Criminal - Shipwrecked

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

There’s an old sailors’ saying about the ocean at the southernmost part of the world — “below 40 degrees latitude, there is no law; below 50 degrees, there is no God.” David Grann brings us the story of what happened when five British warships set off on a secret mission to steal a ship filled with treasure. They’d have to sail around the very bottom of South America — at 56 degrees south. David Grann’s book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast.  We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. These are among, if not the worst seas in the world. They're at the very tip of the Americas and off the very end of Patagonia. And it's the only place on Earth where the seas flow uninterrupted around the globe. So over a span of 13,000 miles, these seas and these waves accumulate enormous power. You can have a wave that can dwarf a 90-foot mast. It is also the strongest currents on Earth. And then there are the winds,

which can accelerate routinely to hurricane force and even reach as much as 200 miles per hour. This is author David Graham. He's talking about the ocean around Cape Horn, the southernmost point in South America. Herman Melville, the novelist who made it around the horn, described it or compared it to a descent into hell in Dante's Inferno. There's an old sailor saying, below 40 degrees latitude, there is no law.

Below 50 degrees, there is no God. Cape Horn is at nearly 56 degrees latitude. Before the Panama Canal was completed, the only way to sail from the Atlantic Ocean into the Pacific was to sail around the bottom of South America. Hundreds of ships wrecked trying it. It's said that sailors who survived going around Cape Horn wore a small gold hoop in their ear to show that they'd made it.

In 1740, five British warships set off on a secret mission that would send them around Cape Horn. They were going after a Spanish ship. Twice a year, Spain sent a ship to the Philippines filled with silver to trade for silks and spices. People knew about it. It was called the Prize of All the Oceans, and the British decided to steal it.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. A commodore named George Anson would lead the mission. He was told that he should create as much trouble for the Spanish as possible, quote, taking, sinking, burning, or otherwise destroying enemy ships along the way. But there was a problem. They didn't have enough sailors. So the Navy began sending out something called press gangs. And these press gangs would rove about.

They would go into pubs. They would roam around towns. They would board ships coming into ports. And they would look for anybody who looked like a mariner. If you had a certain hat, they'd say, oh, that looks like a mariner. Or if you had tar on your fingertips, which was used on ships, they'd say, oh, that looks like a mariner. Or if you had tar on your fingertips, which was used on ships, they'd say, oh, that must be a mariner. And they would essentially seize you and place you on a little boat, a tender,

which was like a prison. You were held below, and you were brought onto the ship and sent on this voyage, this perilous voyage, which might last three years with no expectation, just moments before that this was about to happen. The use of press gangs wasn't unusual at the time. There's one newspaper account of a man who was surrounded by a press gang while he was inside a church,

and eventually snuck away dressed in, quote, an old Jenna woman's long cloak, hood, and bonnet. Some press gangs would even wait in boats to capture sailors returning home on merchant ships. The British Navy brought George Anson 500 men from a pensioner's home, a home for elderly or injured veterans, who'd previously been considered unfit for active service. Many of them couldn't board the ships by themselves and had to be carried on with stretchers. There were also children working on board. David Grand says it's possible some were as young as six years old. Once on board, it was almost impossible to leave. In those days, most seamen,

the majority of seamen, couldn't swim and they would anchor. Part of the tactic was to anchor far enough away because when they were at shore, so many of the men ran and deserted. At any opportunity, many of these people were trying to get the hell out of this expedition. 250 men and boys were put on board the smallest warship, the Wager, about double the number it was meant to hold. By the time the expedition departed, sailors were getting sick. It was typhus, or as they called it, ship's fever. The surgeon on board the Wager moved the infected men to the lower deck.

This was a common practice with sailors who got sick at sea, and it's where the term under the weather comes from. Three months into the journey, the warships reached Brazil. While in Brazil, George Anson wrote to the Admiralty to say 160 sailors had died since they'd left England. And when one of the ship's captains got sick and died, a man named David Cheap took over as captain on the wager. David Cheap was somebody who had always dreamed of becoming a captain. He was somebody who struggled on shore. He was kind of plagued by debts and chased by creditors.

He had run off to sea many years before, and he kind of found refuge at sea. And on this expedition, through a twist of fate, he finally attains his dream of captaining his own ship and having a chance to potentially capture a lucrative prize ship. The wager and the other ships kept heading south, along the coast of South America. Once they went ashore to fix a broken mast and saw armadillos. The sailors called them hogs in armor. As they got further south,

they saw penguins and sea lions. And once, a sailor on board the wager wrote that they nearly hit a whale. Sometimes it snowed. Eventually, it was time for the ships to turn west and enter the waters around Cape Horn. And it was also at that very moment where many of the men could no longer get out of their hammocks. Their skin is starting to change texture and color. It's becoming blackened in places. They're feeling aches and pains.

