The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

We are the hero of our own story. —MARY McCARTHY

Maybe there is a beast….Maybe it’s only us. —WILLIAM GOLDING, LORD OF THE FLIES

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.

Most of the officers and crew had perished, but eighty-one survivors had set out in a makeshift boat lashed together partly from the wreckage of the Wager. 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.

Six months later, another boat washed ashore, this one landing in a blizzard off the southwestern coast of Chile. It was even smaller—a wooden dugout propelled by a sail stitched from the rags of blankets. Onboard were three additional survivors, and their condition was even more frightful. They were half naked and emaciated; insects swarmed over their bodies, nibbling on what remained of their flesh.

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.

It was January 1740, and the British Empire was racing to mobilize for war against its imperial rival Spain.

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.”

Cheap’s father had possessed a large estate in Fife, Scotland, and one of those titles—the second Laird of Rossie—that evoked nobility even if it did not quite confer it. His motto, emblazoned on the family’s crest, was Ditat virtus: “Virtue enriches.” He had seven children with his first wife, and, after she died, he had six more with his second, among them David.

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.”

Cheap knew what a cracking ship the Centurion was. Swift and stout, and weighing about a thousand tons, she had, like the other warships in Anson’s squadron, three towering masts with crisscrossing yards—wooden spars from which the sails unfurled. The Centurion could fly as many as eighteen sails at a time. Its hull gleamed with varnish, and painted around the stern, in gold relief, were Greek mythological figures, including Poseidon.

To increase the chances of surviving a barrage of cannonballs, the hull had a double layer of planks, giving it a thickness of more than a foot in places. The ship had several decks, each stacked upon the next, and two of them had rows of cannons on both...

building, repairing, and fitting out these watercraft was a herculean endeavor even in the best of times, and in a period of war it was chaos. The royal dockyards, which were among the largest manufacturing sites in the world, were overwhelmed with ships—leaking ships, half-constructed ships, ships needing to be loaded and unloaded.

As sophisticated as men-of-war were with their sail propulsion and lethal gunnery, they were largely made from simple, perishable materials: hemp, canvas, and, most of all, timber. Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

Teredo navalis—a reddish shipworm, which can grow longer than a foot—ate through hulls. (Columbus lost two ships to these creatures during his fourth voyage to the West Indies.) Termites also bored through decks and masts and cabin doors, as did deathwatch beetles. A species of fungus further devoured the ship’s wooden core.

John Byron was awakened by the maniacal cries of the Wager’s boatswain and his mates summoning the morning watch: “Rouse out, you sleepers! Rouse out!” It was not quite four a.m., and still dark out, though from his berth in the bowels of the ship Byron couldn’t discern whether it was day or night. As a midshipman on the Wager—he was only sixteen—he was given a spot below the quarterdeck, below the upper deck, and even below the lower deck, where the ordinary sailors slept in hammocks, their bodies dangling from the beams. Byron was stuck down in the aft part of the orlop deck—a damp, airless hole devoid of natural light.

this was still a glorious seven inches more room than was allotted to ordinary seamen—though less than what officers had in their private berths, especially the captain, whose great cabin off the quarterdeck included a sleeping chamber, dining area, and a balcony overlooking the sea.

John Byron had been left with few means to earn a respectable living. He could enter the Church, as one of his younger brothers later did, but that was far too dull for his sensibilities. He could serve in the Army, which many gentlemen preferred, because they could frequently sit idly on a horse looking debonair. Then there was the Navy, in which you actually had to work and get your hands dirty. Samuel Pepys had tried to encourage young noblemen and gentlemen to think of going to sea as “honourable service.”

These volunteers, who often began as either a captain’s servant or what was known as a King’s Letter boy, were eventually rated as midshipmen, which gave them an ambiguous status on a man-of-war.

Despite these enticements, a naval career was considered somewhat unseemly for a person of Byron’s pedigree—a “perversion,” as Samuel Johnson, who knew Byron’s family, called it. Yet Byron was enraptured by the mystique of the sea. He was fascinated by books about sailors, like Sir Francis Drake, so much so that he brought them onboard the Wager—the stories of maritime exploits stashed in his sea chest.

