Dan Snow's History Hit - HMS Wager: Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

Episode Date: April 7, 2024

Join Dan as he narrates the harrowing story of the HMS Wager and its crew's descent into mutiny and survival against all odds. Set against the backdrop of the War of Jenkins' Ear, the Wager, a British warship, was part of a secret squadron sent to attack Spanish holdings in the Pacific but, tragedy struck as the ship was wrecked off the desolate coast of Patagonia during a storm in 1741.With expert testimony from David Grann, the author of the best-selling HMS Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, this episode delves into the ensuing struggle for leadership as the survivors split into factions, the deterioration of their psychological state due to the appalling conditions and the moral quandaries of mutiny and loyalty the men faced as they clung to life.Written by Dan Snow and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

On the 28th of January 1742, a strange object washed ashore the very southern tip of Brazil. It was 50 feet long. It was 10 feet wide. It looked a bit like a giant coffin. And that impression might have been reinforced as people peered inside at the terrible contents. There were 30 men in there, clinging to life. They're at the absolute extremity. In fact, one of them released that grip on life within days. They were listless. They were corpse-like, with dull eyes, rotting clothes, manes of unkempt hair. Many of them lay immobile. The seawater that leaked in through the rough planks swirled around them as the boat moved on the swell. It was a hellish vision.

Then one man, in a supreme effort, hauled himself to his feet and announced, with his swollen tongue and his weak voice, that they were the survivors of his Britannic Majesty's ship, the Wager. that they were the survivors of His Britannic Majesty's ship, the Wager. They'd been wrecked on the coast of Chile eight months earlier. They were at the end of one of the longest open boat journeys in history, nearly 3,000 miles, a journey in which 80 of them had perished in hurricane-force winds that shredded their sails and rigging. Massive seas, foam-capped reefs.

It was an astonishing act of endurance and seamanship. It was one that would make them national heroes to many when their story was told back in Britain. But six months later, another little craft landed in Chile on the other side of the continent. These men in a stitched together little vessel that hardly deserved the name of a boat had also survived the impossible. And they brought with them a different, even darker story. A story, when added to that of the other survivors, would paint a picture of incompetence, murder, betrayal, insubordination, and mutiny. It would be a story that would divide Georgian Britain and shine a light into the dark heart of that most British of institutions, the senior service, the Royal Navy. David Gran, wonderful author, great friend

of the podcast. He's just written a fabulous best-selling book that you will all have heard of, The Wager. We had him on the pod and I urge you all to go back and listen to that original podcast and buy his book, The Wager. But I also wanted to revisit that story on the podcast, give it a bit more airtime, because it is one of the greatest stories of all time. A terrifying story. In this podcast, you'll hear my description of what happened with lots of snippets from David Graham, like this one in which he describes how this story, until now, until his work, largely forgotten,

was once common currency. The story influenced philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau. It influenced Charles Darwin, who brought some of these accounts with him on the Beagle. It influenced two of our greatest novelists of the sea, Herman Melville and Patrick O'Brien. Well, thanks to David Grand's work, it is forgotten no more. Here is our retelling of the story of the wager

and what followed its destruction. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Robert Jenkins had enjoyed a profitable trip to South America. The merchant captain, or smuggler, depending on your national allegiance, had set out from Jamaica, in the Caribbean, with a hull full of cargo. We don't know for sure, but it seems like it could have been enslaved human beings, or sugar, the produce of their forced labour. And he'd traded that cargo with the Spanish colonies of South America. In April 1731, he was returning to Jamaica when he was intercepted by La Isabela, a Spanish, you could say, kind of coast guard vessel,

although that confers an official status that might be slightly misleading. The Spanish commander Juan de Leon Fandinho was not a coast guard in a conventional modern sense. He was more a sort of freelance enforcer affiliated loosely with the Spanish state. He leapt aboard, and according to some accounts, he lashed Robert Jenkins to the mast, took away his candles and his instruments, how dare they, and then more seriously, sliced off his left ear with a sword. One account says he then told Jenkins, the same will happen to him, meaning the king, if he is caught doing the same, which is a great line, but I think it's reasonably unlikely that his Britannic majesty George II was going to try and run a cargo of contraband into Cartagena. But there we are. Mutilated, Jenkins headed back to Britain where he became a pawn. He became a tool used by

politicians trying to dislodge the long-serving Prime Minister Sir Robert Warpole. Warpole's basic outlook had been to let sleeping dogs lie, to avoid war with Spain and France, to concentrate on commerce, trade, ensure stability at home in Britain. But sections of the British political class, as they so often do, wanted war. They wanted conquest, they wanted glory, spoils from overseas, and they wanted power at home. It's a familiar tale. And by 1739, Jenkins had been paraded around Parliament. He'd been sent to see the King. His case had been poured over by the press. Emotions ran high. British honour had been trampled. The Spanish must be taught to respect the British ensign. And a nice war would no doubt turn a profit for the merchants who'd lobbied for it and thrust a

new generation of politicians into power to prosecute it. Walpole reluctantly gave way and allowed the navy to start planning a maritime response. That response would take several forms. One of them was a squadron under Admiral Vernon that sailed for the Caribbean. He reached Antigua in October and attacked ports in Venezuela. The day before, not very sportingly, Britain's formal declaration of war. Britain and Spain were now at war. Named, years later, the War of Jenkins's Ear. Within a month, Vernon had pulled off quite a coup. In just 24 hours, his fleet had captured Portobello,