Then, many of them, their teeth began to fall out. Then their hair began to fall out because they were suffering from this mysterious illness of scurvy. Incredibly, even the cartilage that seemed to be kind of holding together the bones seemed to be coming undone. So there was one man who had fought in a battle 50 years earlier, had broken a bone at that time. It had long since healed. And suddenly it just mysteriously fractured again in the very same spot. And some of the men lost their senses. They were described by one observer on board as going

raving mad that the disease had gotten into their brains and they had gone raving mad. And of course, what they didn't know is that the solution was so simple. All they needed was more vitamin C. When they stopped in Brazil, there were plenty of limes, but they didn't know that eating them would help. No one knew that yet. What happens when the group enters the waters around Cape Horn? Tell me a little bit about where the wager is and what happens to the wager. So as they're coming around the Horn in just these tremendous seas, I mean, even the most experienced seamen all described it as the largest seas.

They almost seemed unable to describe the seas. They almost used the same phrase just in their log books. They just kept describing it as these were the biggest wells we had ever seen. And the ships start to kind of, bits start to break apart. The wager loses one of its masts. And they're all striving to stay together because they know if they separate, there will be nobody there to rescue them if something were to happen to their ship. And so they are frantically firing their guns to signal their location. And yet around Cape Horn, all the ships eventually scatter in the storm. And the wager suddenly finds itself all alone and by itself.

And there's no break. It's not like the winds and the seas die down so everyone get good eight hours of sleep. It's constant. It's constant. They in their own logs would describe it as, one described it as the perfect hurricane, but it really was a series of unending typhoons that just kept battering them with unrelenting waves and unrelenting winds. And another critical part that is happening to them is they have to, so imagine this, they're coming around Cape Horn, they're battling these unfathomably large waves, waves that are dwarfing their mass. Their top men who are kind of hanging off the mass at the very top. The ships are rocking so far, sometimes they touch the water.

They touch the water. And yet they are also sailing on the wager and on the other ships partially blind because they do not know their longitude. Because navigation at this point is pretty rudimentary. It's very rudimentary. They could determine their latitude by reading the stars. That was pretty easy. People had done it all the way back from Magellan and Columbus. But your longitude, to measure that, you really needed a very reliable clock. And such a clock did not yet exist. And so they were forced to do what was called dead reckoning, which essentially amounted to informed guesswork and a leap of faith. And so they were forced to do what was called dead reckoning, which essentially amounted to informed guesswork and a leap of faith.

And so as the wager, Captain Cheap decides he's going to, once he's all alone, he's going to try to get to a point off the coast of Chile that Anson had told them they should rendezvous if they were ever separated. So he's determined to do that. He manages to guide them around the horn, but it turns out that their longitude is not only wrong, it's wrong by hundreds of miles. They thought they'd gone far enough west to clear the Chilean coast, but they miscalculated and were too close to shore. And suddenly, one of the junior officers, the petty officer who has climbed the mast to fix one of the sails, looks out and he sees they are barreling toward land. We'll be right back. To be continued... Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to

get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. So, what do you do if you've got a gigantic ship barreling towards— I mean, it's not like you can put the motor in reverse. No. And not only that, this isn't like modern sailboats. These sailboats to turn around took – it could take as long as an hour, I mean, to try to get one of these ships to turn around because you have to rework the sails, have men climb the masts.

And so they, in a great panic, they do manage to come around. They narrowly miss the land, but they are still pinned against the shore, and the wind is blowing them toward the shore. And so they are still in a completely perilous situation. They're desperately trying to get away from the rocks and the coast, and it's just about then where they feel the ship suddenly jolt and shudder, and they have hit a submerged rock. They are caught in a gulf, which is known as the Gulf, El Golfo de Penas, which translates as the Gulf of Sorrows, or as some prefer to call it, the Gulf of Pain. And so when they hit that rock, initially the rudder shatters

and about a two-ton anchor falls and ends up plunging through the floor of the ship, leaving a gaping hole. And then another wave comes and it kind of propels the wager, careening through the Gulf of Pain, through a mine full of rocks, until at last it hits another bunch of rocks. And at that point begins to completely rip apart. So the masts come down, the decks cave in, the planks shatter. But the ship managed to kind of wedge itself between two pillars of rocks. And so it did not yet immediately sink.

