The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

Three months after the court-martial, three long-lost crew members from Bulkeley’s party, including the midshipman Isaac Morris, astonishingly arrived on a ship in Portsmouth. It had been more than four years since these men had swum ashore in Patagonia with a small party from the Speedwell to gather provisions—only to be left behind on the beach.

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.

In 1959, Patrick O’Brian published The Unknown Shore, a novel inspired by the Wager disaster.

Though a fledgling, less polished work, it provided O’Brian with a template for his subsequent masterful series set during the Napoleonic Wars.

By the late nineteenth century, the Chono had been wiped out by contact with Europeans, and by the early twentieth century there were only a few dozen Kawésqar, who had settled at a hamlet about a hundred miles south of the Golfo de Penas.

Wager Island remains a place of wild desolation. Today, it looks no less forbidding, its shores still battered by unrelenting winds and waves. The trees are knotted and twisted and bent, and many have been blackened by lightning. The ground is sodden from rain and sleet. A near-permanent mist enshrouds the top of Mount Anson

Near Mount Misery, where the castaways built their outpost, a few stalks of celery still sprout, and you can forage for scattered limpets like those the men survived on. And a short way inland, partially buried in an icy stream, are several rotted wooden planks that, hundreds of years ago, washed up onto the island. About five yards long and hammered with treenails, these boards are from the skeletal frame of an eighteenth-century hull—His Majesty’s Ship the Wager. Nothing else remains of the ferocious struggle that once took place there, or of the ravaging dreams of empires.

I especially want to thank John Fontana, who designed the book’s cover; Maria Carella, who did the interior design;

One day several years ago, I made a visit to the British National Archives, in Kew, where I put in a request. Hours later, I received a box; inside was a dusty, moldering manuscript. To avoid damaging it further, I gently pried open the cover with a paper marker. Each page was arranged in columns, with such headings as “month and year,” ship’s “course,” and “Remarkable Observations and Incidents.” The entries, composed with a quill and ink, were now smudged, and the writing was so small and squirrely that I strained to decipher it.

On April 6, 1741, with the ship trying to round Cape Horn, an officer wrote under observations, “All the sails and rigging was bad and men very sickly.”

On April 21, the entry read: “Timothy Picaz, seaman, departed this life…Thomas Smith, invalid, departed this life…John Paterson, invalid, and John Fiddies, seaman, departed this life.”

Even after more than two and a half centuries have passed, there is a surprising trove of firsthand documents, including those detailing the Wager’s calamitous wreck on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. 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.

My descriptions of Wager Island and the surrounding seas were further enhanced by my own three-week journey there, which provided at least a glimpse of the wonder and terror that the castaways experienced. To depict life inside the wooden world during the eighteenth century, I also relied on both published and unpublished journals of other mariners.

Glyn Williams’s book The Prize of All the Oceans remains invaluable, as does his edited collection of primary records, Documents Relating to Anson’s Voyage Round the World. Other essential sources included Daniel Baugh’s groundbreaking British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole; Denver Brunsman’s illuminating history of impressment, The Evil Necessity; Brian Lavery’s brilliant studies of shipbuilding and naval life, among them The Arming and Fitting of English Ships of War, 1600–1815 and his edited collection of primary documents, Shipboard Life and Organisation, 1731–1815; and N. A. M. Rodger’s monumental The Wooden World. Rear Admiral C. H. Layman has also reprinted several key records in his edited collection of primary documents, The Wager Disaster.

My description of the arrival of the vessels is drawn largely from the survivors’ journals, dispatches, published accounts, and private correspondence. For more information, see John Bulkeley and John Cummins’s A Voyage to the South Seas; John Byron’s The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron; Alexander Campbell’s The Sequel to Bulkeley and Cummins’s “Voyage to the South Seas”; C. H. Layman’s The Wager Disaster; and records in TNA-ADM 1 and JS.

“human nature”: Bulkeley and Cummins, A Voyage to the South Seas, xxxi. John Cummins, the carpenter on the Wager, is listed as coauthor of the journal, but Bulkeley was the one who actually wrote it.

Campbell’s The Sequel to Bulkeley and Cummins’s “Voyage to the South-Seas”; and Alexander Carlyle’s Anecdotes and Characters of the Times.

Walter Vernon Anson’s The Life of Admiral Lord Anson: The Father of the British Nav, 1697–1762; John Barrow’s The Life of Lord George Anson;

Andrew D. Lambert’s Admirals: The Naval Commanders Who Made Britain Great; Brian Lavery, Anson’s Navy: Building a Fleet for Empire 1744 –1763; Richard Walter’s A Voyage Round the World; S. W. C. Pack’s Admiral Lord Anson: The Story of Anson’s Voyage and Naval Events of His Day; and Glyn Williams’s The Prize of All the Oceans.

Craig S. Chapman, Disaster on the Spanish Main, and Robert Gaudi, The War of Jenkins’ Ear: The Forgotten War for North and South America.