The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder

The summary

The shipwreck is not the story. On January 28, 1742, thirty skeletal men drifted into an inlet off the Brazilian coast in a boat patched together from scraps of wood and cloth, and announced themselves as castaways from His Majesty’s Ship the Wager. They had last been seen 283 days earlier. England received them as heroes. Six months later three more survivors washed up in Chile, half naked and crawling with insects, carrying a different account: the men in Brazil were not heroes but mutineers.

Both parties were summoned before the Admiralty, where the punishment on the table was the yardarm. Grann’s interest is in what happened next. Having survived typhoons, scurvy and starvation, the men now had to survive each other’s version of events — as he put it to NPR, after waging a war against the elements they began to wage a war over the truth.

The disaster was loaded aboard before the ship sailed

The Wager left Portsmouth in September 1740 carrying some 250 officers and crew, one ship in a squadron of roughly two thousand men under Commodore George Anson. The mission was secret and frankly piratical: round Cape Horn and seize a Spanish treasure galleon that the Centurion’s chaplain called the most desirable prize on the globe. It was the War of Jenkins’ Ear, and Britain wanted silver.

The vessel was a bad joke — a tubby East Indiaman bought off the merchant trade, refitted as a sixth-rate of 28 guns, the lowest class of warship. Manning it was worse. Volunteers had run out, so press gangs kidnapped seamen off the streets. And in place of the regiment Anson expected, the Admiralty allotted his squadron five hundred invalid out-pensioners of Chelsea. Only 259 came aboard: everyone with the limbs and strength to walk out of Portsmouth deserted, leaving, in the official account’s words, only those who were literally invalids — most over sixty, some past seventy.

Grann builds this slowly, on purpose. By the time the Wager strikes rock off Patagonia on May 14, 1741, the catastrophe reads as something assembled on land by an empire in a hurry.

Rank was the last thing to sink

The castaways landed on a mountainous, rain-lashed island in what mariners called the Gulf of Sorrows. Grann went there himself, hiring a boat at Chiloé for the 350-mile run south; bundled in a winter coat he was still bone cold, and found almost nothing to eat but wild celery.

What interests him is that the hierarchy survived the ship. Captain David Cheap kept issuing orders as though the quarterdeck still existed, and for a while the men obeyed — they built an outpost, put up shelters, dug irrigation. Then Cheap shot Midshipman Henry Cozens in the cheek at point-blank range. Cozens lingered fourteen days and died in June 1741, and the gunner John Bulkeley treated the killing as the moment the captain’s authority forfeited itself. What provoked it was never settled: in Bulkeley’s account Cozens was unarmed and asking why a seaman’s wine allowance had been stopped, while naval historians writing from Cheap’s side called him a ringleader shot in open mutiny.

Grann is careful about class here. Cheap was himself a casualty of the system he enforced: a younger son who inherited nothing, dodged creditors, and went to sea at seventeen because there was nowhere else to go.

Whoever published first got to shape the record

In October 1741, eighty-one men left the island in a lengthened longboat they named the Speedwell. Thirty reached Brazil. Bulkeley and the carpenter John Cummins understood exactly what awaited them, and got their journal into print in London in 1743 — three years before Cheap and John Byron made it home. Bulkeley had written to the Admiralty first and been told the journal was his own and their Lordships would have nothing to do with it, which he noted was the point of asking: had he not, they might have blamed him. Their dedication is a small masterpiece of pre-emption: “We stand or fall by the Truth; if Truth will not support us, nothing can.”

Byron’s own Narrative did not appear until 1768; his grandson, the poet Lord Byron, later mined it for Don Juan.

Grann structures the book around this problem, shifting between the perspectives of Cheap, Bulkeley and Byron and letting the accounts contradict each other in the open. The gaps are exact: one officer conceded only that he had “proceeded to extremities,” while another witness described him shooting a seaman in the head. In an author’s note Grann declines to rule, leaving the verdict to the reader. Comparing the versions is how you watch a historical record get manufactured.

The empire had more to lose than the men did

The court martial convened in April 1746, and nobody was convicted of mutiny or murder — for the blunter reason that nobody was charged with either. When Bulkeley objected to giving a deposition while under arrest, the Admiralty’s marshal told him the court was only to know how the ship was lost. Everything after the wreck sat outside its remit. Lieutenant Robert Baynes was reprimanded for disobeying Cheap’s orders over the main-topsail and the anchor, then acquitted in light of his hardships, and that was the sum of it. Cheap and Bulkeley were both offered promotions; Bulkeley turned his down.

Grann’s reading of that non-verdict is the sharpest argument in the book. A real trial, he suggests, would have established on the record that the Navy’s officers — the supposed apostles of the Enlightenment — had degenerated into brutes on a beach, which was awkward for a country whose stated justification for conquest was the superiority of its civilization. Better, on his account, to look away. Anson, meanwhile, had taken the galleon Nuestra Señora de Covadonga in June 1743 and paraded the silver through London to cheering crowds, handing the Admiralty a much better story to tell.

Some stories never got told at all. Grann notes that John Duck, a free Black seaman on the Wager, survived the wreck and the castaway voyage only to be kidnapped and sold into slavery; there is no record of what happened to him. Near the end of the book Grann writes that empires preserve their power with the stories they tell, but just as much with the ones they don’t — “the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”

The bottom line

Grann argues that the fight over what happened on Wager Island mattered more than what actually happened there, because the account that prevails becomes the past. The castaways understood that; so did the Admiralty, which is why the trial examined the loss of a ship and nothing else. Read it if you want a survival story that turns, halfway through, into an argument about who gets believed.