted, occupied peoples had “revolted again and again and again,” asking the “same question, unrelentingly: By what right are we ruled?” On the Spanish ship, Orellana and his party continued to maintain control over the command center, blocking the gangplanks and resisting incursions. But they had no way to maneuver the ship and no place to go, and after more than an hour Pizarro and his forces began to regroup.

Was it terrorism or rebellion or righteousness that made them jump to their demise