Dan Snow's History Hit - Wreck, Scandal & Mutiny on HMS Wager

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

In 1740, the Royal Navy ship The Wager set sail for the Pacific to take part in the War of Jenkins' Ear. The unfortunate ship was separated from the fleet and, after pulverising storms and outbreaks of scurvy, ended up sinking near a small island off the coast of Chile.Dan is joined by David Grann, author of the bestselling book The Wager, to tell this tale of shipwreck and mutiny on the high seas.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today, you'll be happy to learn it's a story of shipwreck, of mutiny, of murder in the 18th century.

It's a story of ambition and hubris. HMS Wager was a 28-gun Royal Navy warship. During the War of Jenkins's Ear in the 18th century, the strangest of the many wars of the 18th century, just precedes the War of Austrian Succession. So during the War of Jenkins's Ear, the British decided to send a squadron around into the Pacific. The first time the Navy had actually sent a squadron into the Pacific. Their plan was to grab as much treasure as they could from the lucrative trade fedding from the Spanish colonies in South America to Asia. Among the ships of that flotilla was HMS Wager. They hit the customary appalling weather off Cape Horn as they went into the Pacific.

Wager became separated and neared the coast of modern-day Chile, where on the 14th of May 1741, she smashed into a rock. And that's when the trouble started. But this is a story of survival and of epic endurance, but also of conflict. It's a story that's been turned into a bestseller by the American writer David Gran. He's a New York Times bestseller. He's been on the podcast before. He's written many, many books. Among them is Killers of the Flower Moon, which is about to be released by Martin Scorsese,

featuring DiCaprio, De Niro, and others. It's a big deal. This will be an epic film when it comes out too. I'll be in there watching it. Enjoy this this the story of the wager t-minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on hiroshima god save the king no black white unity till there is first and black unity never to go to war with one another again and lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

David, great to see you again, man. Great to have you back on the pod. Oh, it's wonderful. Thank you for having me back on the program. This is a crazy story, isn't it? Tell me about the mission HMS Wager sails off on. Yeah, so during an imperial war with Spain that was known as the War of Jenkins' Ear, Spain that was known as the War of Jenkins' Ear. The wager was part of a squadron that was being sent on a secret mission to try to sail around much of the world and try to intercept a Spanish galleon that was filled with so much treasure it was known as the prize of all the oceans. And she didn't quite get there. No, it had high hopes and people hoped they would return bathed in glory and riches. And yes, everything soon went to hell.

Wager is sailing under Commodore George Anson, who becomes the first, eventually the first British naval officer, not Francis Drake, but the first British naval officer to sail around the world. And so there's a little flotilla, isn't there? How many ships are there? There were five warships, including the wager. There was a scouting sloop, which was smaller, that would kind of speed ahead to scout out other ships and territories. And there was also two small cargo ships, which were supposed to just accompany the expedition partway.

And how does it go? It does not go well. I mean, let's just talk about before they even set off, because in many ways, the seeds of the doom could be traced back to the very origins, the beginnings of the expedition. conscription and it was short of supplies. 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 sickly 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. And so they're undermanned. The crews aren't in great shape. They cross the Atlantic, but when do things really start to go wrong? So when they start to round Cape Horn at the very tip of South America. And everybody kind of knows those are the terrible seas in the world, but I didn't really know why or fully understand why until I researched this story. And it's because it's the one place on the globe where the seas travel uninterrupted around the entire earth. So they travel about 13,000 miles accumulating power and they're not blocked by land, nothing to slow them down.

And then they get funneled into this passageway between Antarctica and the tip of South America. 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 Melfill, 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. You're right. So the ships are wooden, the timbers are coming apart anyway,

even before they get into those storms. The crews, as you say in the book, they've got scurvy, they're weak, they're sick. So this is not a modern ship going around Cape Horn and it's terrible weather. So morale, the crews, even if they survive, morale is already very low at this point. Yeah, and you mentioned scurvy, and 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. 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. They do survive, don't they? Against the odds.

Do they make it to the Pacific coast of South America? Do they get round the horn? Yeah, so round the horn, they're desperate to try to stay together at that point because they know that if they get separated, there'll be no one there to rescue them if something goes wrong. So they're firing their guns to kind of signal their location. They're kind of blasting their cannons to signal their location in the storm. But eventually the noise gets drowned out in the storm and they all scatter. They all scatter. And the wager, the ship that I end up focusing on, becomes separated. It finds itself all alone and kind of left to its own destiny. But it does make it into the Pacific. It does make it around the Horn, but they then face yet another challenge, which is they don't

know exactly where they are on the map. Because one, these are kind of uncharted realms for British seamen. But even more than that, they have no way of knowing their longitude because they don't have reliable clocks. So they are sailing partially blunt. They're forced to rely on what was known as dead reckoning, which was essentially informed guesswork and a leap of faith. And as the wager is coming up the coast of Patagonia on the Chilean side of South America, its estimation of its longitude turns out not only to be wrong, but wrong by hundreds of miles. And suddenly it hits a submerged rock. Uh-oh. Okay. What happens now?