the Spanish port in Panama, one of the principal Spanish ports in the New World. He occupied it for a couple of weeks, he smashed it to bits, he stripped it of anything shiny that was portable, and he destroyed all the fortifications. Britain went wild. Here was the result that they'd hoped for. Quick, easy, rich wins. A new neighbourhood in Edinburgh

and a road in north-west London were named Portobello. A new song was written to mark the occasion. You may have heard of it. Rule Britannia. With confidence high off the back of this, the British sent out more expeditions. While Vernon continued to plug away in the Caribbean, in fact with disastrous results, more of that perhaps on another pod, it's an extraordinary story, the British government summoned their most distinguished sailor, well a good sailor, a distinguished sailor with a very distinguished family tree, George Anson, an aristocrat whose uncle was the Lord Chancellor and who had politicians littered throughout his extended family. This well-placed young fellow was given command of a very ambitious expedition indeed.

Encouraged by the apparent Spanish weakness in the Caribbean, the Admiralty was going one step further, and wanted to project British power into the Pacific Ocean to strike at the source of Spanish silver itself, Peru, where mule trains arrived from the mines in the Andes and loaded unimaginable amounts of bullion onto ships bound for Spanish possessions in Asia, like Manila, or headed up to the Isthmus of Panama, where it would be transhipped onto vessels heading back to Spain. In one of the most optimistic set of orders ever penned in Whitehall,

In one of the most optimistic set of orders ever penned in Whitehall, Anson was encouraged to seize Peru's capital Lima, maybe start a rebellion in that valuable Spanish province, capture Panama, and generally sow chaos in the heart of the Spanish Empire. With this broad set of optimistic orders, in the late summer of 1740, Anson set out. He commanded from aboard HMS Centurion, a thousand tons, a 60-gun ship packed with 400 men. His squadron was made up of several smaller ships, the Gloucester, the Severn, the Pearl, the Trial, and one of the smaller ships, HMS Wager, of 600 tons, with 24 guns and over 100 men aboard. There were also two merchant ships accompanying them, who were purely there to carry supplies. At the start of every war, the navy faced a mad scramble to crew up. Peacetime numbers were slashed, particularly under politicians like

the peaceable Sir Robert Warpole, and now rather robust recruitment measures had to be used to get crews onto ships of a dramatically expanded wartime navy. Here's David Graham, who I mentioned, he's a brilliant author of the wager, talk us through some of the methods they used. So it sent out the press gangs to try to round up mariners in ports and towns, just basically eyeballing you. And if you had any of these telltale signs of a mariner, including any tar even under your fingernails, because tar was obviously used on ships back then to make things water resistant, they would seize you and bring you on the ship, but they were still short of men. And so the Admiralty had taken the rather extreme step

of rounding up men from a retirement home, a pensioner's home. These men were in their 60s and 70s. Many were missing an assortment of limbs, and some were so sick they had to be hoisted on stretchers onto the ship. So the challenge of this expedition with this kind of crew to forge them into a band of brothers, especially on the wager, was really enormous. The pensioners he mentioned are in fact Chelsea pensioners, they're from the Royal Hospital. Anson dragged 500 of them aboard to act as marines who could

deploy ashore as soldiers. In fact, only about 250 of them were well enough to go aboard ship, and some of them went aboard on stretchers. The expedition left Britain in the late summer. They were very lucky to dodge a Spanish interception fleet off the island of Madeira, in fact. They had mounds of supplies all over the decks. They had inexperienced crews. Had the Spanish intercepted them, the fighting ability of the ships was terribly compromised and the sea battle could have been fatal. Instead, they ploughed slowly across the Atlantic. One of the merchant vessels, her supplies exhausted, turned back. On the other ships, food started to rot, water spoiled. The ships were crowded

with extra men, like the pensioners and other marines, as they were euphemistically called, which in turn meant extra supplies, extra barrels of salt pork and water. turn meant extra supplies, extra barrels of salt pork and water. Naval ships of the era were always overcrowded, but this was intense even by that standard. As they crossed the equator, the men who were packed together in astonishing heat, carrying all the diseases of the Georgian slums, the poor and the marginalised, well those men started to get sick. Lice bred like lice, I suppose, in the warm, damp, dirty, crowded decks. Typhus spread. The crews called it ship fever. It was so ubiquitous, so familiar. It began with a fever, then a rash that eventually spreads to cover most of the body. Delirium follows. The eyes can't bear the light.

Men raved and screamed. They had to be restrained. Many slipped into a coma and died. Dysentery is never far behind typhus aboard a ship. Despite strict regulations about defecating or urinating below decks, many men found dark corners. Weakened men in Atlantic storms, fearing to go above, did their business below and created the perfect conditions for the Shigella bacteria to thrive. Suffering men doubled over with abdominal pain. Their feces turned to water, blood, and mucus. A bad dose can see a patient lose as much as a litre of water an hour, and no one knew the first thing about a cure.

