The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
David Grann
Doubleday
Nonfiction, History/True Stories
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: In 1740, a small fleet of British vessels set sail on a mission of great national importance: to capture a Spanish galleon loaded with treasure from their New World conquests sailing the Pacific Ocean. They were to make the treacherous crossing around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America and proceed up the coast to intercept the vessel, claiming a rare prize and blackening the eye of a bitter enemy. With them sailed the Wager, a retrofitted merchant ship on its first major military operation. But a black star hung over the entire mission from the start, and after a disastrous rounding of the Horn, the fleet lost sight of the Wager.
Two years later, a raft of castaways drifted into port on the Brazilian coast, claiming to be survivors of the shipwrecked Wager. Most of the crew and the captain were lost, they claimed... until years later, when another small craft of survivors was found off Chile's coast, including Captain David Cheap - who accused the previous group of being murderous mutineers who had left him and a handful of others to die. The story would rock England, raising questions that linger to this day. What really happened to the Wager in their long exile on a deserted island? Was the captain to blame for the misfortune, or the so-called mutineers? And why was the whole thing eventually covered up?
REVIEW: In its time, the story of the Wager was top news, inspiring numerous writers from Lord Byron to William DeFoe, but today few recall it. Grann digs into the conflicting accounts - by Captain Cheap, by the young midshipman John Byron (grandfather of the well-known poet Lord Byron), the leader of the possible-mutineers, gunner John Bulkeley, among other eyewitnesses and background material - to try to unravel the truth, unearthing along the way a tragedy that was almost inevitable from before the ships left the Thames.
The War of Jenkins' Ear, as it came to be known, was just the latest in a string of largely-contrived excuses for the English and the Spaniards to throw countless lives and copious amounts of money at their empire-building rivals. To that end, the English admiralty concocted a daring and rather foolhardy plan to surprise a Spanish treasure ship - not in the Atlantic, but in the Pacific. As usual, the people who sit in their war rooms concocting such plans seemed not to know or care about the logistics of such an endeavor, starting with ill-maintained ships with press-ganged crews (including several dragged from retirement homes for old sailors just to fill berths) and continuing through the immense difficulties of navigating Cape Horn, with perhaps the most treacherous waters of the world. The fact that it was many years before a system to correctly calculate a ship's longitudinal location made it all the more dangerous. Even before then, the Wager's crew had been disrupted by sickness (typhoid and scurvy; in the days before disease vectors were understood, both were commonly death sentences) and not one but two changes in their captain. This was how David Cheap finally got his coveted commission, and his determination to prove himself to the commodore in charge of the fleet (and the greater admiralty, not to mention himself) may be part of what led to the disaster.
Damaged in the deadly seas off the Horn, the Wager fell behind, ultimately finding its grave off an island surrounded by treacherous shoals and harboring minimal food. Here, by his own accounting, Cheap tried to create some sort of order along the strict lines dictated in the British naval code, meeting almost immediate resistance from a few obstinate men and only growing more authoritarian as their situation grew more grim. Bulkeley, a religious man but also a commoner, kept rigorous records of his own, and the tale he recorded contradicted the captain's at several points: from his point of view, the captain was at least partly to blame for their wreck, and once on the island lost control of the situation and himself, to the point of literal murder. Mindful that he might well be hanged for mutiny, the gunner actually took the unprecedented step of publishing his journals, among the first commoners to do so, thus capturing the public's imagination long before anyone else could get home... but the public, as always, could be fickle in their loyalties. Midshipman Byron, meanwhile, has yet another perspective, though his are more clearly colored by his privileged upbringing (and a childhood spent binging fanciful tales of maritime adventures) and his ultimate loyalty to the captain (and his own social class); even he does not always corroborate Cheap's account. The fact that anyone survived at all is little short of miraculous, let alone multiple parties - all of whom eventually end up before their superiors in England, in a trial that ultimately is more about show than uncovering the truth.
As the story unfolds, Grann does a decent job establishing the people, the times, and the world of 18th century sailing and naval battles, as well as the horrific conditions and psychological collapse as things go from barely tolerable to far, far worse. Once again, I'm amazed that anyone actually survived those voyages, even without shipwrecks involved. Grann also notes how much of what happens ultimately lies at the feet of the power structures at the time and their determination to press their imperial claims and cultural superiority (and grab all the wealth and resources and land), no matter the cost in lives to their own subjects (or the indigenous cultures, who were potential slaves at best and inconveniences to be eliminated at worst). Even among themselves, concerns over classism ultimately determined whose story was most respected and remembered. The whole "war" that sent so many sailors and officers on the Wager to their dooms was almost literally over nothing, and gained nothing tangible for either side. There are some places where Grann loses the thread of the story in the weeds of extraneous detail and tangents, and others where he glosses over points or doesn't seem to follow up earlier hints of trouble (the way official logs were deliberately sabotaged long before mutiny was on the table, for instance, spoke to other secrets of the voyage that were never explored or even speculated on). Taken all together, though, this is a solid tale of a maritime disaster that deserves to be remembered.
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