“I had anticipated a kind of elegant house with guns in the windows; an orderly set of men; in short, I expected to find a species of Grosvenor Place, floating around like Noah’s ark.” Instead, he noted, the deck was “dirty, slippery and wet; the smells abominable; the whole sight disgusting; and when I remarked the slovenly attire of the midshipmen, dressed in shabby round jackets, glazed hats, no gloves, and some without shoes, I forgot all the glory…and, for nearly the first time in my life, and I wish I could say it was the last, took the handkerchief from my pocket, covered my face, and cried like the child I was.”

the demands of shipboard life: a hat, to shield them from the sun; a jacket (usually blue), to stay warm; a neckerchief, to mop the brow; and trousers—that curious fashion started by sailors. These pants, like his jacket, were cut short to keep them from getting caught in the ropes, and during foul weather they were coated with protective sticky tar. Even in these humble garments, Byron cut a striking figure, with pale, luminous skin; large, curious brown eyes; and ringlets of hair. One observer later described him as irresistibly handsome—“the champion of his form.”

Byron heard scampering footsteps and a babel of accents. There were men from all strata of society, from dandies to city paupers, who had to have their wages garnished to pay the purser, Thomas Harvey, for their slops and eating utensils.

Although the society on a ship was not always as rigidly segregated as its counterpart on land, there was widespread discrimination.

As one seaman observed, “A man-of-war may justly be styled an epitome of the world, in which there is a sample of every character, some good men as well as bad.” Among the latter, he noted, were “highwaymen, burglars, pickpockets, debauchees, adulterers, gamesters, lampooners, bastard-getters, imposters, panders, parasites, ruffians, hypocrites, threadworn beaux jack-a-dandies.”

But the Wager had an unusual number of unwilling and troublesome crewmen, including the carpenter’s mate James Mitchell. He frightened Byron even more than the boatswain, King; he seemed to burn with murderous rage. Byron could not yet know for certain the true nature lurking inside his fellow seamen or even himself: a long, dangerous voyage inexorably exposed one’s hidden soul.

each person had his own distinct station—one that designated not only where he worked on the ship but also where he stood in its hierarchy. Captain Kidd, who presided from the quarterdeck, was at the pinnacle of this structure.

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.

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.

About a third of the way up, he came abreast of the main yard, the wooden spar that extended from the mast like the arms of a cross, and from which the mainsail unfurled. It was also where, on the foremast, a condemned mutineer got hanged from a rope—or, as the saying went, took “a walk up Ladder Lane, and down Hemp Street.”

These ropes were coated in tar against the elements, and the boatswain was responsible for making sure that they remained in good condition. 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.

Bulkeley complained that “prayer had been entirely neglected on board,” and that in the Navy “devotion, in so solemn a manner, is so rarely performed that I know but one instance of it during the many years I have belonged.” He had brought with him a book entitled The Christian’s Pattern: or, A Treatise of the Imitation of Jesus Christ, and he seemed to approach the treacherous journey at least partly as a way of getting closer to himself and to God. Suffering can “make a man enter into himself,” the book instructed, but in this world of temptation, “the life of man is a warfare upon earth.”

Most important, he fiercely guarded the munitions entrusted to him, knowing that if they fell into careless or mutinous hands, they could destroy a ship from within. A 1747 naval manual stressed that a gunner must be a “sober, careful, honest man,” and it seemed to describe Bulkeley exactly when it noted that some of the best gunners had come from the “lowest station on board, raising themselves to preferment by pure dint of diligence and industry.”

Unlike his new captain, George Murray, or the midshipman John Byron, he was no silk-stocking dandy. He didn’t have a baron as a father, or some powerful patron greasing his path to the quarterdeck. He might outrank Byron—and might serve as his guide on the ways of a man-of-war—but he was still considered socially inferior to him. Though there were instances of gunners becoming lieutenants or captains, they were rare, and Bulkeley was too blunt, too certain of himself, to flatter his superiors, which he deemed a “degenerate” practice.

Daniel Defoe complained that sailors’ logbooks were often no more than “tedious accounts of…how many leagues they sailed every day; where they had the winds, when it blew hard, and when softly.”

