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.

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.

As Samuel Johnson once observed, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”

Sir Walter Raleigh had envisioned: “Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world.”

Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

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.

(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)

On a previous British expedition, an officer had spotted an albatross by Staten Island and, fearing that it was a bad omen, shot it, and the ship later wrecked on an island. The incident inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem, the killing of the albatross brings a curse upon the seaman, causing his companions to die of thirst: Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung. Anson’s men hunted these birds nonetheless. “I remember one caught with a hook and line…baited with a piece of salt pork,” Millechamp wrote. Though the albatross weighed about thirty pounds, he added, “the captain, lieutenant, surgeon and myself eat him all up for dinner.”

“Below forty degrees latitude, there is no law,” a sailors’ adage went. “Below fifty degrees, there is no God.”

Byron tried to offer his deceased companions a proper sea burial, but there were so many corpses, and so few hands to assist, that the bodies often had to be heaved overboard unceremoniously. As the poet Lord Byron—who drew on what he referred to as “my grand-dad’s ‘Narrative’ ”—would put it, “Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.”

Cheap knew that unity was paramount to their survival, intuiting a principle that science would later demonstrate. In 1945, in one of the most comprehensive modern studies of human deprivation, known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, scientists assessed the effects of hunger on a group of individuals. During a six-month period, thirty-six male volunteers—all were single, fit pacifists who had shown an ability to get along with others—had their calorie intake cut in half. The men lost their strength and stamina—each shedding roughly a quarter of his body weight—and they became irritable, depressed, and unable to concentrate. Many of the volunteers had hoped that self-abnegation would lead them, like monks, to a deeper spirituality, but instead they began conniving, stealing food, and coming to blows. “How many people have I hurt with my indifference, my grouchiness, my overbearing perversion for food?” one subject wrote. Another subject shouted, “I’m going to kill myself,” then turned on one of the scientists and said, “I’m going to kill you.” This person also fantasized about cannibalism and had to be removed from the experiment. A report summarizing the results of the study noted that the volunteers were shocked at “how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be.”

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.