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. 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, and 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've 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. So it's a catastrophic event. A catastrophic event. I mean, it is shattering with one fortuitous thing for at least some of the survivors, which is that the ship did not completely sink yet. 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. We now know what the island was. What's it called today? It's called Wager Island, named after the ship. And was it inhabited? No, it was not inhabited, at least by any permanent kind of settlement. It is a place, I visited the island, it remains 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. And 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. They're on this tiny island off the south coast of Chile. Okay. It's all going well. It's all going well.

But isn't there a, I've had this with Shackleton when I was in the Antarctic. There's a sort of tradition, or at least a rule, that the officer's writ only extends to as long as the ship is, they're afloat, right? The commission only works as long as it's afloat. So after that, command and control can break down, can't it? Yes, it can. There was a kind of, I would say it wasn't clear. There was a murkiness in the

regulations. And so it was not actually clearly specified. In fact, after this expedition, the Admiralty would clarify its rules to specify that after a shipwreck, the captain would remain in command. But in this case, it wasn't abundantly clear. And so that gray area kind of facilitated the breakdown of command and control. And there were gripes against the captain. There was not a Shackleton on board this ship. I mean, George Anson, who was in charge of the squadron, who was on another ship, had many Shackletonian qualities. But the captain of the wager, a man named David Sheep, who was somebody from Scotland, who was always kind of frustrated on land. He had debts, and yet he had always found refuge at sea. And on

this voyage, he had finally obtained what he had always longed for, which was his dream to be captain of a warship. And yet now he finds himself on land in this wreckage. He's a bit tempestuous, and he's kind of desperate to hold his command as order begins to break down. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is the story of the shipwreck of the wager. More coming up. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and throughout June on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, I'm marking the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's first folio.

It would be hard to think of Shakespeare without plays like Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, As You Like It and A Winter's Tale. But without the first folio, none of these would have survived. This is not a book designed to be carried around. This is a book which establishes itself in the library, in the study and that physicality tells us something about how the plays are being rebranded, reframed for a new generation. Throughout this month, I'm delving deep into the first folio, how it was produced, who made it,

and to what extent it has ensured Shakespeare's enduring legacy. So do join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. How do we know what happens here, David? How was it writing this? And what are the records? Anyone who survives this is going to have a different story to tell from anyone else. Yeah, so, I mean, there is a surprising, at least to me it was surprising, 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 logbooks from the expedition and journals. And, you know, they come in these boxes from the 1740s and the dust just comes out of them and 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. And one of the things that made this story so fascinating to me, and maybe we'll get into this, is that not only what will happen on the island, but after some of the survivors do miraculously make it back to England, they are summoned to face this court-martial, where after waging this war against the elements, they have to wage a war over the truth. And if they don't tell a convincing tale, they're afraid they're going to get hanged.

So many of them release their testimony or their documents or their journals. And so we do have this war over the truth, this conflicting perspectives. And the way I kind of structure the story is from the warring perspectives of three main figures on the wager. One was Captain Cheap. One was the gunner, John Bulkley, who in many ways was the most skilled seaman on the wager, but because he didn't come from the aristocracy, he knew it was very unlikely that he was ever going to become a captain of a warship. And then John Byron, who was the 16-year-old midshipman on the wager when it set sails. And if the name is familiar to listeners, it's because he would later go on to become the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron,

whose poetry, including Don Juan, is greatly influenced by what he referred to as my granddad's narrative. Oh my God, very cool. How did they escape? 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 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. And ultimately, Bulkley and many of his men hold a debate over that taboo of mutiny. And they ultimately abandon Captain Cheapa on the island. Oh, wow. Yeah. And they set off in a castaway boat that they reconstruct, kind of very ingeniously build.

But they are packed so tightly in this boat, they could barely move. And of course, they're starving. They face starvation. On the island, they had descended into a real life Lord of the Flies with murder and mutiny and mayhem. And now they're packed on this little boat. They traverse some 3,000 miles, completing one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded. They go from the coast of Chile.

I hope people can envision this in their minds. 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. And initially, they are greeted as heroes and hailed for their ingenuity for completing this voyage. But then, several months later, another little castaway boat washes ashore, this time on the other side of South America, off the coast of Chile. And this castaway boat, it's even smaller. It's just like a little wooden dugout. It's got a seal that is just stitched together from the rags of blankets. And on board are three men, including John Byer in the midshipmen, including the captain,

David Cheap, who is so delirious, he can't even recollect his name. But eventually, when they recover, they obviously tell a very different story. And they say that those people who got into Brazil were not in fact heroes, they were mutineers. And then it slowly becomes clear with these charges and counter charges being lawed back and forth that on that island, these kind of vanguard of the empire, these apostles of Western civilization has slowly descended into this Hobbesian state of depravity. Wow. Crikey. And so in the end, how many survivors are there?

