The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

Way down in the seething ocean turbulences at the bottom of the world around Cape Horn where the latitudes graduate from the Roaring Forties to the Furious Fifties and into the Screaming Sixties, and channels and landmarks bear names like the Gulf of Sorrows, Dead Man’s Road, Desolation Island, Mount Misery, the Port of Famine, the Bay of Severing of Friends and the Rocks of Deceit, lies the mist-shrouded uninhabited Wager Island.
 
As a result of the somewhat dubious and bizarre “War of Jenkins’ Ear”, Commodore George Anson is ordered to take a Royal Navy squadron and hunt down the Spanish in the Pacific. Wager is one of the vessels that falls behind and is wrecked on a remote island in 1741.
 
This is the story of what happened to the crew and subsequently. Pre-dating the better-known Mutiny on the Bounty by almost half-a-century, this harrowing tale carries prescient echoes of that event but on some levels is even more extraordinary, and has an unexpected conclusion.
 
There’s the ambitious Captain David Cheap who is determined to follow orders at any cost and is at odds with the gunner, John Bulkeley, a surprisingly erudite and religious man whose meticulous record-keeping forms the bedrock of the story. Others also write or record their own observations, including the sixteen-year-old midshipman, John Byron, destined to be the grandfather of the famous Lord Byron.
 
Rather than their misfortune binding these men together, they break up into gangs and factions. Scurvy, deprivation, accidents, murder, abandonment, lack of warmth or shelter and starvation kills most. Hunger can drive even the best of friends to commit unspeakable cruelties against one another. And it appears someone has deliberately destroyed the logbook pages detailing the last hours of the Wager.
 
Increasingly angry with Cheap, Bulkeley takes command and rebuilds the longboat which he sails to Brazil with his large group of supporters, leaving behind Cheap and his small group of loyalists. Only Cheap, Byron and one other officer survive and eventually reach Chile with the aid of an indigenous tribe. When they return to England, they are faced with a storm of a different sort. Bulkeley and twenty-nine other men have survived their ordeal and Bulkeley has published his memoirs. Cheap will have a very different story to tell of the events. In 1746, five years after the wreck of the Wager, a court martial takes place in Portsmouth.
 
You’ll find yourself totally swept up in the horrendous events and its cast of real-life characters. No fiction can compete with this amazing true story of human endurance and psychological complexities all at the mercy of politics, war, class, prejudice and ambition.
 
There’s the short poignant tale of John Duck, a free Black seaman, who managed to survive everything, only to be kidnapped and sold again into slavery, never to be heard of again.
 
“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t – the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
 
It’s no wonder there is a movie currently in production. Whether it can ever do justice to this brilliant book remains to be seen.
 
 
Five Stars
 
amazon.com
 
amazon.co.uk
 
Dymocks Australia

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