Peter
McMillan teaches English part-time and writes part-time.
Several books (fiction and non-fiction) published under
his name and a pen name (Adam Mac) are licensed under the
Creative Commons and available for free download as PDF
books.
Above
fifty feet long and ten feet wide, it was a boat of some sort
— though it looked as if it had been patched together
from scraps of wood and cloth and then battered into oblivion.
Its sails were shredded, its boom shattered. Seawater seeped
through the hull and a stench emanated from within. The bystanders,
edging closer, heard unnerving sounds: thirty men were crammed
onboard, their bodies almost wasted to the bone. Their clothes
had largely disintegrated. Their faces were enveloped in hair,
tangled and salted like seaweed.
Thus
did the H.M.S. Wager’s castaways appear to the townspeople
in the Brazilian port of Rio Grande on January 28, 1742. The
Wager, a British man-of-war, had been shipwrecked off the
coast of Patagonia in May 1741, and this was the main body
of survivors. Led by John Bulkeley, the ship's gunner, these
men — what was left of the 81 who had set sail for Brazil
from the Pacific coast of southern Chile — had traveled
nearly 3,000 miles “through menacing gales and tidal
waves, through ice storms and earthquakes” to make their
way back to England. And that was not the end of their travails
as they faced court-martial on returning home.
Grann’s account of the Wager shipwreck, mutiny and self-rescue
is an excellent piece of storytelling and a much more entertaining
read than Rear Admiral C.H. Layman’s The Wager Disaster:
Mayhem, Mutiny and Murder in the South Seas (2015), which
is a documentary. Yet, Philip Mountbatten, in his foreword
to Layman's book, comments:
[But]
what a tale! Told largely in the words of the participants
themselves ... reveal[ing] a drama of misfortune, unimaginable
hardship, super-human endurance, mixed with extremes in
human behaviour, both heroic and despicable, and a small
boat journey of epic proportions.
Grann
might dispute the objectivity of the Admiral’s non-narrative
account insofar as the facts underlying his own editorializing
do provide a more fulsome account of the Wager’s adventures.
For example, unlike Layman, Grann refers to Commodore Anson's
continuation of the squadron’s journey after the Wager
was lost rounding Cape Horn to illustrate the marked contrast
in leadership and mission success between Commodore Anson
and Captain Cheap and their respective ships, the Centurion
and the Wager.
Grann
also mentions the punishment of the mutineers on the H.M.S.
Bounty in 1789 to highlight the extremely unusual outcome
of the court-martial in the Wager case. No charges of mutiny
were filed, and none were laid though mutiny could not have
been more “conspicuous.” That no court-martial
or other punishments were meted out to the Wager’s mutineers
suggests that a double standard was in play. This might have
been owing in part to Bulkeley's maritime journal —
thorough and detailed, as early on he expected it to be put
before the Lords of the Admiralty —and the publicity
the Wager story commanded in what Grann describes as a period
of an increasingly open British press.
As
for the motives of Cheap, Anson and the British Admiralty,
Grann does not hesitate to say that egoism and autocracy were
inherent in the very structure of the Royal Navy and that
elitist chauvinism was at the very foundation of the British
Empire’s colonial and trade policies and practices.
(Here it might be worth noting that David Grann is an American.)
Referring to the London of the day, Grann asserts that “[it]
was the pulsing heart of an island empire built on the toll
of seamen and slavery and colonialism.” Significant
responsibility for the high death toll — “Of the
nearly two thousand men who had set sail, more than thirteen
hundred had perished” — is laid at the feet of
the senior officers and those they served, an attitude captured
half a century later during the Napoleonic wars by the term
‘cannon fodder.’ Furthermore, in economic terms,
Anson’s expedition had not been a success: “though
Anson had returned with some 400,000 pounds’ worth of
booty [Spanish treasure], the war had cost taxpayers 43 million
pounds.” A protracted court-martial, publicized in the
London papers would not likely have been a public relations
coup for the Empire.
