The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

In September 1740, during an imperial conflict with Spain, the Wager, carrying some 250 officers and crew, had embarked from Portsmouth in a squadron on a secret mission: to capture a treasure-filled Spanish galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans.” Near Cape Horn, at the tip of South America, the squadron had been engulfed by a hurricane, and the Wager was believed to have sunk with all its souls. But 283 days after the ship had last been reported seen, these men miraculously emerged in Brazil.

What happened.

Packed so tightly onboard that they could barely move, they traveled through menacing gales and tidal waves, through ice storms and earthquakes. More than fifty men died during the arduous journey, and by the time the few remnants reached Brazil three and a half months later, they had traversed nearly three thousand miles—one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded. They were hailed for their ingenuity and bravery. As

Its hard to fathom this happening today, especially among people who dont know where theyre going. Is it any wonder they were thought of as heroic?

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. In the process, they subjugated and destroyed innumerable indigenous peoples, justifying their ruthless self-interest—including the reliance on the ever-expanding Atlantic slave trade—by claiming that they were somehow spreading “civilization” to the benighted realms of the earth.

Sounds familiar.

The topmen, who were young and agile and admired for their fearlessness, scurried up the masts to unfurl and roll up sails, and to keep lookout, hovering in the sky like birds of prey. 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. The forecastle men tended to be the most experienced, their bodies bearing the stigmata of years at sea: crooked fingers, leathery skin, lash scars. On the bottom rung, situated on deck alongside the squawking, defecating livestock, were the “waisters”—pitiful landlubbers with no sea experience who were relegated to unskilled drudgery. Finally, in their own special category, were the marines: soldiers detached from the Army who were equally pathetic landlubbers. While at sea, they were governed by naval authority and had to obey the Wager’s captain, but they were commanded by two Army officers:

Heirarchies of sea faring

One British captain recommended that a young officer in training bring onboard a small library with the classics by Virgil and Ovid and poems by Swift and Milton. “It is a mistaken notion that any blockhead will make a seaman,” the captain explained. “I don’t know one situation in life that requires so accomplished an education as the sea officer….He should be a man of letters and languages, a mathematician, and an accomplished gentleman.”

Surprising? Why is this the case?

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 ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.

Sayings derived from seamanship.

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?

Why mutiny is interesting.

because naval rules stated that, after a shipwreck, the seamen onboard were no longer entitled to wages, the castaways might have assumed that they were not subject to naval law on the island. Yet this bureaucratic reasoning, which the historian Glyndwr Williams called an “escape clause,” baldly ignored an addendum to the rule: if seamen were still able to procure supplies from a wreck, then they continued to be on the Navy’s payroll.

Fair?

Of the nearly two thousand men who had set sail, more than thirteen hundred had perished—a shocking death rate, even for such a long voyage. And though Anson had returned with some 400,000 pounds’ worth of booty, the war had cost taxpayers 43 million pounds.

Mirrors modern day conflicts? What's the cost of war, and does the end justify the means?

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.

These records include not only logbooks, but also correspondence, diaries, muster books, court-martial testimony, Admiralty reports, and other government records. Added to them are numerous contemporaneous newspaper accounts, sea ballads, and sketches made during the voyage. And, of course, there are the vivid sea narratives that many of the participants themselves published.