The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“The conflict was the result of the endless jockeying among the European powers to expand their empires. They each vied to conquer or control ever larger swaths of the earth, so that they could exploit and monopolize other nations’ valuable natural resources and trade markets.”

To understand the story of the Wager, it is important to remember the context of the colonial struggle between Britain and Spain. Not only did the Wager set out to serve Britain’s colonial mission, the events of the mutiny and the treatment of the narratives emerging from it were shaped by this backdrop of colonial conflict.

“During the age of sail, when wind-powered vessels were the only bridge across the vast oceans, nautical language was so pervasive that it was adopted by those on terra firma.”

The British navy played a large role in British society. Not only was it an opportunity for a career and social advancement; it also influenced British culture and language. “Terra firma” refers to land.

“After a voyage, the captain of a ship turned over the requisite logbooks to the Admiralty, providing reams of information for building an empire—an encyclopedia of the sea and of unfamiliar lands.”

Logbooks were important both as sources of information about the voyages of British ships and as the basis for popular books published and released to the British public. Their importance became especially clear with John Bulkeley and his journal, as the journal played a key role in the court martial and public controversy surrounding the mutiny.

“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 was somehow righteous and heroic.”

Among European colonial empires, negative and stereotyped attitudes toward Indigenous populations prevailed. For the colonizers, these attitudes justified continued abuse of and aggression toward Indigenous societies. The colonizers saw Indigenous populations as other, which dehumanized them.

“Amid these travails, the one superior whom Bulkeley never criticized was Anson. From the outset, the commodore had been dealt a sinister hand—a woefully organized expedition—but he had done all he could to preserve the squadron and bolster the men’s spirits.”

George Anson was the leader of the squadron sent to Cape Horn. In contrast to the ill-fated Wager, his successful capture of a Spanish galleon near the Philippines would be promoted and embraced by the British public.

“In the British Navy, volunteer and pressed seamen stopped being paid after their ship was decommissioned, and, as two of the castaways argued, the loss of the Wager meant that for most of them, their earnings had likely ceased: they were suffering for nothing.”

Even for those forcibly recruited into the British Navy, there were rules surrounding their service. These rules provided enough wiggle-room to pardon all the survivors during the court martial.

“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.’”

Modern psychological and sociological analyses have shown that intense situations where individuals struggle to survive cause violent behavior. As David Grann also points out, social norms often break down in these situations.

“The only type of commander whom seamen despised as much as a tyrant was one who could not maintain order, and who failed to uphold an unspoken promise—that in exchange for the men’s loyalty, he would protect their well-being.”

Ships in the British navy often acted like microcosms of society. Like governments, captains and other senior officers were expected to both maintain stability and to protect the interests of crew members.

“There was still, [Cheap] believed, a possibility of glory—and redemption.”

Despite the circumstances, Cheap was determined to maintain his original orders and attack a Spanish settlement on the South American mainland. However, his crew, facing dwindling food supplies, wanted to sail back to Britain.

“For Bulkeley, this route seemed to have another, deeper seduction. They would be charting their own destiny, emancipating themselves from a naval mission that had been bungled by government and military officials back home—a mission that had been doomed from the outset.”

As a lower-ranking officer, Bulkeley had little hope for a promotion within the navy. His mutiny against Captain Cheap had the dimension of a lower-class revolt against an inept upper class.

“In this state of nature, there was no written code, no preexisting text, that could fully guide them. To survive, they needed to establish their own rules.”

The British navy was a reflection of British society, and being stowaways represented a breakdown in social ties. Cheap’s actions, especially taking thieves to trial and punishing them, were intended to preserve social cohesion.

“[A]s the boats slipped away, Cheap realized that the island would likely become the place where he and his story were lost forever.”

Even in the midst of the stress of trying to survive on Wager Island, Bulkeley and Cheap both understood the importance of trying to control the narrative.

“To play a role in totally deserting his commander—no matter how flawed and tyrannical he was—threatened the romantic image of himself that he had clung to despite the horrors of the voyage.”

Coming from an upper-class background, John Byron was driven by the romantic ideals of the British navy. Among those ideals was loyalty to his captain. However, the stresses of the shipwreck tested even that.

“Was God seeing the things they did out there? Bulkeley still sought solace from The Christian’s Pattern, but a passage in it warned, ‘Hadst thou a clear conscience, thou could not fear death. It were better to avoid sin than to flee death.’ Yet was it a sin to want to live?”

Crew members on Wager Island felt a conflict between ideals. Among them was survival versus loyalty to authority represented in Captain Cheap. There was also Bulkeley’s conflict between the need for survival and his Christian morals.

“The lives of the former castaways were once again at risk—only now the danger was not from the natural elements, but from the stories that they would tell the Admiralty.”

This quote emphasizes The Importance of Stories. Controlling the narrative of events on the Wager and Wager Island were crucial. Little if any physical evidence would be found concerning these events. Therefore, whether or not anyone was arrested and condemned for their actions depended on stories and who got to tell them.

“When Bulkeley was a castaway, he had stopped waiting around for others in power to display leadership. And now, months after his return to his native island, he decided to launch another kind of rebellion—a literary one.”

Bulkeley succeeded in his mission of shaping the narrative about events on the Wager and Wager Island. His frank, lower-class voice had a particular power over the general public.

“Though hardly a work of literature, the journal was packed with more narrative and personal detail than a traditional logbook, and the story was told in a bracing new voice—that of a hard-nosed seaman.”

Part of Bulkeley’s appeal was one of class. Most accounts of sea life and naval adventures came from upper-class voice. In a time when the modern mass media was beginning to take shape, Bulkeley’s everyman voice had an appeal.

“Even so, the castaways’ accounts betrayed their inherent racism.”

As Grann argues, racism and colonial attitudes inform the perspectives of the survivors of the Wager. For example, racism shaped how they perceived the Indigenous peoples who assisted them in their survival.

“London was the pulsing heart of an island empire built on the toll of seamen and slavery and colonialism.”

The British Empire was wealthy, and much of that wealth appeared in London, the empire’s metropolitan “heart.” Grann argues this wealth was derived from exploitation of both enslaved people and colonized lands.

“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.”

The general public in Britain had diverse views of the controversy, as the 18th century saw the emergence of a mass media and large print culture. However, the public would particularly embrace Bulkeley’s version of events.

“Ferreting out and documenting all the incontrovertible facts of what happened on the island […] 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.”

The British Empire depended on the myth of British superiority, especially over Indigenous populations. A story where British officers succumbed to violent, “uncivilized” behavior and relied on Indigenous peoples to survive threatened that myth.

“Over the next several decades, British naval victories would transform the small island nation into an empire with maritime supremacy—what the poet James Thomson called an ‘empire of the deep.’”

As an island nation, Britain depended on its navy. Its wealth and power were derived from holdings across North America, India, and the Pacific Ocean. Maintaining and protecting that empire made Britain rely more on naval power than any other power.

“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.”

One of Grann’s core arguments is that empires do not just rely on the exploitation of other people. Empires also demand tremendous sacrifices from their own people.