The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

In his journal, Bulkeley jotted a line from the poet John Dryden: Presence of mind, and courage in distress, Are more than armies to procure success.

Once their boat was fastened to the man-of-war, they slithered onto the wreckage, crawling along the caved-in deck and cracked beams, which continued to break apart even as the men were perched on top of them. As the explorers inched along the sunken ruins, they saw, down in the water, the corpses of their compatriots floating between the decks; one misstep, and they would join them. “The difficulties we had to encounter in these visits to the wreck cannot be easily described,” Byron wrote.

When they weren’t mining the wreck, they went on excursions. Byron made a study of the seabirds that he saw, including the steamer duck, which had short wings and big webbed feet, and made a snoring sound when it cleaned its feathers at night. He considered this duck an avian equivalent of a racehorse, because of “the velocity with which it moved across the surface of the water, in a sort of half flying, half running motion.”

Late one evening, someone sneaked into the supply tent next to Captain Cheap’s dwelling. “The store tent was broke open, and robbed of a great deal of flour,” Bulkeley wrote. The burglary threatened the very survival of the group. Byron called it a “most heinous crime.”

When they arrived, they noticed that the seaman who had been with Mitchell was lying on the half-submerged deck. His body was still, his expression unmoving. He was dead, and there were strange marks around his neck. Though Byron couldn’t prove it, he suspected that Mitchell had strangled him so that he could keep all the spoils that they had salvaged from the wreck.

three slender canoes had appeared out of the mist. Unlike the castaways’ rickety rafts, these were sturdy and strong, made from overlapping sheaths of bark meshed together with whale tendons and curved elegantly upward at the bow and the stern. Onboard were several men with bare chests and long black hair, carrying lances and slingshots.

“Their clothing was nothing but a bit of some beast’s skin about their waists, and something woven from feathers over the shoulders,” he wrote. A fire was somehow kept going inside each canoe, and the paddlers seemed unfazed by the cold as they maneuvered expertly through the breakers. They were accompanied by several dogs—“cur-like looking” animals, Byron wrote—which surveyed the sea like fierce lookouts.

“It was evident from their great surprise,” Byron wrote, “and every part of their behavior, as well as their not having one thing in their possession which could be derived from white people, that they had never seen such.” They were a party of Kawésqar (Ka-WES-kar), which means “people who wear skins.” Along with several other indigenous groups, the Kawésqar had settled in Patagonia

(Archeological evidence indicates that the first humans in the region arrived about twelve thousand years ago, toward the end of the Ice Age.)

European explorers, baffled by how anyone could survive in the region—and seeking to justify their brutal assaults on indigenous groups—often labeled the Kawésqar and other canoe people as “cannibals,” but there is no credible evidence of this.

If a fire did go out, it was reignited by striking flint with the mineral pyrite, which contains sulfuric gases. In canoes, the fires were burned on sand or clay hearths, and the children were often responsible for stoking them. The Kawésqar were so well adapted to the cold that centuries later NASA, hoping to figure out ways for astronauts to survive on a frozen planet, sent scientists to the region to learn their methods.

Home was also the canoe…with its fireplace, potable water, a dog or two, domestic and hunting equipment, almost everything essential….Whatever food or material they needed was in the water or along the shore.”

Captain Cheap also gave them a mirror. “They were strangely affected with the novelty,” Byron wrote. “The beholder could not conceive it to be his own face that was represented, but that of some other behind it, which he therefore went round to the back of the glass to find out.” Campbell noted that the Kawésqar were “extremely courteous in their behavior,” and that Captain Cheap “treated them with great civility.”

The poet Lord Byron, drawing on his grandfather’s description, wrote in Don Juan: What could they do? and hunger’s rage grew wild: So Juan’s spaniel, spite of his entreating, Was kill’d, and portion’d out for present eating.

Mitchell and his band of nine outlaws deserted the main group and set up their own base, a few miles away, scouring for their own sources of food. They were known as the seceders, and it was perhaps best for everyone else that they had left the encampment. But they were armed and, as Campbell put it, “rambled wither they pleased.”

One of the seamen at the encampment disappeared while foraging on Mount Misery, and a search party discovered his body stuffed in the bushes. The victim, Byron wrote, had been “stabbed in several places, and shockingly mangled”; his few supplies had evidently been taken. Byron suspected that Mitchell had committed “no less than two murders since the loss of our ship.” The discovery of the body—and the discovery that some crewmen were willing to kill to survive—shook the search party.

Rifts were also growing among the men at the settlement. Many of them—including the boatswain, John King—had become brazenly vocal in their disdain for Captain Cheap. To them, he was stubborn, he was vainglorious, and he’d led them into this hellfire and was now incapable of getting them out. Why should he be the one to determine what tasks they performed and what amount of food they were allotted?

Harvey, was out for a walk when he spotted a figure crawling through the bushes by the supply tent. “Who goes there?” It was a marine named Rowland Crusset. Harvey seized and searched him. He was found to be carrying, Bulkeley recorded, “upwards of a day’s flour for ninety souls, with one piece of beef under his coat,” and he had stashed three more slabs of beef in the bushes. Another marine, Thomas Smith, who was Crusset’s messmate, had been guarding the store tent at the time and was arrested as an accomplice.