And so some of the men, they climb up onto the ruins of their ship, what had been their home, the place they knew, their security, their fortress. They climb up to the top of these ruins, and they peer out in the mist, and there they see a desolate island. Sailors began evacuating in the few small boats that the wager had on board. At first, some of them refused to leave and broke into the wager's liquor supplies. I mean, I think you saw all sorts of reactions, as one does in extreme circumstances. You saw some behave very heroically in helping to get people off the ship, but you saw others behave selfishly,

and you saw some kind of just, you know, almost lose it after all the suffering and just begin to drink and break into the officer's chest and put on their clothing. But that's how some of them conduct themselves until they are eventually retrieved from the ship. What is the island like that they've landed on? Yeah, so the island, which is off the Chilean coast of Patagonia,

you know, they hoped it might be their salvation. But when they get there, it turns out to be freezing cold. It turns out to be constantly raining or sleeting. They have no shelter. And worst of all, they can find no food whatsoever. And so, well, they find a little bit. They find some mussels, which they soon exhaust, but there's virtually no food. And one British officer later compared the island to a place in which the soul of the man dies in him. Captain Cheap believes that he was the commander of the ship, he should remain commander on the island, and he believes they should be governed by the same rules, and that their only way of surviving was to work in this kind of cohesive, almost machine-like quality

with him guiding the way. But there is some discontent, the fact that they had shipwrecked. There's grumblings about Captain Cheap, who could be very temperamental. And at the same time, Cheap decides that they must try to salvage some food from the ship. They begin taking these small rowboat out to the ship, which is, you know, three quarters underwater. Waves are smashing against it. And they are trying to see if they can get supplies, almost, you know, an excavation so that they can try to survive. They were able to recover some flour, meat, peas and oatmeal, and casks of liquor.

And Captain Cheap made a plan to ration everything out. There were about 150 men left. They started calling the place they had landed, Wager Island. And initially, they tried to try to see if they can build an outpost and survive on this desolate, barren, windswept, cold, hopeless place. So they'll set up the society just as they had on the wager. Captain Cheap will be in charge. There'll be law. There'll be order.

We'll monitor the provisions. And this is the way we'll keep ourselves sane and alive. Exactly, exactly. That is his vision, and that's what he believes. And initially, despite some grumbling from some of the men, for the most part, they do do that. And they begin to try to build like a little, almost like a little village. They build various huts and little thatched dwellings, and they begin to try to extract food and to parcel it out.

But gradually, as they run lower on food, order begins to break down. And the first fracture comes from a kind of group that is a smaller group, maybe about a dozen or so, who the others describe as the seceders. They break apart from the camp. They set up their camp elsewhere on the island, but they're kind of roaming wild on the island. They're like these marauders, these thieves,

and the rest of the camp is afraid of them, afraid they may come and attack and pillage. And the leader or one of the main figures within those marauders is believed to have already early on killed at least one man for his supplies, his rations. One day, some of the sailors spotted men in canoes. It was a group of indigenous people called the Coescar, who lived as nomads, traveling up and down the Chilean coast. For a while, they helped the men from the wager. They brought them fish, mussels, and even sheep. But according to David Grand, some of the sailors began mistreating the

Coescar and made a plan to steal some of their canoes. So the coescar left. The food stores were running low on the island, and Captain Cheap made the decision to cut back on rations. And you start to see as some of them, in their desperation, they begin to break into the store tent to steal food, which is, one must understand, when you're stealing food, when you have no food and that's your last bit of sustenance, it is equivalent or close to the equivalence of taking a gun and shooting you because you're

taking away your only means of staying alive. And so they decide they need to kind of create order, and Cheap is determined to create order. And so he creates a system of punishment. They hold trials. They hold a court-martial. The denouement of these trials is not in doubt. They happen fairly hastily. And then these men are whipped, and they are whipped severely.

They are lashed in some cases 600 times, an amount that if it was done consecutively would have killed them, so they have to break it out over a few days. And then after that, Cheap decides with some of his other followers that they shall then banish these condemned, these thieves, to a little islet that's kind of off the island. They would row them out there and leave them to themselves. David Grand says that Captain Cheap was starting to feel like he was losing control

over the men on the island. He began having problems with a sailor named Henry Cousins. He seemed to be constantly drunk, and once ignored a simple order from Captain Cheap to roll a cask of peas into the tent where they kept their food. And then there comes a point where Cheap hears a fight outside his hut, and he hears somebody cry, you know, kind of accuse Cousins of mutiny, even though he wasn't committing mutiny.