At this point, let's check in on one of those small warships. HMS Wager. I should say, the ship hadn't been a naval vessel for long. Until very recently, she'd been an armed merchant ship. She'd been built five years earlier and operated by the East India Company. It had a big hull for all that cargo brought back from the East, and it had cannon for protection against pirates and European adversaries. In 1739, she'd arrived back from India and she'd been bought by the Admiralty, especially for this voyage. She was sent down for debt for docks and she was refitted. As a merchant vessel, she did have more space for storage than a standard naval vessel, but her gun ports did allow her to go to war if necessary,

so she was a good fit for the job. There were 28 cannon on her gun deck, but in her hull she had bigger guns, siege artillery for attacking Spanish possessions ashore. She had spare ammunition, she had rum, she was packed with supplies, and was carrying far more men than she would have had on a trip to Asia. Wager, like the rest of the fleet, had been terribly affected by the sickness that tore through the ranks. Officers were dropping dead. Anson had to shuffle his personnel around. The

first captain of Wager, Captain Kidd, was moved to another ship to replace a fallen comrade. But he also died. Just before death, we have an account of him being terribly worried about his five-year-old son, for whom he was the only source of support. In the end, all he could do was commend him to a benevolent God. Just before he breathed his last he was said to have made a terrible prophecy. The voyage would end in poverty, vermin, famine, death and destruction.

His death caused another ripple in the command structure as men were shuffled around. Wager's new commander Murray was moved to him, and Murray's replacement was a more junior officer. He was a lieutenant, now acting captain, David Cheap. Cheap had served right under Anson's nose. He'd been the first lieutenant of the Centurion, the flagship. He was a thick-set Scotsman who'd gone to sea to avoid a legal wrangle with his brother over inheritance, and the unwelcome attention of men he owed money to. Like many before and many since, the sea was a place of safety. From the irksome demands of the land, it was also a field of opportunity. Glory and prizes and reputation lay just over the horizon. He hoped. It looked briefly like those hopes were going to be dashed

as he lay sick in the Atlantic, but he recovered. He'd never commanded a big ship before. He was not, by all accounts, a people person, and his new ship, the Wager, was in poor condition. The decks were terribly overcrowded, men were ill, and they were suspicious of their new boss. Oh, and they were about to attempt to pass Cape Horn, one of the most dangerous and challenging sea passages anywhere in the world. The bottom, the southerly tip of South America, the most infamous headland on Earth. The wave-lashed misery around which ships had to pass to get into the Pacific.

You talk to any sailor and mention the horn and they will grimace. The weather, the sea conditions there are the stuff of legend. The southern ocean girdles the Earth down there. Constant, howling westerly gales travel unimpeded around the planet in the world's only circumpolar ocean. You heard me talking about this on the podcast when I went on the Shackleton expedition in 2022. The roaring 40s, the furious 50s, the titanic waves, the wind coming in freezing blasts from the exact direction in which the sailors are trying to steer. It's not good. Here's David Graham. There are the strongest currents on earth there. The winds can accelerate off into hurricane force and even reach 200 miles per hour. And then there are the Cape Horn rollers,

these waves that can dwarf a 90-foot mass. Herman Melfel, who later rounded the horn, a 90-foot mass. Herman Melfel, who later rounded the horn, compared it to a descent into hell in Dante's Inferno. And so these ships, the squadron coming around Cape Horn, soon find themselves smack in this hell, and the ships are just being bandied about as if they're no more than pitiful rowboats. There's an old sailor's saying, no more than pitiful rowboats. There's an old sailor's saying, below 40 degrees latitude, there's no law. Below 50 degrees, there's no God.

As if the dysentery, the typhus, the appalling weather wasn't bad enough, that age-old scourge of the long-distance mariner now appeared aboard the ships. Men's tooth loosened in their gums, hair fell out. Old scar tissue softened. Wounds reopened. It was scurvy.

It's caused by a lack of vitamin C. They didn't know that at the time, of course. They didn't know what vitamin C was. So again, they had absolutely no ability to treat it. It just got worse until people died. It's worth just pausing on that for a moment because here they are in this storm where they're going to need everybody on these ships if they're going to have any chance to persevere getting to the question of morale. And suddenly, many of the men, most of them, can't even get out of their hammocks because they are suffering from scurvy. This is one of the worst maritime outbreaks

of scurvy ever recorded. And you can read these journals and read these logbooks, you know, and they describe their teeth falling out and their hair falling out. They describe the cartilage between their bones coming undone. One seaman who had shattered a bone five decades earlier at a battle

suddenly has that same bone in the same place mysteriously fracture again. And the disease is also affecting their senses. One seaman described, he said, the disease got into our brains and we went raving mad and hundreds and hundreds of them perished, their bodies kind of just tossed overboard. So not only are the ships breaking apart, not only are they in this storm, now they have this scurvy. And so you can just imagine the challenges to morale and even just keeping these ships going at that point. Pitiful, skinny, sick men that haul themselves aloft if they had any chance of completing their voyage. They had to put up sail, take in sail, trim sail, try and

optimise those sails to catch the wind and move the boat forward through the water. It was a slow, back-breaking job at the best of times, and these were not the best of times. Weakened men in relentlessly bad weather clinging to masts and spars as they lurched through 90 degrees on huge waves. Oh, and of course, they didn't really know where they were. They tried to use dead reckoning, which basically means calculating your speed and direction with the compass and a so-called log, a long string with knots in it. You toss it over the side and then count the knots slipping through your fingers in a certain time span, hence knots, the unit of speed at sea. So you sort of know your speed, and you sort of know the direction you think you're travelling in,

