"The Wager"

Never thought I would be so engrossed with a shipwreck story from the 18th century. (Mostly) based on log books, David Grann made it both highly informative and gut-wrenching, and the audiobook narrator Dion Graham surely deserves a top prize for his masterful performance.

• Anson corresponded even more sparingly, as if he doubted the ability of words to convey what he saw or felt. “He loved reading little, and writing, or dictating his own letters less, and that seeming negligence…drew upon him the ill will of many,” a relative wrote.
• Jenkins reputedly displayed his severed appendage, pickled in a jar, and pledged “my cause to my country.” The incident further ignited the passions of Parliament and pamphleteers, leading people to cry for blood—an ear for an ear—and a good deal of booty as well. The conflict became known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
• Yet the heart of the plan called for an act of outright thievery: to snatch a Spanish galleon loaded with virgin silver and hundreds of thousands of silver coins. Twice a year, Spain sent such a galleon—it was not always the same ship—from Mexico to the Philippines to purchase silks and spices and other Asian commodities, which, in turn, were sold in Europe and the Americas. These exchanges provided crucial links in Spain’s global trading empire.
• Cape Horn. Only a few British sailors had successfully made this passage, where winds routinely blow at gale force, waves can climb to nearly a hundred feet, and icebergs lurk in the hollows.
• Reflecting the dual nature of their creators, (Men-of-war) were devised to be both murderous instruments and the homes in which hundreds of sailors lived together as a family. In a lethal, floating chess game, these pieces were deployed around the globe to achieve what Sir Walter Raleigh had envisioned: “Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world.”
• As sophisticated as men-of-war were with their sail propulsion and lethal gunnery, they were largely made from simple, perishable materials: hemp, canvas, and, most of all, timber. Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.
• The average man-of-war was estimated by a leading shipwright to last only fourteen years. And to survive that long, a ship had to be virtually remade after each extensive voyage, with new masts and sheathing and rigging.
• grabbing anyone who betrayed the telltale signs of a mariner: the familiar checkered shirt and wide-kneed trousers and round hat; the fingers smeared with tar, which was used to make virtually everything on a ship more water-resistant and durable. (Seamen were known as tars.)
• He inhaled the salted air and listened to the splendid symphony around him: the rocking of the hull, the snapping of the halyards, the splashing of waves against the prow. The ships glided in elegant formation, with the Centurion leading the way, her sails spread like wings.
• The topmen, who were young and agile and admired for their fearlessness, scurried up the masts to unfurl and roll up sails, and to keep lookout, hovering in the sky like birds of prey. Then came those assigned to the forecastle, a partial deck toward the bow, where they controlled the headsails and also heaved and dropped the anchors, the largest of which weighed about two tons. The forecastle men tended to be the most experienced, their bodies bearing the stigmata of years at sea: crooked fingers, leathery skin, lash scars. On the bottom rung, situated on deck alongside the squawking, defecating livestock, were the “waisters”—pitiful landlubbers with no sea experience who were relegated to unskilled drudgery.
• One British captain recommended that a young officer in training bring onboard a small library with the classics by Virgil and Ovid and poems by Swift and Milton. “It is a mistaken notion that any blockhead will make a seaman,” the captain explained. “I don’t know one situation in life that requires so accomplished an education as the sea officer... Byron also needed to learn how to steer and splice and brace and tack, how to read the stars and the tides, how to use a quadrant to fix his position, and how to measure the ship’s speed by casting a line ribbed with evenly spaced knots into the water and then counting the number that slipped through his hands over a period of time.
• To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals... A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.
• He knew the precise point on a cresting wave when a crew should unleash fire. He expertly mixed cartridges and packed grenades with corn powder, and when necessary, he pulled the fuses with his teeth... it seemed to describe Bulkeley exactly when it noted that some of the best gunners had come from the “lowest station on board, raising themselves to preferment by pure dint of diligence and industry.”
• In 1710, the Earl of Shaftesbury observed that tales of the sea were “in our present days what books of chivalry were in those of our forefathers.”


• As a newly appointed captain in Joseph Conrad’s story “The Secret Sharer” wondered, how far would he prove “faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly”?
• Cape Horn, the rocky, barren island marking the southernmost tip of the Americas. Because the far-southern seas are the only waters that flow uninterrupted around the globe, they gather enormous power, with waves building over as much as thirteen thousand miles, accumulating strength as they roll through one ocean after another. When they arrive, at last, at Cape Horn, they are squeezed into a narrowing corridor between the southernmost American headlands and the northernmost part of the Antarctic Peninsula. This funnel, known as the Drake Passage, makes the torrent even more pulverizing. The currents are not only the longest-running on earth but also the strongest, transporting more than four billion cubic feet of water per second, more than six hundred times the discharge of the Amazon River. And then there are the winds. Consistently whipping eastward from the Pacific, where no lands obstruct them, they frequently accelerate to hurricane force, and can reach two hundred miles per hour. Seamen refer to the latitudes in which they blow with names that capture the increasing intensity: the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, and the Screaming Sixties... Floating on some of these waves are lethal bergs cleaved from pack ice. And the collision of cold fronts from the Antarctic and warm fronts from near the equator produce an endless cycle of rain and fog, sleet and snow, thunder and lightning.