Cheek bursts out of his hut. He's holding a pistol in his hand. He approaches Cousins, who he calls that villain. He takes his pistol, and without asking any questions, he proceeds to what he calls extremities, which the other men in their own accounts say, cheap shot the man right in the head and killed him, or eventually killed him.

He didn't die instantly. And what was the reaction within the group to this? That was really, in some ways, the beginning of the end of his authority, because even though at that moment of horror, he comes out and he says, I am still your commander. And there's a moment of tension. They eventually retreat.

But at that point on, more and more of the men turn on Captain Cheap. And so rather than in this kind of mad, violent act of desperation to kind of maintain authority, it does the exact opposite and it diminishes authority, creates greater levels of discontent. Many of the sailors had begun to gravitate towards a man named John Bulkley, who'd been in charge of the weapons on the wager. Some of the men helped John Bulkley build a thatched hut, a hut that was bigger than Captain Cheap's. John Bulkley wrote in his journals that sometimes he disagreed with how Captain Cheap was running

things. Soon the wager's carpenter, a close friend of John Bulkley's, came up with an idea to get off the island. They would build a boat. So the castaways together, the two main factions, one led by Cheap and a few of his followers, and the one led by Bulkley, which has now the majority of the followers. For a brief moment, they unite around a scheme to try to build a castaway boat to get off the island. And so they begin to collect bits of wood. They take a kind of shattered transport boat, which they got off the wreck, and they begin to try to expand it and

build it into this, into a castaway boat, their ark. But even while they're building this, tensions and the war between the factions breaks out anew. And partly it breaks out because how they want to use this Castaway boat, if they complete it, are very different. John Bulkley wanted to sail through the sometimes very narrow Strait of Magellan to get back to the Atlantic Ocean without going around Cape Horn. He thought that they might be able to navigate the strait, since they would not be in a large ship.

John Bulkley wrote in his journals that people might think it was a mad undertaking. The strait was known for its unpredictable storms and maze-like channels, and they had no good maps. But he believed that if they could get to the Atlantic Ocean, they could find safety in Brazil. And the main point of his plan is, we're done with this expedition. We want to get the hell out of here. We want to get home. But Captain Cheap wanted to continue.

Cheap's idea is to take this ark, this castaway boat, when it's completed and sailed north, and try to see if they can then capture a Spanish ship, despite their weakened condition, and eventually continue with the expedition. One day, John Bulkley brought a petition to Captain Cheap that had been signed by the majority of the crew. John Bulkley read it aloud. We think it the best, surest, and most safe way to proceed through the Strait of Magellan Captain Cheap didn't agree.

Two days later, he told them the petition had given him, quote, a great deal of uneasiness. He said he hadn't been sleeping. Nearly three weeks passed. of uneasiness. He said he hadn't been sleeping. Nearly three weeks passed. And then John Bulkley had a secret meeting with a small group of men he trusted.

And Bulkley and his men began to discuss that forbidden subject of mutiny. We'll be right back. The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software?

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Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. Early one morning, a few days after the sailors completed construction on their boat, named the Speedwell, John Bulkley and a group of men surprised Captain Cheap in his hut and tied his hands behind his back. They said they were arresting him for shooting Henry Cousins. They forced Captain Cheap into a tent that served as a makeshift prison. Five days later, John Bulkley and about 80 men left Captain Cheap on Wager Island, along with his two remaining supporters, and headed for Brazil. You have to imagine, these are men who have battled typhoons, tidal waves, scurvy, shipwreck. They are then on an island for months, starving.

Many of them died of starvation in the party that was on the island. They have watched their men die left and right. And now they have to get on this little boat, packed so tightly that they can barely move. They don't have provisions. They have a little bit of flour. And somehow, you know, they have to navigate, try to navigate this journey led by, for the most part, led by Bulkley.

The trip took three and a half months, and most of the men died. You know, by the time they're starting to drift toward the coastline in Brazil, they're delirious. By that time, their numbers dwindle to about 30. Bulkley is one of the few who has any strength whatsoever, but he imagines he sees kind of butterflies snowing from the sky and falling all around him. And eventually they drift to shore, and they're so weak they can barely even stand. They'd arrived at a port in southern Brazil.