And some log keepers inserted personal notes. Bulkeley, in one of his journals, transcribed a verse from a poem: Bold were the Men who on the Ocean first Spread the new Sails, when Ship wreck was the worst: More Dangers Now from MAN alone we find, Than from the Rocks, the Billows, and the Wind.

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

Bulkeley rarely betrayed emotion, and in his journal he coolly noted this turn of events, as if it were just another trial in that eternal “warfare upon earth.” (As his book on Christianity asked, “How shall thy patience be crowned, if no adversity happen unto thee?”) But his entry did dwell on one unsettling detail. He wrote that Captain Kidd, on his deathbed, had delivered a prophecy concerning the expedition: “It would end in poverty, vermin, famine, death and destruction.”

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.

Moreover, a sudden shallowing of the seabed in the region—it goes from thirteen hundred feet deep to barely three hundred—combines with the other brute forces to generate waves of frightening magnitude. These “Cape Horn rollers” can dwarf a ninety-foot mast. Floating on some of these waves are lethal bergs cleaved from pack ice. And the collision of cold fronts from the Antarctic and warm fronts from near the equator produce an endless cycle of rain and fog, sleet and snow, thunder and lightning.

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. Herman Melville, who made the passage, compared it, in White-Jacket, to the descent into hell in Dante’s Inferno. “At those ends of the earth are no chronicles,” Melville wrote, except for the ruins of spars and hulls that hint of dark endings—“of ships that have sailed from their ports, and never more have been heard of.”

Cape Horn is Cape Horn….Heaven help the sailors, their wives and their little ones.” Over the years, seamen have strained to find a fitting name for this watery graveyard at the ends of the earth. Some call it the “Terrible,” others “Dead Men’s Road.” Rudyard Kipling dubbed it the “blind Horn’s hate.”

In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering a prize of twenty thousand pounds—the equivalent today of some three and a half million dollars—for a “Practicable and Useful” solution. Cheap’s former vessel the Centurion had played a role in testing a potentially revolutionary new method. Four years before this voyage, it had carried onboard a forty-three-year-old inventor named John Harrison, whom the First Lord of the Admiralty, Charles Wager, had recommended as a “very ingenious and sober man.”

The clock was in its developmental stages, but when Harrison used it to gauge the Centurion’s longitude, he correctly announced that the ship was off course by…sixty miles! Harrison continued to hone his timekeeper until, in 1773, at the age of eighty, he garnered the prize.

They were forced instead to rely on “dead reckoning”—a process using a sandglass to estimate time, and a knotted line dropped in the sea to approximate the ship’s speed. The method, which also incorporated intuition about the effects of winds and currents, amounted to informed guesswork and a leap of faith. Too often for a commander, as Sobel put it, “the technique of dead reckoning marked him for a dead man.”

But what Cheap did not know—what none of the men knew—was that summer was not actually the safest time to round the Horn from east to west. Though in May and the winter months of June and July, the air temperature is colder and there is less light, the winds are tempered and sometimes blow from the east, making it easier to sail toward the Pacific. During the rest of the year, the conditions are more brutal.

“The only things we met with remarkable here are the armadillos, or what the seamen call hogs in armour,” the Trial’s purser, Millechamp, wrote. “They are about the size of a large cat, their nose like a hog’s, with a thick shell…hard enough to resist a strong blow with a hammer.” St. Julian was not just a place of desolation; it also stood, in the eyes of Cheap and his men, as a grisly memorial to the toll that a long, claustrophobic voyage could wreak upon a ship’s company.

He remained vigilant, peering at times through his spyglass. There were penguins, which Millechamp described as “half fish, half fowl,” and there were southern right whales and humpbacks, blowing their spouts. The impressionable Byron later wrote of these southern seas, “It is incredible the number of whales that are here, it makes it dangerous for a ship, we were very near striking upon one, and another blew the water in upon the quarterdeck and they are of the largest kind we ever have seen.”

The conquistadores had claimed that the inhabitants of these bottomlands were a race of giants. According to Magellan’s scribe, one was “so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist.” Magellan called the region Patagonia.

There was a sinister design to these fictions. By portraying the natives as both magnificent and less than human, Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.