• the Centurion had played a role in testing a potentially revolutionary new method. Four years before this voyage, it had carried onboard a forty-three-year-old inventor named John Harrison, whom the First Lord of the Admiralty, Charles Wager, had recommended as a “very ingenious and sober man.” Harrison was given free rein of the ship to conduct a trial of his latest contraption—a timepiece about two feet high, with ball weights and oscillating arms.
• Magellan called the region Patagonia. The name may have derived from the inhabitants’ feet—pata means “paw” in Spanish—which, as legend has it, were mammoth; or perhaps the name was borrowed from a medieval saga that featured a monstrous figure known as “the Great Patagon.” There was a sinister design to these fictions. By portraying the natives as both magnificent and less than human, Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.
• As the ships entered the strait, they bore close to Staten Island. The sight unnerved the men. “Though Tierra del Fuego had an aspect extremely barren and desolate,” Reverend Walter noted, this island “far surpasses it, in the wildness and horror of its appearance.” It consisted of nothing but rocks cloven by lightning and earthquakes, and stacked precariously on top of one another, rising three thousand feet in pinnacles of icy solitude. Melville wrote that these mountains “loomed up, like the border of some other world. Flashing walls and crystal battlements, like the diamond watch-towers along heaven’s furthest frontier.” In his journal, Millechamp described the island as the most horrid thing he had ever seen—“a proper nursery for desperation.”
• We had to turn our heads to take a breath, or the wind simply jammed the air down our throats. The rain stung our faces and our bare legs like hard pellets. It was almost impossible to open my eyes.”
• Lieutenant Saumarez later sensed the power of certain nutrients. “I could plainly observe,” he wrote, “that there is a Je ne sais quoi in the frame of the human system that cannot be renewed, cannot be preserved, without the assistance of certain earthly particles, or in plain English, the land is man’s proper element, and vegetables and fruit his only physic.” All Byron and his companions needed to combat scurvy was some citrus, and when they had stopped at St. Catherine to gather supplies, there had been an abundance of limes. The cure—that unforbidden fruit which decades later would be furnished to all British seamen, giving them the nickname Limeys—had been right within their grasp.
• At last, she crashed into a cluster of rocks and began ripping apart. The two remaining masts started to fall and were cut down by the men before they could pull the ship entirely over. The bowsprit cleaved, windows burst, treenails popped, planks shattered, cabins collapsed, decks caved in. Water flooded the lower portions of the ship, snaking from chamber to chamber, filling nooks and crannies. Rats scurried upward.
• Many of the volunteers had hoped that self-abnegation would lead them, like monks, to a deeper spirituality, but instead they began conniving, stealing food, and coming to blows. “How many people have I hurt with my indifference, my grouchiness, my overbearing perversion for food?” one subject wrote. Another subject shouted, “I’m going to kill myself,” then turned on one of the scientists and said, “I’m going to kill you.” This person also fantasized about cannibalism and had to be removed from the experiment. A report summarizing the results of the study noted that the volunteers were shocked at “how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be.”
• a long, narrow form of seaweed, which they scraped from the rocks. When boiled in water for about two hours, it made what Bulkeley deemed “a good and wholesome food.” Other times Byron and his companions would mix the seaweed with flour and fry it with the tallow from candles;
• It was Phipps! His craft had been capsized by a wave, and he’d just managed to scramble onto the rock, where he’d been stranded, shivering and hungry—the castaway of castaways.
• And the Wager’s bell that had washed ashore was rung the way it had been on the ship—to signal a meal or a gathering.
• Byron realized that, unlike the solitary castaway Alexander Selkirk, who had inspired Robinson Crusoe, he now had to cope with the most unpredictable and volatile creatures in all of nature: desperate humans.
• It was rare for the Kawésqar to stay in one place for more than a few days, as they were careful not to exhaust an area’s food resources. And they were skilled navigators, especially the women, who typically steered and paddled the canoes. These long vessels were only about a meter wide, but each one had room to transport a family and its prized dogs,
• they coped with the climate without wearing bulky clothing. To keep warm, they oiled their skin with insulating seal blubber. And in this land of fire they always kept a blaze going, using it not only for heat but also to roast meat, make implements, and send smoke signals. Logs were obtained from the myrtle tree, which would burn even when damp; baby bird feathers and insect nests provided highly flammable tinder.