And Bulkley then reveals that they are the survivors of His Majesty's ship, the Wager. They were welcomed and treated like heroes. John Bulkley wrote a letter to notify the British Navy, and noted that Captain Cheap had, quote, at his own request, tarried behind. John Bulkley knew many people in England might see what they did as mutiny. So when Bulkley gets back, he knows if he doesn't tell a convincing tale, he might get hanged. And so he decides to get his story out there first

and to release his account. He had actually kept a contemporaneous journal on the island and during the voyage, which was kind of remarkable. He had a quill and salvaged some ink from the voyage. He was a compulsive diarist and writer. And so he takes this account, he publishes it, it becomes a sensation,

and probably to some degree sways the public. John Bulkley wrote, The reader will find that necessity absolutely compelled us to act as we did. His journals included his account of Henry Cousin's death, how Captain Cheap had shot him, and how John Bulkley considered it murder. He also wrote that he blamed Captain Cheap for wrecking the wager in the first place. His journal was serialized in the London Magazine and published as a book. It was so popular that a second printing was ordered. As a result, he's not tried yet.

And it seems like the whole wager of fear may just blissfully fade away, which you kind of sense the admiralty and the authorities wanted because it was such a disaster. And years would go by before one day, about nearly six years after they had originally departed England on the expedition, on the wager, a boat arrives, a vessel arrives, and on board is Captain Cheap. Captain Cheap had returned to England with two other sailors who'd been left on Wager Island. Captain Cheap said several months after John Bulkley and the others left, another group of native Patagonians, the Chono, arrived in canoes and rescued them. But soon after they were rescued, the sailors were captured by the Spanish and imprisoned. They remained in Spanish custody for two and a half years. Captain Cheap said they were eventually allowed to live outside the prison,

as long as they didn't contact anyone back home. Eventually, Britain and Spain came to an agreement to trade prisoners, and Captain Cheap was able to return to England. They had to sail past Wager Island and back around Cape Horn. When Captain Cheap returned home, he learned that John Bulkley had accused him of murder. He wrote a letter to an Admiralty official and said John Bulkley was a liar and a coward

and had most inhumanly abandoned them. The Admiralty summoned every surviving sailor from the wager to appear at a court-martial. If Captain Cheap was found guilty of murdering Henry Cousins, he could be sentenced to death. John Bulkley also faced a possible

death sentence for mutiny. And they go into that court-martial and well, remarkably, the judges don't ask any questions about the mutiny or what happened on the island. They only ask them about

why the ship had wrecked, what had caused the ship to wreck. Anytime a ship wrecked in the British Navy, there was always an inquiry. And that's all they're asking about. It was like the equivalent of pulling somebody over, driving a car, and finding a dead body in the trunk and asking the driver only why he had a busted taillight. And that's basically what happens. And so they decide not to press them about all the alleged crimes on the islands. And while we'll never know precisely their reasoning, they had many incentives or reasons

for wanting to look the other way. And so ultimately, all the defendants are let go. That's the end of the proceedings. And the British Navy and the authorities, you get the sense, looked around and said, you know what? We are supposed to be, you know, these officers are supposed to be the vanguard of the empire. They're supposed to be these apostles of British civilization. They are supposed to be gentlemen. Instead, they look like brutes who committed all these crimes against each other and descended into a Hobbesian state of depravity.

And at the same time, the disastrous wager affair was a reminder of how bad and bungled the war had generally gone. And so they let all the men go, and it becomes, as one historian described it, the mutiny that never was. And what happened to David Cheap and John Bokely? So Bokely, you know, Bokely, it's funny, people end up kind of doing things that reflect their characters.

And so Bokely kind of escapes to the place where you can reinvent yourself, and that would later become a hotbed of rebellion and revolution. He goes to Philadelphia in the colonies, and the last we hear from him is in an account where he reprints his journal there, an American edition of it, and that's the last we hear from him.

He kind of inserts himself into history in this brief, bold way, and then he disappears. And Captain Cheap returns to the Navy. And he does actually capture, not long after, he does capture a Spanish ship with a good deal of treasure on board. Not like the prize they were chasing, but enough to then retire from the Navy and to live comfortably. But he could never fully escape the shame and the disgrace

of what had happened on Wager Island, and even in one of his obits, it described how he had shot a man dead on the island. In the end, despite losing the wager, the British Navy did successfully capture the Spanish ship. The treasure they found on board, silver, jewels, and money, was worth what would be 80 million dollars today. David Graham says the story of the wager went on to inspire Herman Melville, who called it a remarkable and most interesting narrative. And today, when you look at Google Maps of the Gulf of Pain,

you can see Wager Island. A few years ago, someone wrote a review that says, not the best place to be shipwrecked, forced to deal with drunken mutineers. David Grand's book is The Wager, a tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and murder. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Raul Baez. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic. Adabotulinum Toxin A is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

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