While
Grann’s narrative offers compelling reading —
the book is a page-turner — of equal or greater value
is the author’s political commentary — the focus
of this review.
Throughout
the book, Grann maintains the thesis that the Wager disaster
was symptom of a sick empire. He takes on the rigid hierarchy
at sea: “As on land, there was a premium on real estate,
and where you lay your head marked your place in the pecking
order.” On the lowest deck were the young midshipmen,
one of whom was the 16-year-old John Byron, grandfather of
Lord Byron, the poet, and each was “allowed a space
no wider than twenty-one inches in which to sling their hammocks,”
though “this was still a glorious seven inches more
room than was allotted to ordinary seamen—though less
than what officers had in their private berths.”
He
also details the horrors of the Royal Navy’s recruiting:
“Armed gangs were dispatched to press seafaring men
into service—in effect, kidnapping them.” Still,
Anson’s squadron was short of men, so the government
sent 143 marines to support the anticipated land invasions
and assist in ship duties, but “they were such raw recruits
that they had never set foot on a ship and didn’t even
know how to fire a weapon.” Then, the government forced
500 invalid veterans from the Royal Hospital, men who were
“old, lame, or infirm in ye service of the Crowne.”
A sizable number of crew members were unwilling sailors, but
they were the necessary and expendable mass dispatched to
the seven seas to extend and hold together Britain’s
maritime empire. And then, in contrast to the oft-cited U.S.
Marine code of conduct in battle to never leave a Marine behind,
abandonment of seamen was all too common among the Wager’s
officers and crew — both under Captain Cheap and Bulkeley,
the de facto captain of the Speedwell, the only surviving
boat of the Wager, which brought the castaways to Brazil.
Only in the case of the marooning of Captain Cheap —
the decisive act of mutiny — did serious concerns about
consequences arise but these were primarily legal in nature.
Referring
to the absolute authority invested in the captain of a ship
and the limits at sea of English law hard won from the monarchy
during the tumultuous 17th century, Grann describes a different
Britain sans Bill of Rights.
At
sea, beyond the reach of any government, [the captain] had
enormous authority. “The captain had to be father and
confessor, judge and jury, to his men,” one historian
wrote. “He had more power over them than the King —
for the King could not order a man to be flogged. He could
and did order them into battle and thus had the power of life
and death over everyone on board.”
And
this unquestioned authority during the Age of Sail when combined
with the hubris of men looking to their own legends and the
gross deficiencies in contemporaneous navigational charts
and technology (e.g., instruments to accurately measure longitude
or how far east or west a ship was from a known underwater
reef of rocks) led to many maritime disasters. For example,
in 1707, inaccurate maps, the absence of instruments for measuring
longitude and the exaggerated self-confidence of Admiral Cloudesley
Shovell in the ‘familiar’ waters of England contributed
heavily towards one of the worst British naval disasters in
history. Just off the Cornish coast, a fleet of His Majesty’s
ships returning from war in the Mediterranean smashed into
the notorious rocks of the Scilly Isles during a vicious storm,
sinking four warships and killing more than 1,300 men, with
some estimates as high as 2,000 dead.
In
1741, Britain staged a two-pronged attack on Spain’s
South American colonial holdings during the War of Jenkins’
Ear, a conflict that later merged into the imperial War of
the Austrian Succession. The main attack was concentrated
on the Spanish coastal city of Cartagena by a massive fleet
of 186 British ships, which to that point in time was “the
largest amphibious assault in history.” A much smaller
operation was staged in the Southern Hemisphere. Commodore
Anson’s squadron of five warships was given secret orders
to attack Spanish forces in the Pacific and confiscate gold
shipments passing from South America to the Philippines. Grann
writing about the timing of the squadron’s southern
passage around Cape Horn states that summer was not actually
the safest time to round the Horn from east to west. Though
in May and the winter months of June and July, the air temperature
is colder and there is less light, the winds are tempered
and sometimes blow from the east, making it easier to sail
toward the Pacific.