• The Kawésqar left once more, but soon came back again with their wives and children, along with other families. There were some fifty people in total—the shipwreck being one of those attractions, like a beached whale, that drew disparate Kawésqar parties together.
• The only way to free it was to bore a hole in the side of the Wager. 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.
• Bulkeley said of the castaways, “They are in great pain, and can scarce see to walk.” Yet they were compelled onward by that mysterious narcotic: hope.
• Narborough had described his journey through the Strait of Magellan, that 350-mile passageway between the end of the South American mainland and Tierra del Fuego, which offered an alternative route between the Pacific and the Atlantic that avoided the Drake Passage around Cape Horn. “At any time if you have a desire to enter the Strait of Magellan” from the Pacific side, Narborough wrote, “it will be safest, in my opinion, to bear in for the land, in the latitude of 52 degrees.” This opening was about four hundred miles south of Wager Island, and 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;
• Cheap, realizing he was still dangerously outmanned, dispatched the purser to offer brandy to the seceders as an inducement to form an alliance, but the marauders remained a freewheeling band. <> Bulkeley learned of this attempt and decried it as “bribery.” Meanwhile, he was busy securing more muskets and pistols and shot from the wreck, turning his own house into an armory as well.
• One day Cheap had Lieutenant Baynes relay an unexpected proposition to Bulkeley: on the coming Sabbath, why not use Bulkeley’s large quarters as a place of divine worship, so that all the men could pray together? It seemed like a peace offering, a show of respect to Bulkeley’s piousness, and a reminder that they were all made of the same clay. But the gunner sniffed a ruse and refused the offer. “We believe religion to have the least share in this proposal,” Bulkeley noted in his journal. “If our tent should be turned into a house of prayer…we may, perhaps, in the midst of our devotion, be surprised, and our arms taken from us in order to frustrate our designs.”
• Bulkeley approached him, and Cheap stared at the man who had usurped him. He knew that each of them was about to face another agonizing ordeal, and perhaps he recognized a small part of himself in Bulkeley—the prideful ambition, the desperate cruelty, and the vestige of goodness. He put out his hand and wished him a safe passage.
• The party was forced to seek shelter in the lagoon of another island just west of Cheap’s Bay, where they could repair the sail and wait out the storm. They had traveled barely a mile. <> The next day, Bulkeley asked for volunteers to take the barge back to Wager Island and retrieve a discarded canvas tent in case they later needed extra sailcloth. Byron suddenly saw an opportunity.
• Hoping to sneak away with the barge, they (Byron and Campbell) tried to enlist the other men onboard, who included several of Cheap’s erstwhile supporters. They, too, had been shocked by the abandonment of the captain. Fearing they would be hanged if they ever made it back to England, they joined the counterplot.
• Byron, who had constantly been guided by the whims of superiors, finally tried to formulate a plan of his own. He decided that he must go back to the mutineers and claim the portion of food owed his party. It would be risky, perhaps even foolhardy, but what other option was there?
• The boat was only twenty-five feet long, and it was even less stable in the waves, which during severe storms dwarfed its single mast. The men sat bunched together on hard, narrow planks, bouncing up and down. There was no area below where crew members could find shelter, and at night they would sometimes clamber onto the Speedwell to sleep, while the cutter was towed behind. At such times, the longboat was stuffed with seventy-one men. <> Not only did these vessels have to traverse some of the roughest seas on earth; most of the men attempting to pull off this feat were already near death. “
• But faced with growing dissent, he turned the boat around, heading back the way they had come. One marine began to go mad, laughing hysterically, until he slumped over in silence, dead. Another man died shortly after, and then another. Their bodies were tossed into the sea. <> It took the surviving party close to two weeks to retrace its path, only to then realize that they had found the strait all along. Now they had to start east all over again.
• Cheap wanted to make one final attempt to round the cape. They were so close, and if they made it he was sure that his plan would succeed. But the men would no longer abide his devouring obsessions, and they decided to return to the place they had long been trying to escape: Wager Island... Cheap reluctantly assented. It took them nearly two weeks to circle back to the island, and by then the entire disastrous foray had lasted two months. They’d exhausted all of their food from the journey; Byron had even eaten the rancid, foul-smelling sealskins covering his feet.
• At its widest, the strait extended twenty miles, but here it tapered to just two. Navigating the narrowest point in the passageway was treacherous. The tide rose and fell some forty feet, and there were often countervailing winds and eight-knot currents. It was nighttime when the castaways began sailing through the nine-mile-long chute,
• They had not only made it through the 350-mile passageway in their jury-rigged boat; they had also, thanks to a remarkable feat of navigation by Bulkeley, taken, even with their initial false start, only thirty-one days—a week faster than Ferdinand Magellan and his armada.
