Imagine setting off to sea on a doomed mission of imperial conquest, ending up shipwrecked on an impossibly remote island, losing hundreds of your fellow sailors to illness, disaster and starvation, and then, finally, returning home after your ordeals … and you’re put on trial for mutiny.
Where does duty end and survival begin? This is one of the questions bestselling author David Grann asks in his harrowing account.
The British Royal Navy ship HMS Wager left Britain in 1740 as part of a fleet on a secret assignment during the conflict with Spain known as the “War of Jenkins’ Ear”. The ships set out to disrupt the Pacific possessions of the Spanish empire, but it all fell apart horribly.
During the journey, the ambitious Lieutenant David Cheap was promoted to acting captain of the Wager, but the promotion became a poisoned pill when the ship was separated from the fleet and wrecked among remote islands off the coast of Chile.
The shipwreck was horrific – much of the crew got drunk, determined to die in “an orgy of revelry” – but what followed was even worse. Cheap’s command of his surviving crew collapsed in a Lord of the Flies-style breakdown of all polite society’s rules and ended in a mutiny that’s still debated centuries on.
New Yorker magazine writer Grann has honed his skills at bringing nearly forgotten history to vivid life with books including Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, and the page-turning tension of The Wager is no exception.
“A long, dangerous voyage inexorably exposed one’s hidden soul,” he writes, and his account is a testament to how thin the line between man and madness can become.
Swirling like another current in the wave-tossed narrative of The Wager is who has power at sea and who doesn’t. As the mission goes awry, Captain Cheap proves a paranoid and ineffective figurehead, while the unheralded ship’s gunner, John Bulkeley, a versatile jack-of-all-trades, quietly emerges as a born leader, calmly solving problems while Cheap bangs on about command and protocol.
The clash between the two comes to a head when the dwindling survivors plot a way to leave their tiny island and find rescue. What was left of the Wager crew split into factions, attempting separate escapes.
Only 10 men from the Wager’s crew of almost 300 ultimately survived to return to England. The deposed captain and the gritty gunner both survived on opposite sides, in a case that ended up in a military court martial to determine who was at fault for the disastrous mission. After risking everything, the pathetic survivors faced a trial for their lives.
Grann brings to life the unfathomable dangers they faced. You feel the stench of the crowded quarters below decks, the tension of life in what he memorably dubs “the wooden world” at sea.
The hardships feel impossible to bear from our infinitely more comfortable age – men forced to subsist on weeds and ship’s rats; bones literally dissolving due to unrecognised scurvy; crew swept away in the waves or simply worn down by exhaustion. One seaman snaps in a storm, stalking the deck “waving his cutlass and screaming that he was the King of England”.
Grann’s eye for sharp detail is helped by a wealth of research material including the logs of Bulkeley and the insightful seaman John Byron, the grandfather of the famed poet and a newcomer to shipboard life.
Bulkeley’s candid defence of his actions became a bestselling book and was something new in a world of stiff, patrician accounts: “a bracing new voice – that of a hard-nosed seaman”. Slowly, The Wager shows the ossified British boundaries of class and rank starting to crumble, just a bit, after high and low alike survived their mingled journey on their wooden world.
Grann richly sketches his narrative’s cast, from the honour-driven fleet commodore to the poor press-ganged sailors scooped up around the docks forced to serve, some of them old men literally loaded aboard in stretchers. Unlike some exploration literature, this never feels like one man’s story.
But in the end, was it even worth it? Who remembers the War of Jenkins’ Ear now? Grann pays respect to “thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving – and even sacrificing themselves for – a system many of them rarely question”.
“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t,” he writes.
A rip-roaring read that also leaves you quietly reassessing how power and privilege work, The Wager pays off.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann (Simon & Schuster, $39.99).