but then you have to estimate what the current is doing, how much leeway you're making, basically how far the wind's pushing you sideways as well as forward. And after days of storms, all this becomes just a giant guessing game. One night, for example, was a brief break in the cloud, a chink of moonlight showed the coast of Patagonia slap bang on the bows. A single cannon was fired from the lead ship and they all went hard about. The entire fleet had just narrowly avoided complete destruction in the dead of night on a hostile coast. The sheer scale of this harrowing, arduous, deadly, uncomfortable, miserable enterprise just makes me struggle to understand how anyone could sustain themselves

in this extreme a situation. We really are an extraordinary species. And for the crew of the wager in particular, things were about to get worse. In the dead of a moonless night, Wager lost contact with the rest of the fleet. You can just imagine the creeping dread of the officers on the quarterdeck at first light, of the lookouts in the mast tops who scanned the surrounding sea. They hoped to see their fellowships emerge out of the murk. They waited, they hoped, but as the hours passed, they had to accept that they were lost. they hoped, but as the hours passed, they had to accept that they were lost. They were by themselves, on the far side of the world. Up until this point, the big decisions had been made by the commander, Commodore Anson, on the flagship. The inexperienced Captain the Wager might not have been hugely popular on his own ship, but he knew his reefing from his jibing,

his halyards from his tiller, and he was, you know, he's effective enough to keep wager sailing in roughly the direction that Anson had commanded. But now, Captain David Cheap was in charge. He was second only to God aboard wager. It was his decision where they went. Should they continue up the coast of South America? Should they turn around and head for home? Should they head straight out into the Pacific? There was debate on board, and opposition hardened around the impressive figure of the gunner, John Bultley. Now, the gunner's an odd rank at this time in the Navy. The gunner was unquestionably a senior figure on board, but on paper, he's not one of the senior officers. He's like the bosun who was the most experienced sailor, or the carpenter who kept the ship afloat. The gunner was in a bracket with

them, which was roughly the sort of third tier. They were very, very experienced. They were very competent. They would have stood high in the captain's estimation in normal times. But they were not officers and gentlemen in that traditional sense. They didn't dine in the wardroom. They didn't sleep with the other officers. They lived much closer to the sailors from whose ranks they'd been promoted. The gunner was obviously in charge of all the cannon aboard the ship. He was an essential figure. So John Bulkeley knew his business at least as well as the inexperienced captain. And he didn't think there was much point wandering about a single ship with tattered rigging, groaning, planking and a half-dead crew trying to find the rest of the fleet somewhere on a deeply inhospitable coast. They had done their

best. It was time to head for a pre-agreed rendezvous, the Juan Fernandez Islands, further out in the Pacific, away from the deadly coast of Patagonia. Now Captain Cheap had been told by Admiral Anson that he desperately needed the supplies aboard Wager to capture those key Spanish possessions along the coast. This was Captain Cheap's first command. The Admiral had given him a direct order. He was desperate not to fail, not to let him down. So he overruled Bulkeley and his officers and continued to hug the rocky coast that he couldn't really see, estimating his position and heading north, hoping to find his fellow ships, to find his Commodore. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere.

There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans,

kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. There was thick cloud on the 13th of May 1741.

The wind was coming in hard, as it always seemed to from the west, from the sea to the land, a dangerous position to be in. That land was still invisible, but it was there, like a kind of ghostly presence. Hundreds of miles of rocky lee shore, uninhabited, without much sheltered anchorage. It was over there, somewhere to the east, perhaps a hundred miles, perhaps much closer. At 9am, or two bells in the morning watch ship's time, the carpenter went forward to inspect the metal bolts that held the rigging up. He wanted to see how they were faring. He was going to suck his teeth and mutter curses on the lords of the

admiralty, on the weather, on Commodore Anson, on the corrosive effect of the sea. But then, with the briefest of gaps in the cloud, he thought he saw land dead ahead. Then the clouds closed. He told the lieutenant of the watch, who hadn't seen anything himself, and chose to do nothing with that information. In opting for passivity, that lieutenant had just condemned his ship and his crewmates. Unbeknown to the crew, the wager had been pushed into a large, uncharted bay. With every boat length she travelled, she was moving further into a shoal-strewn cul-de-sac. Today we call it the Golfo de Piaz, the Gulf of Distress. Five precious hours and dozens of miles later, at 2pm, land was seen. To the west.

