The Wager

To understand how it reached that point, you have to go back to the mission. In 1740, Britain was at war with Spain, and the Admiralty dispatched a squadron under Commodore George Anson to raid Spanish holdings in the Pacific and, if fortune allowed, capture a treasure galleon. The Wager was one of the ships — an aging merchant vessel converted for war, overloaded, undermanned, and crewed in part by men pressed into service or dragged from a hospital for invalids. Before it ever left, the expedition was carrying the seeds of its own collapse.

The Atlantic crossing was punishing, but the real disaster came at Cape Horn. Rounding the tip of South America, the squadron met weeks of storms so violent that ships were scattered and men were swept overboard. Scurvy did the rest. With no understanding yet of what caused it, the disease rotted the crews from within — gums bleeding, old wounds reopening, men dying by the dozen. On the Wager alone, the toll was staggering. The ship that finally struggled into the Pacific was a floating hospital, its rigging half-shredded, its captain newly promoted and its crew hollowed out.

The island — the survivors called it Wager Island — was a place of near-constant rain, thin food and killing cold. The men built crude shelters, scavenged the wreck for salvage, and began, slowly, to starve. In these conditions the ordinary logic of naval discipline started to fray. Cheap insisted he was still their captain, still owed obedience, even though there was no ship, no pay reaching them, and no clear prospect of rescue. Many of the men saw it differently: without a vessel, they reasoned, the articles that bound them no longer applied.

The turning point came when Cheap shot a young midshipman named Henry Cozens. The circumstances were disputed even by those present — Cozens may have been drunk and insubordinate — but the man was unarmed, and he died slowly of the wound over days. For much of the crew, that killing dissolved whatever legitimacy Cheap had left. A captain who executed his own men on a whim was not an authority to be obeyed; he was a danger to survive. From that moment, the community on the island effectively split.

When the full reckoning finally came, in a court-martial in 1746, it revealed what the whole affair had really been about. The Navy convened the tribunal partly because the surviving officers demanded it and partly because the Bulkeley faction's published account had made the scandal too public to ignore. But the court did not set out to establish, cleanly, whether a mutiny had occurred. It focused instead on the narrower question of the loss of the ship — and on that, the outcome was strikingly mild. The men were largely acquitted or lightly dealt with. The hanging that the word 'mutiny' promised never came.

Grann's reconstruction makes clear why. A full mutiny trial would have been ruinous for everyone, the Admiralty included. It would have advertised how badly the expedition had been provisioned, how many pressed and dying men had been sent to sea, how the institution's own failures had produced the catastrophe. Convicting the survivors of mutiny meant putting the Navy itself in the dock. So the empire, needing a version of events it could live with, quietly chose the version that closed the matter — not the one that resolved the truth.

The two crews arrived in England certain that the record would vindicate them, and in a sense both were disappointed and both survived. Bulkeley's men were not hanged, but they were never cleared of the shadow either; Cheap got his court but not the reckoning he wanted. The neutral witness who could have settled it — the sea itself, or the men who died on that island — never testified. What remained were competing manuscripts, and a tribunal that preferred to answer a smaller question than the one everyone was really asking.