Delays
in outfitting the ships and raising the crew put the squadron
off schedule from the beginning. The plan had been to sail
around the fearsome Cape of Horn during the optimal weather
season, such as it was at that far end of the world where
the currents from the Atlantic and Pacific crashed together,
with “waves of frightening magnitude . . . [t]hese ‘Cape
Horn rollers’ [could] dwarf a ninety-foot mast.”
Owing to the postponements, Anson’s ships met the ferocious
winds and waves of Drake Passage, and it was there —
at the southern tip of South America — that the foul
weather scattered the ships separating the Wager from the
rest of the squadron.
Because
the far-southern seas are the only waters that flow uninterrupted
around the globe, they gather enormous power, with waves building
over as much as thirteen thousand miles, accumulating strength
as they roll through one ocean after another. When they arrive,
at last, at Cape Horn, they are squeezed into a narrowing
corridor between the southernmost American headlands and the
northernmost part of the Antarctic Peninsula. This funnel,
known as the Drake Passage, makes the torrent even more pulverizing.
The currents are not only the longest-running on earth but
also the strongest . . . And then there are the winds. Consistently
whipping eastward from the Pacific, where no lands obstruct
them, they frequently accelerate to hurricane force, and can
reach two hundred miles per hour.
The
Wager never rejoined the squadron, but it nevertheless sailed
on in determined hopes of a reunion — its captain, Cheap,
refusing to abandon his first commission as ship’s captain
for personal reasons (if he “prevailed, he would become
a hero, his feats celebrated in the yarns and ballads of seamen”)
as well as because the Wager was carrying the bulk of the
squadron’s armaments. The Wager ultimately succumbed
to the relentless storms and wrecked off the southwest coast
of Chile in the aptly named Golfo de Penas (Gulf of Pain).
The Centurion, the flagship under the command of Commodore
Anson, eventually found itself alone in the South Pacific,
and it too resumed its mission notwithstanding the long odds
against it. In the Philippines, the Centurion engaged the
Spanish gold ship, Our Lady of Covadonga, conveying its treasure
from South America to Asia in a fierce sea battle and emerged
victorious and in possession of the Spanish treasure, which
it duly brought home to England after completing its circumnavigation
of the globe.
The
reader is left to speculate what might have happened if the
squadron had crossed Drake’s Passage during June or
July and whether a more judicious commander would have been
less generous with the lives of his officers and sailors.
Notwithstanding
the perils of the sea — foul weather, enemy ships, scurvy
(“there were so many corpses, and so few hands to assist,
that the bodies often had to be heaved overboard unceremoniously
. . . ‘Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown”
as Lord Byron put it) — mutiny is a high crime on the
high seas. Under the British Articles of War, ““No
person in or belonging to the fleet shall utter any words
of sedition or mutiny . . . upon pain of death.” And
there was historical precedent from the Spanish Navy as well
as the British Navy.
St. Julian [a harbor on the southern coast of Argentina] was
not just a place of desolation; it also stood, in the eyes
of Cheap and his men, as a grisly memorial to the toll that
a long, claustrophobic voyage could wreak upon a ship’s
company. When Magellan anchored there, on Easter Day in 1520,
several of his increasingly resentful men tried to overthrow
him, and he had to quash a mutiny. On a tiny island in the
harbor, he ordered one of the rebels beheaded—his body
quartered and hung from a gibbet for everyone to see.
Fifty-eight years later, when Francis Drake paused at St.
Julian during his round-the-world voyage, he also suspected
a simmering plot, and accused one of his men, Thomas Doughty,
of treason . . . Doughty pleaded to be brought back to England
for a proper trial, but Drake responded that he had no need
for “crafty lawyers,” adding, “Neither care
I for the laws.” At the same execution site that Magellan
had used, Doughty was decapitated with an axe. Drake ordered
that the head, still pouring blood, be held up before his
men, and cried out, “Lo! This is the end of traitors!”