And it was to the west and the northwest. The boasts and his mates roared at any crewman with any strength left in his body. The wheel was put hard over, and rather than continuing roughly north, they attempted to get out of trouble and steer to the south and west, out into the Pacific. The wind increased, blowing from that mighty ocean towards the shore, and sailing into the wind, well that requires a lusty, fit crew trimming sails, keeping their angle to the wind just so, lots of little adjustment, a taut rig, the masts raked back at just the right pitch. It needs a hull free of weed so it can run straight and true through the waves. And the wager had none of those things. At this moment of crisis, the captain, cheap, fell down

a hatch onto the deck below and broke his shoulder. He was forced to take to his bunk just as his command faced its greatest threat. The howling winds pushed the leaking, limping, plodding ship sideways as much as forward. One of the midshipmen, a young man called Byron, was on watch and he called the storm that night dreadful beyond description. At 0430, on the 14th of May, there was the sound that every mariner fears, that every one of us who have experienced it remembers. The grinding, gouging, angry sound of wooden hull on rock. An abomination. of wooden hull on rock. An abomination. Ships are supposed to float. They're supposed to prance through waves, sliced through bright blue like a dolphin. Supported, cushioned, protected by fathoms of water. When you strike the bottom, after a long stretch of float, it's like being dragged back down to earth after floating aloft. It's immediate. It's stomach-churning. In this dreadful situation, Byron observed,

the wager lay for some little time, every soul on board looking upon the present minute as his last. on board, looking upon the present minute as his last. The tired wooden hull of wager was being torn on rocks like a cheese grater in the dark. Suddenly, it hits a submerged rock. Now, as I'm sure some of your listeners know, back then, most seamen didn't know how to swim. And so this ship is not only like a fortress to fight in battles, but it's also their home, their floating civilization. So you can just imagine the terror, it hits this rock and suddenly the rudder shatters on the wager. And there is an anchor that weighs two tons that falls through the hull of the ship. And then the wager is teetering for a moment. Then another wave sweeps it off this rock.

And it's careening through this, what's now known as El Golfo de Penas, which translates as the Gulf of Sorrows, or some prefer to call it the Gulf of Pain. And it's careening without a rudder to steer by. A ship without a rudder is like a car without a steering column. You're going to keep going for a while, but where and when you stop is no longer up to you. Water was now pouring into the hull of Wager, torrents of it,

great black tentacles of solid seawater claiming the lower portions of the ship. Enfeebled men drowned where they lay. Some of the crew lost their minds. One pranced around claiming he was the King of England. Others lay catatonic. Enfeebled men drowned where they lay. Some of the crew lost their minds. One pranced around claiming he was the King of England. Others lay catatonic, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the horror they were living through. Some fought, though.

The gunner, Bulkley, seems to have taken control. The only option was now trying to balance the sails in such a way as to steer the ship a little bit, head towards the shallows, towards the land. They were sinking anyway. They might as well sink where they would have a fighting chance of survival. A wild scramble through surf and razor-sharp rocks. Better that than the silent certainty of slipping beneath the waves in 40 fathoms. Water pouring through this hole until finally it smashes into a cluster of other rocks.

And at that point begins to shatter. The planks are ripping apart. The masts are coming down. You got the decks caving in. You have water surging up through the bottom of the ship. You have the rats scurrying upwards. The men who have been suffering from scurvy or in their hammocks and couldn't get out in time, they drowned. It feels odd to talk of luck in this uniquely ill-starred expedition, but they did have a sliver of luck here. They got close to the shore and smashed into another band of rocks, and this time they stuck fast. Wager had reached its terminal point. Bulkley went to retrieve the ship's documents, like the log, the record of all the movements of the ship, the course changes, and the estimated positions. But he discovered the log had been deliberately destroyed, no doubt by some officer wishing to shield himself from any future inquiry.

It got wedged between these rocks. And so the survivors, there were about 145 of them, they climb up onto the remnants of the ruins and they peer out into the mist. And that's when they see this desolate island. Wager Island, it's called today. A shard of land off the Chilean coast. Pleasingly, there's a Lake Cochrane inland of the coast here. Little Easter egg for those of you who enjoyed those pods earlier this year. To understand that coastline, imagine if you pull a piece of ice off

a frozen pond and then drop it on the ground. The coastline looks like that shatter pattern. It is a place of wild desolation. The trees are all bent at 45 degrees angles. They look like they're lying on top of each other because of the winds. It was winter when they were there, and so the temperature was hovering around freezing. And it is a place of kind of constant precipitation, so it was always raining or sleeting. Still, a hard, barren island is a lot more attractive than a doomed wreck. Just over 100 of the crew took the small boat and managed to make it to the shore. Some men stayed behind, and in the hallowed tradition of the British seafarer they broke into the booze supplies and got roaringly drunk. Lolling around, they dressed up in the officer's fancy clothes, they got in fistfights,

they danced on the rim of oblivion. Bulkley wrote, they fell into the most violent outrage and disorder. Initially Captain Cheap lying on his sickbed in the surgeon's cabin with a broken shoulder, refused to leave his ship. Loyal crewmen, though, begged him to, telling him that every effort had been made to convince the drunks to leave the ship and the captain could leave the stricken vessel with honour. The men, clambering ashore, must have enjoyed, well, a moment of euphoria, as they felt unyielding rock beneath their feet and fingers. They would have drunk deep from rivulets of rainwater that poured off that glistening rock. But that moment of euphoria, if it existed, was probably very brief. Byron reports that that night

he just lay there in the driving rain. He didn't sleep a wink. There was no cover. On either side of him were men's bodies. And when the grey light of dawn came up, they didn't stir. Three men had died in the night beside him. The survivors were alone, without any hope of rescue. They had no ship. They were on a barren shard of rock, surrounded by unknown territory. Worst of all, they can find virtually no food. There are no animals on the island.

