David Grann · 2023 · survival

David Grann's true account of HMS Wager, sent in 1740 as part of Commodore Anson's squadron to round Cape Horn and plunder a Spanish treasure galleon. Wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia, her starving survivors fell into mutiny and murder before splitting into rival parties, each making an epic open-boat voyage back to civilisation: the mutineers south through the Strait of Magellan to Brazil, Captain Cheap north to Spanish Chile. This route follows the squadron from Portsmouth around the Horn to the wreck in the Gulf of Sorrows, and the Speedwell's desperate journey home to face the reckoning.

1. 1
   Portsmouth

   In September 1740, with England at war with Spain, a squadron of five warships under Commodore George Anson slips out of Portsmouth on a secret mission: to round Cape Horn into the Pacific and seize a Spanish treasure galleon. Among them is HMS Wager, an ageing merchant ship pressed into naval service, undermanned and crammed with invalid pensioners and raw recruits. None of them can imagine what lies ahead.

2. 2
   Madeira

   The squadron calls at Madeira to take on wine and water. Already there are delays and shortages and a creeping unease, but the ships are still together, still disciplined, still an instrument of the King's will. After Madeira they strike out across the Atlantic, and the first of the fevers begins to move through the crowded decks.

3. 3
   St Catherine's Island

   At the Portuguese island of St Catherine, off the coast of Brazil, the squadron stops to repair and resupply. Typhus and then scurvy are taking hold, and the dead are buried ashore. It is here, in a reshuffling of officers, that the severe and untested David Cheap is given command of the Wager, the ship that will undo him.

4. 4
   Port St Julian

   Pressing south into the cold, the ships pause on the bleak Patagonian shore at Port St Julian, the same desolate anchorage where Magellan and Drake had each once put down mutinies of their own. Ahead lies the most dreaded passage in the world, and the squadron is already sick, late in the season, and sailing on inaccurate charts.

5. 5
   Strait of Le Maire

   At the Strait of Le Maire, the gateway to Cape Horn, the weather seems briefly fair, and the ships press through between Tierra del Fuego and the Isle of States. Then the storms fall upon them. Mountainous seas and shrieking winds from the south drive the squadron back and scatter it, and one vast wave washes clean over the Wager from end to end.

6. 6
   Cape Horn

   The squadron beats round the Horn into the worst weather on earth with the crews already dying of scurvy - and the Wager is driven west and then north, separated from the rest and unable to claw off a lee shore.

7. 7
   Wager Island

   Driven helplessly north onto the Patagonian coast, the Wager strikes two great rocks and is wrecked in the Golfo de Penas, the Gulf of Sorrows, in May 1741. The survivors struggle ashore onto a cold, mountainous island, soon named Wager Island, where, starving and leaderless, the old naval order collapses into theft, drunkenness, murder and open mutiny against Captain Cheap.

8. 8
   Strait of Magellan

   After months of misery, the gunner John Bulkeley leads the larger faction in a mutiny, abandons Cheap, and crowds eighty-one men into the lengthened longboat Speedwell and two smaller boats. Their desperate plan is to sail south and east through the Strait of Magellan, the sheltered passage Magellan himself had found, and so reach the Atlantic and Brazil.

9. 9
   Rio Grande

   Through the freezing strait and up the Atlantic coast the overloaded Speedwell claws its way, men dying of starvation by the day, others abandoned on the shore to a near-certain death. After more than two thousand miles in an open boat, only thirty of the eighty-one stagger ashore at Rio Grande in Brazil, in one of the greatest and most terrible voyages in the history of the sea.

10. 10
    Portsmouth

    The survivors trickle home to England, where Bulkeley and Cheap, each with his own version written down in ink, must answer for what happened on the island. Cheap, left behind, has by now made his own extraordinary escape north into Spanish captivity and home again. At the court-martial, the struggle to live becomes a struggle to be believed, and the Navy must decide whose story is the truth.