Cheap told Bulkeley and several other officers, “I really think that for robbing the store tent—which, in our present circumstances, is starving the whole body of people—the prisoners deserve death.” No one disagreed.

all three defendants were found guilty. In reviewing the Articles of War, it was determined that the “crime did not touch life,” and thus did not merit the death penalty. Instead, each guilty man was condemned to be given six hundred lashes—an amount so extreme that it would have to be administered in increments of two hundred, over three days. Otherwise, it would be lethal.

Bulkeley then spoke up, and proposed what he called “a way next to death”—one that would “strike a terror in all for the future.” After the guilty men had been flogged, he suggested, they should be banished to a rocky islet off the coast, which contained at least some mussels, snails, and fresh water, and be left there until the company had means of returning to England. Captain Cheap seized on the idea. Surely, after such a severe punishment, no one else would dare to defy his orders and put his own needs above those of the company.

Crusset’s shirt had been stripped off, exposing his back; stones of ice struck him first. Then one of the men seized the whip and with all his might began to thrash Crusset. The whip slashed his skin. One witness to a flogging noted that, after two dozen lashings, the “lacerated back looks inhuman; it resembles roasted meat burnt nearly black before a scorching fire; yet still the lashes fall.”

After another person was repeatedly whipped, Cheap ordered Byron and several men to row the thief out to the islet. The man seemed near death. Byron recalled, “We, in compassion, and contrary to order, patched him up a bit of a hut, and kindled him a fire, and then left the poor wretch to shift for himself.” A few days later, Byron went with some companions to sneak the man some nibbles of food, only to find him “dead and stiff.”

It was hard for Cheap to know what to believe. Facts, too, can become casualties in a warring society. There were rumors and counterrumors, some perhaps intentionally promulgated to create greater confusion, to further undermine him.

Even among the officers, he detected signs of disloyalty. The head of the marines, Pemberton, had lost, in Cheap’s words, “all sense of honour or the interest of his country.” The wishy-washy Lieutenant Baynes appeared to shift allegiances with the latest breeze, and the boatswain, King, incited so many quarrels that his own companions had booted him from their shelter. Then there was John Bulkeley, the seeming worm in the apple. Cheap had probed him regarding his loyalties, and Bulkeley had assured him that he and “the people”—there was that phrase again—“never would engage in any mutiny against him.”

As Cheap listened to the tumult of shrieking winds, cracking thunder, drumming hail, and roaring surf, he paced with his cane. When Anson had given him his captaincy, it was more than a promotion: it brought a measure of the respect and honor that Cheap had long coveted. And it meant that he had a chance to burnish himself in glory, as a leader of men. All of that was now being undermined, along with the outpost.

Byron observed that Cheap was “jealous to the last degree” of his power as captain—power that he saw “daily declining, and ready to be trampled upon.” On June 7, nearly a month after the Wager had run aground, he gave a simple order to Midshipman Henry Cozens to roll a cask of peas salvaged from the wreck up the beach and into the store tent. Cozens, appearing unsteady from liquor, insisted that the cask was too heavy, and began to turn away. A midshipman refusing his captain! Cheap shouted that Cozens was drunk.

“This day Mr. Henry Cozens, midshipman, was confined by the Captain,” Bulkeley recorded in his journal. “The fault alleged against him was drunkenness.”

Cozens shouted that Cheap was even worse than George Shelvocke, an infamous British buccaneer who, two decades earlier, had wrecked his ship, the Speedwell, on one of the Juan Fernández Islands. After returning to England, Shelvocke was accused of deliberately sinking the ship to defraud his investors. “Though Shelvocke was a rogue, he was not a fool,” Cozens said to Cheap. “And, by God, you are both.”

Cheap quickly recovered himself, and in a surprising act he released Cozens from confinement. But some of the men gave the midshipman more liquor, and he began to cause another ruckus, this time quarreling with the captain’s close ally the purser, Thomas Harvey. When sober, Cozens was always congenial, and Byron believed that some of the cabalists had fed his friend liquor to turn him into their own destructive agent.

Cozens was in line awaiting his share of the rations, which the purser, Harvey, distributed from the store tent, when he heard a rumor: Cheap had decided to cut his amount of wine. In an instant, Cozens stampeded toward Harvey to demand his share. The purser, still simmering from their earlier dispute, drew his flintlock pistol with its roughly foot-long barrel. Cozens continued advancing. Harvey cocked the hammer and took aim, calling Cozens a dog and accusing him of intending to commit mutiny.

The bullet soared past Cozens. Hearing the shot and the shouting about mutiny, Cheap burst out of his dwelling. His eyes were ablaze, his pistol already in hand. Squinting in the rain, he looked around for Cozens, whom he was certain had fired the bullet, and shouted, “Where’s that villain?”

Cheap walked over and, with neither questions nor ceremony, placed the cool tip of the barrel against Cozens’s left cheek. Then, as he would later describe it, he “proceeded to extremities.”