There are some birds that kind of flutter off the shoreline. There were some mussels, which they quickly ate. There's a little bit of celery, which they ate, which miraculously to them cured their scurvy. They didn't realize why, but it had vitamin C in it. One British officer later described the island as a place where the soul of man dies in him. The wreck of Wager sat perched on his rock for a few days before breaking apart. The drunken men who'd stayed aboard either drowned or were rescued. They all now faced a decision that would tear the group apart.

And we know a remarkable amount about it, as the author David Graham explains. So there is this surprising trove of primary resources that have survived all these years. You can go to the British archives and you go to like, for example, Kew and the British National Archives, and you can pull out log books from the expedition and journals. And, you know, they come in these boxes from the 1740s and the dust just comes out of them, the bindings are disintegrating. And yet there they are. And you can read them and they're meticulously documented

and you can really vividly reconstruct what happened. Captain Cheap and the majority of his crew discovered they had very different ideas about what to do next. So when they get on the island, first Captain Cheap tries to build a kind of an imperial outpost, this settlement, and he wants to govern by the same rules and regulations that had existed on the ship,

and he obviously wants to remain their commander. But more and more of the people are kind of gravitating towards John Bulkley, the gunner, who was this kind of gravitating towards John Bulkley, the gunner, who was this kind of instinctive leader, who uses these phrases like life and liberty to stir the men. And each has very different visions of the nature of leadership and what they should do to survive. Cheap was a captain who'd lost his ship, his first command. That meant certain court-martial. first command. That meant certain court-martial. If found guilty, he faced shame, dishonour,

expulsion from the navy, poverty, ignominy. So he wanted to try and forestall that. He wanted to take the small boats, the open boats, fit them out with driftwood and material scavenged from the wreck and sail north to catch up with the British, to add their strength to the depleted crews of Anson's fleet. Most of the other men, encouraged by Bulkeley, had had enough. They had done their duty to his majesty. It was time to see to their own salvation and head home. On their side was the fact that in 1741, you signed up or were impressed to serve, not for the Royal Navy, but a particular ship. If it sank, you no longer got paid. And although it was a grey area, the implication of that was that you didn't necessarily have to go on obeying the ship's officers or its captain. So the question of leadership started to gnaw at

the group like a cancer, and all that was against a backdrop of hunger and desperation. The men were at the extremity. Cheap's authority was fading. Hungry, scared men are insubordinate men. In early June, there was an altercation outside Cheap's tent, an argument about rations. He burst out in a rage with a pistol and shot a midshipman, Cousins, in the face. The poor man was mortally wounded and he lingered for more than a week before dying. The opposition to Captain Cheap now hardened. They now felt they had an excuse, an opportunity.

They could use this execution, or this murder, to arrest Cheap and strip him of command. A rebellious lieutenant said that once Cheap was arrested, they could set out for home, quote, without being any longer liable to the obstruction they now meet from the captain's perverseness and chicanery. On the 4th of August,

Bulkeley approached Cheap with a gang of sailors around him. He stopped and held up a piece of paper. Dramatically, he'd read it out as if he was in a court of law. We, whose names are under-mentioned, do upon mature consideration think it the best, surest, and most safe way for the preservation of the body of people on the spot to proceed through the Strait of Magellan for England, dated at a desolate island on the coast of Patagonia. Bulkley had got a lot of people to sign this declaration, including senior members of the crew. There was a discussion in Cheap's tent. It got reasonably heated.

Cheap cried out that he was still their commander, and Bulkley replied coolly, We will support you with our lives as long as you suffer reason to rule. you with our lives as long as you suffer reason to rule. Once the carpenter had finished building a reasonably seaworthy vessel, well, the time came to decide. Bulkley and the others refused point blank to go north. They refused to serve under Cheap and die for his ambition. It was mutiny. On the 9th of October, sailors burst in upon Cheap. They abused him, quote, somewhat rudely and tied him up. The commander of the small detachment of Royal Marines was also tied up. Cheap spat at the mutineer, gentlemen, do you know what you have done? Bulkley replied, sir, it's your own fault. You have given yourself no manner of concern for the public good.

You have acted quite the reverse, or else have been so careless and indifferent about it as if we had no commander. Cheap said simply, you will doubtless be called to account for this hereafter. With that, the bosun, a drunken troublemaker called King, walked up to Cheap and punched him in the face, shouting, it was your time. Now, God damn you, it's mine. Cheap simply said, you're a scoundrel for using a gentleman ill when he is a prisoner. His face was streaked with blood and rain. Four days later, Bulkley led a little squadron of two small boats to the south.

Two junior officers, two midshipmen, had thought they'd be taking Captain Cheap with them, albeit as a prisoner, and when he was abandoned on the island, they had second thoughts. They took one of the boats and sailed back to join their captain. One of those midshipmen, who I've already mentioned, Byron, was actually the famous Lord Byron's grandfather. Let's leave Byron and Cheap on their island and focus first on Bulkeley's group as they tried to sail to safety. The big problem that Bulkeley now faced was that,

like a lion with a taste for human flesh, the men had experienced the heady freedoms of mutiny, of rebelling against authority, and he needed to nip that right in the bud. He wrote down a list of rules for the journey. Whatever fowl, fish, or necessaries of life obtained during the passage shall be divided equally among the whole. Any person found guilty of stealing food shall, irrespective of rank, be cast upon the nearest shore and abandoned. To prevent broils, quarrels, and mutiny, any man who threatens the life of another or inflicts violence shall be left on the nearest shore and abandoned. Now, if you thought it was bad sailing in a leaky old

warship around Cape Horn and along the coast of South America, well, it's certainly not any better in a patched together open boat. Bulkeley set off with 81 men. Ten died in the first two weeks. His hull was packed with listless, apathetic, scurvy-ridden sailors, slowly freezing to death. They chose ten men by lot to abandon on the desolate shoreline, a certain death sentence. Then they tried to round the tip of South America, enduring indescribable conditions.