• As the sense of paranoia deepened, Bulkeley wrote that he’d heard King had vowed “either to compel us to deliver up the journal, or to take our lives.” An official in Brazil remarked how strange it was that “people who had undergone so many hardships and difficulties could not agree lovingly together.” The forces unleashed on Wager Island were like the horrors inside Pandora’s box: once unlocked, they could not be contained.
• Finally, Bulkeley wrote, the office sent him back the journal with an order: “to make an abstract by way of narrative that it might not be too tedious for their Lordships’ perusal.”
• Now, while sailing through the South China Sea, Anson summoned his men on deck and climbed onto the roof of his cabin to address them. The party had recently stopped in Canton, where they had repaired and resupplied the Centurion and where Anson had let it be known that he intended to return to England at last, bringing an end to their doomed endeavor... Anson, that inscrutable card player, revealed that all his talk about heading home had been a ruse. He had studied the timing and patterns that the Spanish galleon historically followed on its route... he suspected that the galleon would soon be off the coast of the Philippines. And he planned to try to intercept it.
• They knocked down cabin partitions, to make more room for the gun crews; dumped overboard any livestock that was in the way; and tossed any unnecessary timber that might shatter under fire and rain down lethal splinters. Sand was sprinkled on the decks to make them less slippery. Men working the cannons were given rammers and sponges and priming irons and horns and wads and—in case of fire—tubs of water. Down in the magazine room, the gunner and his mates distributed gunpowder to the powder monkeys, who then ran them up the ladders and through the ship, making sure not to trip and cause an explosion before the battle had begun. Lanterns were extinguished, and so was the galley stove.
• Everywhere the party discerned more riches. Jewels and money were tucked under floorboards, and in the false bottoms of sea chests. Spain’s colonial plunder was now Britain’s. It was the largest treasure ever seized by a British naval commander—the equivalent today of nearly $80 million. Anson and his party had captured the greatest prize of all the oceans.
• Anson, who was soon promoted to rear admiral, was awarded about ninety thousand pounds—the equivalent today of $20 million.
• After traveling some seventy miles, the castaways could see to the northwest the cape of the gulf that they had previously failed to round. To their surprise, their guides didn’t lead them in that direction. Instead, they hauled the canoes on land and proceeded to break the boats apart, each one separating into five distinct components, which made them easier to transport. .. The castaways followed Martin and his party overland along a secret path—an eight-mile portage route through the wilderness, which allowed them to avoid the perilous seas around the cape.
• The press had grown exponentially, fueled by the loosening of government censorship and by wider literacy. And to satisfy the public’s insatiable thirst for news, there had emerged a professional class of scribblers who earned a living from sales rather than from aristocratic patronage, and whom the old literary establishment derided as “Grub Street hacks.”
• The trial, to commence in just a few weeks, would have to pierce through the fog of narratives—the contradictory, the shaded, even the fictitious—to discern what had really happened and thus mete out justice. As the writer Janet Malcolm once observed, “The law is the guardian of the ideal of unmediated truth, truth stripped bare of the ornament of narration….The story that can best withstand the attrition of the rules of evidence is the story that wins.”
• Ferreting out and documenting all the incontrovertible facts of what had happened on the island—the marauding, the stealing, the whippings, the murders—would have undercut the central claim on which the British Empire tried to justify its rule of other peoples: namely, that its imperial forces, its civilization, were inherently superior. That its officers were gentlemen, not brutes. <> Moreover, a proper trial would have offered an unwelcome reminder that the War of Jenkins’ Ear had been a calamity—another ignoble chapter in the long, grim history of nations sending their troops off on ill-conceived, poorly funded, bungled military adventures.
• Of the nearly two thousand men who had set sail, more than thirteen hundred had perished—a shocking death rate, even for such a long voyage. And though Anson had returned with some 400,000 pounds’ worth of booty, the war had cost taxpayers 43 million pounds.
• the war itself had been rooted at least partly in a deception. The merchant captain Robert Jenkins had indeed been attacked by the Spanish, but this had occurred in 1731, eight years before the outbreak of the war.
• A mutiny, especially in times of war, can be so threatening to the established order that it is not even officially recognized as one. During the First World War, French troops in various units on the western front refused to fight, in one of the largest mutinies in history. But the government’s official account described the incident merely as “Disturbances and the Rectification of Morale.”
• 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.
• The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions—with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.
• Strikingly, there was one surviving castaway who never had a chance to record his testimony in any form. Not in a book or in a deposition. Not even in a letter. And that was John Duck, the free Black seaman who had gone ashore with Morris’s abandoned party... he suffered what every free Black seaman dreaded: he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Morris didn’t know where his friend had been taken, whether to the mines or to the fields—Duck’s fate was unknown, as is the case for so many people whose stories can never be told... 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.
• 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.