![]() In the controversy that followed, with charges and countercharges from both sides, it became clear that while stranded on the island the Wager’s officers and crew had struggled to persevere in the most extreme circumstances. They were not heroes-they were mutineers. One man was so delirious that he had “quite lost himself,” as a companion put it, “not recollecting our names . . . or even his own.”Īfter these men recovered and returned to England, they levelled a shocking allegation against their companions who had surfaced in Brazil. They were half naked and emaciated insects swarmed over their bodies, nibbling on what remained of their flesh. On board were three additional survivors, and their condition was even more frightful. It was even smaller-a wooden dugout propelled by a sail stitched from the rags of blankets. Six months later, another boat washed ashore, this one landing in a blizzard off the southwestern coast of Chile. As the leader of the party noted, it was hard to believe that “human nature could possibly support the miseries that we have endured.” They were hailed for their ingenuity and bravery. More than fifty men died during the arduous journey, and, by the time the few remnants reached Brazil three and a half months later, they had traversed nearly three thousand miles-one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded. Packed so tightly on board that they could barely move, they travelled through menacing gales and tidal waves, through ice storms and earthquakes. ![]() Most of the officers and crew had perished, but eighty-one survivors had set out in a makeshift boat lashed together partly from the wreckage of the Wager. They had been shipwrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. ![]() But a figure who appeared to be in charge rose with an extraordinary exertion of will and announced that they were castaways from His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British man-of-war. One soon gave out his last breath and died. Some were so weak they could not even stand. Their faces were enveloped in hair, tangled and salted like seaweed. The bystanders, edging closer, heard unnerving sounds: thirty men were crammed on board, their bodies wasted almost to the bone. Seawater seeped through the hull, and a stench emanated from within. Its sails were shredded, its boom shattered. More than 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. Yet somehow-whether through destiny, as some would later proclaim, or dumb luck-it drifted into an inlet, off the southeastern coast of Brazil, where several inhabitants laid eyes upon it. Once or twice, the vessel nearly smashed into a reef, which might have ended our story. For days, it watched as the strange object heaved up and down in the ocean, tossed mercilessly by the wind and the waves. During the chaotic voyage, he was promoted to captain of the Wager and, at long last, fulfilled his dream of becoming a lord of the sea-that is, until the wreck. In this excerpt, of the book’s prologue and first chapter, Grann introduces David Cheap, a burly, tempestuous British naval lieutenant. To better understand what the castaways had endured on the island, which is situated in the Gulf of Sorrows-or, as some prefer to call it, the Gulf of Pain-he travelled there in a small, wood-heated boat. ![]() (Byron was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, who drew, in “ Don Juan ,” on what he referred to as “my grand-dad’s ‘Narrative.’ ”) Grann set out to reconstruct what really took place, and spent more than half a decade combing through the archival debris: the washed-out logbooks, the moldering correspondence, the partly truthful journals, the surviving records from the court-martial. In 2016, Grann, a staff writer at the magazine and the author of “ Killers of the Flower Moon ” and “ The Lost City of Z ,” stumbled across an eyewitness account of the voyage by John Byron, who had been a sixteen-year-old midshipman on the Wager when the journey began. They each attempted to shade a scandalous truth-to erase history. Years later, several survivors made it back to England, where, facing a court-martial and desperate to save their own lives, they gave wildly conflicting versions of what had happened. The men, marooned on a desolate island, descended into murderous anarchy. ” It tells the extraordinary saga of the officers and crew of the Wager, a British naval warship that wrecked off the Chilean coast of Patagonia, in 1741. All of these elements converge in David Grann’s upcoming book, “ The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. A war over the truth and who gets to write history.
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