Men were dying every day. Others challenged his leadership. In southern Argentina, he abandoned another eight men, who would experience the most shocking trials, which I'll come back to. Somehow, I mean, goodness knows how, on the 28th of January 1742, Goodness knows how, on the 28th of January 1742, the crew sighted the Rio Grande, the southern tip of Portuguese-controlled Brazil. After a journey of well over 2,000 miles in an open boat, which had been their home for 15 weeks, of the 81 men who'd set off from Wager Island, 30 arrived in Brazil. They go from the coast of Chile all the way south, down through the Strait of Magellan, which is known as a place of great squalls, and then up the coast to Brazil. And eventually there were about 80 of them set out,

and this little castaway boat washes ashore off the coast of Brazil. By then, there were only 30 survivors. Their bodies almost wasted to the bone, including John Bulkley. And they announced they are the survivors of His Majesty's ship, the Wager. They believed that they were the only survivors of His Majesty's ship, the Wager. They had to be. There was no way anyone could have survived on that rock in Patagonia, could they? Let's get back. Let us return to Captain Cheap. He's got midshipman Byron and 19

or 20 men on said rock. Occasionally, one of them just dropped dead from malnutrition, from the terrible conditions. And so two months or so after Bulkeley had left, they decide to strike out at the height of summer or what passes for summer in December 1741. There are two remaining little open boats left of them. And they set off, not heading south of the Atlantic and home, but north to the Spanish possessions of Peru and northern Chile, perhaps there to catch up with their commander Ansem. In their little boats they sailed hard on the wind, rigs creaking, sheets taut, sails hauled in till they were stiff as boards. One of the little boats turned over in foul weather. Men were drowned. Survivors were hauled aboard the other boat, which was now dangerously overcrowded. The terrible decision was taken to

abandon submarines ashore, to leave them to fend for themselves. They weren't sailors, so they were just useless mouths. Byron, the midshipman, describes what a torment this was. He wrote, this was a melancholy thing, but necessity compelled us to do it. And as we were obliged to leave some behind us, the marines were fixed upon as not being of any service on board. What made the case of these poor men the more deplorable was the place being destitute of seal, shellfish, or anything they could possibly live upon. The captain left arms, ammunition, a frying pan, and several other necessaries. Our hearts melted with compassion for them, he wrote.

As their little boat got underway, the marines they left behind gave three cheers and roared, God save the King. None of those marines were ever heard from again. The open boat crew endured terrors. They attempted to beat out to sea, to get out of the gulf, to get round the mighty headland, to escape that gulf of misery. But their little tub just wasn't up to it. It just couldn't get round the headland, with winds and waves smashing it sideways. They pulled desperately oars, pulling for king, for country, for their wives, sweethearts and loved ones. But they couldn't make it.

They turned around. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It had been an utterly pointless two-month voyage, and they found themselves back on Wager Island. Seven more men had died. Another expired as soon as they reached the island. Many of them, I think they'd made up their minds that they would die there.

But then two weeks later, salvation. From an unexpected quarter, a group of indigenous Americans paddled up to the island. Using broken Spanish, they explained that it was impossible to sail north from here, but you could get north by travelling over land, using rivers, lakes and the sea. An ingenious route with portages where you carry the boats and then have spells on the water. The survivors promised the Indians, as they called them, every tool and piece of iron they had, and the Indians agreed to lead them to a Spanish settlement. It was, you will not be surprised to learn, an inconceivably harsh journey. Ten men died of starvation, exhaustion and exposure. Only four were left alive, among them improbably Captain

Cheap. His hatred and thirst for vengeance, I think, keeping him from lying down and giving up. The Spanish took these walking corpses into custody and they were sometimes kept in cells, but other times lived with a bit of liberty. They spent two years as captives in Santiago, Chile. Cheap fell out so badly with one of the other four survivors that he insisted on crossing the Andes and heading to Argentina with a Spanish group rather than remaining with his intolerable captain. So it was a little band of three men who eventually boarded a French ship, it was a little band of three men who eventually boarded a French ship and after various misadventures they arrived back in the UK on the 9th of April 1745. Over two years after the group of survivors led by Gunnar Bultly, against every chance Cheap had survived.

And now it was time for a reckoning. But before we get to that reckoning, I just want to take a bit of time out here to talk about one last group of survivors who got back even later. Do you remember those men who were abandoned by Bulkeley in South America on his terrible journey to Brazil? Some of them incredibly survived.