Well, one of the survivors from Berkeley'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 survive 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. And eventually those survivors go back to England. And the principals, along with their allies, are summoned to a court-martial to be tried for their alleged crimes. And that's where they are terrified that after everything they've been through, they might be hanged.

Now, you've looked under the bonnet here. You've spent hours in the archives, days, years pursuing this. Who do you think was in the right? Who do you think was under the bonnet here you spent hours in the archives days years pursuing this who do you think was in the right who do you think was in the wrong such an interesting question because 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 understand them. And I try, and I say at the

very beginning, I find the reader is an integral to this process as I am as the author. And so I kind of present the warring and the countering perspectives of each, and I kind of leave it to the reader to preside that judgment. But I think you will find there are times you will identify with each of them. Captain Cheap is probably the most complex person, the most flawed under those circumstances. And I think the person the reader will probably identify most with is John Byron, because he was just a boy when this expedition set sails. And suddenly he has to come of age, not only amid the horrors of the elements, but of his own fellow humans. And so he, in many ways, is our eyes and ears onto this world. It's one of these great moments, you know, I saw you write this book and see it now shoot into the

top of the bestseller charts. And it's so strange because people knew about this story, right? Did we forget to celebrate it, study it more, look at it closely again? I mean, has this story come and gone out of fashion? Was it hugely talked about in the 18th century? Why now? And what's the historiography of this? That's a really interesting question. And it's always hard to fully figure out why, but this was a sensation in its day. This expedition, what happened to the wager was a scandalous sensation. And when this was going on, their accounts would become the equivalent of bestsellers in the day. And then, of course, George Anson, the commodore of the expedition, somehow against

all odds, survives with one ship, the Centurion, and actually captures the galleon, the Spanish galleon, filled with the treasure, comes back to England during this kind of disastrous war where there was really no good news, and returns with his treasure. So he is celebrated and feted. He's promoted into the Navy in many ways. He's sometimes called the father of the British Navy. He releases an account, or he's kind of, it's an official account. It seemed to be by other writers, but he was kind of the force behind it. That becomes probably the best-selling work of travel literature in all the 18th century. This account was, just to underscore the point, this 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. And yet over time, it really, like so many stories, fades from history. It gets replaced by other tales of maritime from the sea, like Nelson in England. And some of the underbelly of the story, the kind of what happened on Wager Island was also kind of covered up at the time. People didn't really want to face that part of the story because it didn't make the British Empire look really good. They wanted to focus on the Anson part. And so by the time I kind of decided to write about it, at least it seemed to me largely forgotten outside of a circle of British historians and naval aficionados. And the story really struck me as both an incredible saga of human survival and resilience,

kind of one of the most extraordinary maritime tales I'd ever come across. But it also, I thought, felt very resonant because I was going to the archives and reading these journals. And at the time of the trial, there were all these allegations of disinformation and misinformation. There were even allegations, I swear, of fake journals. And then I was coming home, and at least in the United States,

we were having these great debates over the nature of truth. We were talking about disinformation and fake news and alternative facts. And then I would go back to the archives and I'd be reading about in the story this kind of war over history. There was a war over history. Whose story would prevail? Not just individually, but also which side would the British empire tell? And then I would be back home and we'd be having

our own wars over history and which history should be told and, you know, which statue should be standing. And so the story often felt to me like this weird parable of our contemporary times. So that was the added reason for me of wanting to kind of revisit this story from a long time ago. I just got to ask, from a sailing point of view, how did they make that vast 3,000 mile journey? I mean, were they stopping? Unlike Bly or Shackleton, some of those amazing open boat journeys, presumably you're going along the coast. Were they able to replenish? Were they able to repair their craft? So the challenge for them was most of them on the board didn't know how to swim.

And they had originally a small little transport boat, but eventually they lose their tiny little transport. So they don't, after a while, they don't have a way to kind of row ashore. So it's very challenging for them to stop without wrecking their castaway boat that they had built. When they can, they try on occasion to try to anchor nearby and see if they can get some people ashore. That leads to great travails into itself where sometimes people would be abandoned because they couldn't get back to the ship. So they do occasionally stop, but it's very infrequent and many of them do starve.

And something very interesting happened, which I didn't know about, you may be familiar with this, but when they did stop occasionally and get food because they were in such a state of starvation, I'm forgetting what the name is now called, but if you suddenly eat when you're starving and you eat too quickly, it can actually cause you to die. And so some of them, they would then quickly eat after being in such a state of deprivation. It's like a refeeding syndrome. And scientists kind of discover it after World War II when many Jewish people were let out of the prison camps and the concentration camps, and they were suddenly fed and some of them died. So that did also happen to some of them, but

they did occasionally find enough nutrition for at least some of them to survive. It is a wild story, David Grand. Thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Tell me about it. What is your hugely successful book called? It is called The Wager, A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. You're a true hero if you make an 18th century naval story that most people have never heard of go viral around the world. So I'm in awe of you. Well done you. Thank you. Thank you for having me back on the show. the show. This is history's heroes, people with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us

when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.