All
knew the severity of the punishment for mutiny, which explains
why Bulkeley, often referred to as a ‘sea lawyer’
for his knowledge of the ‘laws of the sea,’ laboured
with unflagging resolve to document with meticulous care the
events of the Wager’s voyage and in particular the behaviour
of Cheap who from the start had shown himself to be a questionable
leader. Bulkeley’s journal, published after his return
to England, was an influential and damning indictment all
the way up the chain of command. And it is not unlikely that
the Board of the Admiralty factored that into its calculations
in deciding not to prosecute the mutineers. In fact, Grann
adds that “C. H. Layman, a British rear admiral and
an authority on the Wager case, later concluded there was
‘an uncomfortable whiff of justification’ in the
Admiralty’s decision not to prosecute a conspicuous
mutiny.”
Returning
to Grann’s critique of imperial Britain, the book’s
epigraph contains a passage from Lord of the Flies
— “Maybe there is a beast . . . Maybe it’s
only us” — which suggests that Grann, despite
his social criticism, was somewhat ambivalent about human
nature itself. After all, the tale of the Wager was not entirely
summed up as a class struggle between the officers and crew.
There was abundant disharmony among the sailors, too. And
as for motives, the lure of Spanish treasure — the goal
of Anson’s squadron having been to intercept and raid
a Spanish ship carrying gold from Cartagena to the Philippines
— tempted many a seaman to sign up, unsurprisingly,
as a common seaman could expect this act of imperial piracy
to net “some twenty years’ worth of wages”
— a paltry amount relative to Commodore Anson’s
take of “the equivalent today of $20 million.”
As for the ultimate crime of murder, though Captain Cheap
could have been so charged in the death of Midshipman Henry
Cozens, that was not the only murder. During the anarchy that
ensued after the shipwreck, violence and murder occurred among
men who had trusted one another with their lives during their
dangerous sea voyage thus far.
Faced
with starvation and freezing temperatures, they built an outpost
and tried to re-create naval order. But as their situation
deteriorated, the Wager’s officers and crew—those
supposed apostles of the Enlightenment—descended into
a Hobbesian state of depravity. There were warring factions
and marauders and abandonments and murders. A few of the men
succumbed to cannibalism.
One
is left wondering just how the quote from Lord of the
Flies squares with the author’s social critique
of the 18th century British Empire and the Royal Navy. Would
he be maintaining something along the lines of the historian,
Lord Ashton, who asserted that “Power tends to corrupt;
absolute power corrupts absolutely?” What room is left
for a middle ground between the tyranny of the all-powerful
sea captain and the anarchy of a shipwrecked crew of cold
and hungry men? Perhaps, the relatively well-led flight of
the Wager Island ‘mutineers’ led by Bulkeley,
described at length by the author, through the dangerous shallows
and narrows of the stormy Strait of Magellan to the Atlantic
and then up the coast to Brazil and safety? But doubtless
those abandoned on the Speedwell's difficult passage home
would not agree, e.g., Midshipman Morris, one of the eight
men put ashore to gather provisions and then left on the uninhabited
Atlantic Patagonian coast south of Buenos Aires, on returning
to England, called the desertion "the greatest act of
cruelty."
Finally,
to the question of whether what these men did was mutinous.
The decision of 81 men, nearly naked, frozen and starving,
choosing to follow the ship’s gunner — who was
not even a commissioned British naval officer — on a
dangerous trip that might eventually lead home to England
rather than a captain who no longer had a ship to command
but nonetheless intended recommencing his mission of finding
and reuniting with Anson’s squadron somewhere off the
unruly waters of Pacific Patagonia by means of a craft of
dubious seaworthiness and with the very real risk of encountering
well-armed, well-fed and well-clothed Spanish soldiers. Why
but for glory, riches and empire?