John Byron ran from his hut and saw Cozens on the ground, “weltering in his blood.” Captain Cheap had shot him in the head. Many of the men stood back, afraid of Cheap’s rage, but Byron went over and knelt by his messmate’s side as the rain washed over him. Cozens was still breathing. He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. Then he “took me by the hand,” Byron recalled, “shaking his head, as if he meant to take leave of us.”

Bulkeley observed that Cozens’s “notorious disrespectful words to the Captain might probably make the Captain suspect his design was mutiny,” but it was clear that Cozens had no weapon. Byron thought that however wrong Cozens’s actions had been, Cheap’s response was inexcusable. The onlookers continued to stir as Cozens lay before them, barely alive.

Amid the rising clamor, Cheap ordered the men to stand in assembly. Bulkeley wondered if he and his men should get their weapons. “But, on consideration, I thought better to go without arms,” he recalled.

There was a moment of uncertainty as the sea broke against the shore. Bulkeley and his men knew that if they refused to comply, they would be taking the first step toward overthrowing their appointed captain and upending the rules of the Navy—the rules that they had lived by.

Cheap’s rash shooting of Cozens, Byron noted, had nearly provoked “open sedition and revolt.” But eventually Bulkeley retreated, and the rest of the castaways followed suit. Byron, who went to his hut alone, observed that the company’s resentment seemed “smothered for the present.”

Finally, Captain Cheap ordered that Cozens be taken ...

The first textbook on medicine for sea surgeons warned that gunshot injuries “are always compound, never simple, and are the more difficult of cure.”

if Cozens were to have a chance of surviving, the bullet would need to be surgically removed. The operation was scheduled for the following day. When the time came, though, the chief surgeon, Elliot, did not appear. Some attributed his absence to a previous fight between him and Cozens. The carpenter, Cummins, said he had heard that Elliot had intended to come but Captain Cheap had intervened. Midshipman Campbell said that he was unaware of the captain ever doing such a thing, suggesting perhaps that conflict was being stoked by disinformation—just as the rumor about Cozens’s wine rations being cut had been false.

When Bulkeley asked Cheap for his permission to do so, the captain refused, insisting that Cozens had mutinous intentions, which threatened their outpost. “If he lives,” Cheap said, “I will carry him a prisoner to the Commodore, and hang him.”

Cozens asked Robert for one last favor: to deliver to Bulkeley a small package containing the extracted bullet and piece of bone. Cozens wanted the evidence preserved. Robert agreed, and Bulkeley placed the disconcerting package in his shelter.

The carpenter, Cummins, came up with a novel idea: if they could rescue the longboat that had been submerged with the wreck, they just might be able to remake it into an ark—one that could carry them off the island.

The task was hard and perilous, but the men did it, and the boat was soon heaved ashore. Cracked, waterlogged, and too cramped to hold but a fraction of the party, the vessel did not seem as if it could carry the castaways even around the island. Yet it contained the kernel of a dream. Cummins oversaw the engineering and remodeling of the craft. To fit more people in it, the thirty-six-foot hull would have to be extended at least another twelve feet. Many of the existing planks had rotted and would have to be replaced. And the boat would need to be transformed into a two-masted vessel so that it could power through the tremendous seas.

First, the longboat had to be rested on thick blocks of wood, so that the hull was elevated from the ground. Next, Cummins sawed the boat in half. Then the real trick began: somehow stitching these pieces not only back together again but also in an entirely new form, one that was longer, wider, and stronger. Through rain and sleet, gales and lightning, Cummins—whom Bulkeley described as indefatigable—honed the design with his smattering of tools, including a saw, a hammer, and an adze, which resembled an ax.

Bulkeley was seized by an idea. With their eventual new longboat and three small transport crafts, he thought, the castaways could cross through the strait and into the Atlantic, then head north to Brazil; its government, being neutral in the war, would surely provide them a safe haven and facilitate their passage back to England. The total distance from Wager Island to Brazil would be nearly three thousand miles. And Bulkeley conceded that many would deem it a “mad undertaking.” The strait was winding and narrow in places, and it often splintered into a bewildering maze of dead-end offshoots. Shoals and rocks cluttered the waters, and there were blinding fogs.

For Bulkeley, this route seemed to have another, deeper seduction. They would be charting their own destiny, emancipating themselves from a naval mission that had been bungled by government and military officials back home—a mission that had been doomed from the outset. The castaways would now choose to survive rather than venture north through the Pacific, where a Spanish armada would likely pulverize or capture them. “Our going through the Strait of Magellan for the coast of Brazil would be the only way to prevent our throwing ourselves into the hands of a cruel, barbarous, and insulting enemy,” Bulkeley concluded.

As we cannot act offensively, we ought to have regard to our safety and liberty.”

A full-blown mutiny was unlike other revolts. It took place within the very forces established by the state to impose order—the military—which is why it posed such a threat to the ruling authorities and was so often brutally quashed. This was also why mutinies captured the public imagination. 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?