There had been eight of them. Initially, they'd tried to kill sea lions with rocks to feed themselves. Then they tried to walk the hundreds of miles north to Buenos Aires. They failed. They had turned back. One day, a group of them went out hunting, and when they returned, the two sentries back at base had been murdered. All their possessions had been stolen. Their camp was destroyed. Later, two other men disappeared while out hunting. The four survivors again tried to hike to Buenos Aires. They were captured by indigenous people, they were enslaved,

and they endured terrible hardships. They passed through several owners, and then three of them were ransomed by the Spanish. It wasn't much of a salvation because the Spanish threw them aboard a prison hulk, and they lived on bread and water. They were sent back across the Atlantic, they survived a bloody mutiny aboard that ship and they were then imprisoned in Spain before eventually being sent back to England. They arrived in July 1746, almost exactly five years after the wreck. And so this group, this group among the midshipmen Isaac Morris and two others,

And so this group, this group among them, midshipman Isaac Morris and two others, let's just recap what they endured. A typhus outbreak, scurvy, malnutrition, unimaginable weather, a shipwreck, mutiny, an open boat journey through the Southern Ocean, marooning, comrades murdered, enslavement, forced marches, imprisonment, another mutiny, and a further bout of imprisonment. It's extraordinary. I asked David Gran, out of the original ship's company just how many survived. Well, one of the survivors from Bocli's group dies soon after they

get to Brazil, and about 29 of them survive. There's a couple other kind of stragglers that eventually make it, about six others or seven others. So you're looking at about 35, 36 survived out of 250 people had originally gone on this ship. And on the whole expedition, just to point out, nearly 2000 people went and more than 1300 perished. So it was just a shocking death toll even for a voyage of this nature. Wager had been lost. The Admiralty wanted to know why and who was responsible. There would be a court-martial. For his part, Cheap wanted Bulkeley and the others hanged. Their lords of the Admiralty were in a predicament. Bulkeley had become a bit of a celebrity. Unusually, he'd published his account. He'd insisted that after a ship was lost,

the authority of the captain no longer bound the crew. Now, the Admiralty didn't particularly want to heavily publicise this drama. They did not want this tale to receive yet more publicity, a tale of people shooting each other in the head and generally behaving in a way that would not reflect well on His Majesty's Navy. And so it was that on April 1746, on HMS Royal George off Portsmouth, the court-martial met. Now, oddly, it was on the 16th of April, at exactly the same time that Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highlanders were being massacred on the sleep-blasted battlefield of Culloden, several hundred miles to the north. As one great challenge to Georgian

Britain was seen off, another particular challenge would have to be dealt with. The people in charge of the court-martial organised a good old-fashioned institutional whitewash. The court decided it was only going to look at the circumstances of the sinking itself. Everyone was acquitted. One lieutenant, however, was reprimanded for not acting decisively when the sighting of Shaw was passed after him at the stern. All of the main protagonists, can you imagine, all of the main protagonists were in that great stern cabin of HMS Royal George. Bulkley, Cheap, Byron, even the bosun king who'd got drunk on the wreckage and then punched Cheap in the face,

he was there as well. Can you imagine the awkwardness, the seething hatred? But that was that. There would be no further inquiries. Everyone was free to continue with their lives and careers. Cheap was given command of another ship. He didn't have long to enjoy that command, however. He died in the early 1750s. Bulkeley was offered a little boat to command, but he refused, and he was wise to do so. She was lost in a storm with all hands. He had some money from his memoir. It's a very early example of a memoir written by someone who wasn't an officer. It was published with this fascinating title, A Voyage to the South Seas in the Years 1740-41, A faithful narrative of the loss of His Majesty's ship, the Wager, on a desolate island

in the latitude 47 south, longitude 81 40 west With the proceedings and conduct of the officers and crew and the hardships they endured in the said island for the space of five months their bold attempt for liberty in coasting the southern part of the vast region of Patagonia setting out with upward of 80 souls in their boats the loss of the cutter, their passage through the Straits of Magellan, an account of the incredible hardships they frequently underwent for want of food of any kind. It's a catchy title. Cheap emigrated to Pennsylvania, where he disappears from the

historic record. I'm so tempted to wonder, in the years to come, as an older gentleman, did he rally to the American colours? Did he avenge himself on the British hierarchy by ferrying General Washington's army across the Hudson or the Delaware? We'll never know. When he returned from his very successful expedition, in which he did capture lots of Spanish gold, Admiral Anson corrected this loophole in naval law. As Lord Commissioner in 1747, he passed an act for extending the discipline of the navy to crews of His Majesty's ships, wrecked, lost, or taken, and continuing to receive wages upon certain conditions. taken and continuing to receive wages upon certain conditions. From this point forward, the crews would obey their commanders, even after being wrecked, but they would also be paid. In retrospect, the survivors of the wager were very lucky not to be convicted of mutiny, and they owe their acquittal to the desire of the Admiralty to hush it up, and that new force, public opinion.

Bulkley and the others were popular. They captured the public fancy. It would not do to execute them. That is the story of the wager and her crew. Let's leave the last words to the wonderful David Graham. Thanks for listening. This is a case not of pure villains or pure heroes. These were deeply humans who are placed under these very extreme circumstances. The voyage and the island become almost like a laboratory that is testing the human condition under these extreme circumstances. And inevitably, it begins to reveal their hidden nature, and it reveals both the good and the bad. So there will be these moments where you will be just amazed by the gallantry and sacrifice. And then a moment later, the same person, you just recoil at the the brutality and so it is a complex case you