Several men squeezed into the shelter, seeking refuge from the storm, and they cleared a space for Captain Cheap, who had to be helped inside. In his condition, he would have “certainly lost his life without such a shelter,” Campbell wrote.

  There was no room for Byron, and along with most of the others he lay down in the mud. The stars, which had once guided them across the sea, were blotted out by the clouds, and Byron was cast in total darkness as he listened to the crashing surf and the jostling branches and the moaning sick.

  It stormed all night. By morning it was still storming, and he had not slept. Though he and the rest of the castaways were drenched and half frozen, they forced themselves to their feet—except for one of the invalids and two other ailing men who had been sleeping beside Byron. Nothing awoke them, and it dawned on Byron that they were dead.

  * * *

  Near the shore, Cheap leaned on his cane. The mist hung over the sea, enclosing him and his men in a gray netherworld. Through the vaporous light, he could make out the remnants of the Wager still wedged between the rocks—a grotesque reminder of what had befallen them. It was obvious that King, Mitchell, and the other renegades who had refused to abandon the ship would soon be drowned. Determined to rescue them, Cheap dispatched young Campbell and a small party to fetch them in the yawl.

  Campbell set off, and upon boarding the Wager, he was stunned by the bedlam. Mitchell and his gang, abetted by the boatswain, King, had commandeered what remained of the ship, pirating the wreckage like the survivors of an apocalypse. “Some were singing psalms,” Campbell noted, “others fighting, others swearing, and some lay drunk on the deck.” A few of the inebriates had fallen into the pooling waters and drowned, and their corpses were strewn among the revelers, along with empty casks of liquor and debris.

  Campbell spotted a barrel of gunpowder and went to salvage it. But two of the seamen, embittered by his mistreatment of them during the voyage, came at him, screaming, “Damn ye!” A third seaman charged toward him with a bayonet, the blade shimmering. Campbell fled with his party, leaving the renegades on their doomed prize.

  That evening, while Cheap was in the shelter, he was awakened by a blast, which was so loud it echoed over the blaring winds. Suddenly a metallic ball screeched right above his roof, smashing into the surrounding trees and cratering in the earth. Then came another blast—a burst of light radiating through the darkness. Cheap realized that the men on the wreck, fearing that it was about to fully sink, were firing shots from a cannon on the quarterdeck—a signal that they were now ready to come ashore.

  The stragglers were successfully retrieved. As they paraded onto the island, Cheap fixated on their appearance. Over their tarred trousers and checkered shirts, they were wearing clothes of the finest silk and lace, which they had pilfered from the abandoned sea chests of the officers.

  Because King was the boatswain, Cheap held him most responsible, and as the other castaways looked on, Cheap stepped toward him. King, in his regal outfit, was acting like a lord paramount. Cheap’s left arm dangled lamely, but with his right one he raised his cane and struck King with such fury that the burly boatswain crumpled to the ground. Cheap cursed him as a rogue. Then he forced King and the rest of the lot, including Mitchell, to remove the officers’ clothing until they looked, as Bulkeley put it, “like a parcel of transported felons.” Cheap had made clear that he was still their captain.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Beast

  Byron was hungry. In the few days since he and his companions had been cast on the island, they had come across virtually nothing to eat. “We had most of us fasted” forty-eight hours, Byron wrote, and some even longer than that. They had yet to spot a single animal on land to hunt—not even a rat. More surprisingly, perhaps because of the tremendous breakers, the waters near the shore seemed empty of fish. “The very sea,” Byron wrote, “is found to be almost as barren as the land.” Finally, somebody shot a seagull, and Captain Cheap ordered that it be divvied among the group.

  The men assembled branches and struck together pieces of flint and metal from a tinderbox, struggling to ignite the damp wood. At last, a flame crackled upward, the smoke twisting in the wind. The old cook, Thomas Maclean, skinned the bird and boiled it in a large pot, sprinkling in some of their flour to make a thick soup. The steaming portions were doled out, like sacred offerings, in the few wooden bowls they had salvaged.

  Byron relished his share. Yet moments later, he and his companions were all, as Byron put it, “seized with the most painful sickness at our stomachs” and “violent retchings.” The flour had been contaminated. The men were now even more depleted than before, and they were discovering that the climate was marked by almost incessant tempests. A British captain who passed by the island nearly a century later noted how the fierce squalls beat down from the ever-present clouds that engulfed the surrounding lonely heights, and called it a place where “the soul of man dies in him.”

  As hungry as Byron and his companions were, they were afraid to wander far—their fears heightened by their deep-seated prejudices. “Being strongly prepossessed that the savages were retired but some little distance from us, and waited to see us divided, our parties did not make…any great excursions,” Byron noted.

  The castaways mostly stayed along the shore, which was cordoned off by the sodden grasslands and by the steep hills covered in dense, gnarly woods. Looming to the southwest was a small mountain, and to the north and east there were more daunting peaks, including one that rose about two thousand feet, with a flat top and vapors rising from it like a smoky volcano.

  The men scavenged the beach for mussels and snails. Refuse from the wreck had begun to wash ashore: chunks of the decks, the stump of the mainmast, a chain pump, a gun carriage, and a bell. Byron picked through the litter, looking for anything useful. Several corpses had been disgorged from the wreck, and he recoiled at these “hideous spectacles.” But lying among them, he discovered, was something that suddenly seemed more valuable than the galleon itself: a wooden cask filled with salted beef.

  * * *

  On May 17, three days after the wreck, the gunner, John Bulkeley, savored a few scraps of meat. In his journal, he noted that it would soon be the Pentecost—the seventh Sunday after Easter, when Christians commemorate the moment that the Holy Spirit appeared during a harvest feast. As the Scripture puts it, on that day “whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

  Like the majority of the castaways, Bulkeley had no shelter—he was eating, sleeping, and squatting outside. “It rained so hard that it had almost cost us our lives,” he wrote. Byron, meanwhile, fretted that it would be “impossible for us to subsist” much longer without shelter. The temperature hovered around freezing, and the blistering ocean winds and the constant dampness made it the kind of cold that got under one’s clothing, turning lips blue and causing teeth to chatter. The kind of cold that killed.

  Bulkeley had an idea. He enlisted Cummins and several of the stoutest seamen to help him drag the cutter up the shore, flip it over, and prop it up with the keel pointing upward—the goal, Bulkeley wrote, was “to contrive something like a house.”

  He and his friends crowded into the dry sanctuary. Spotting Byron wandering aimlessly about, Bulkeley welcomed him in. As the gunner gathered the men together, assisting them, they were grateful. He had made a fire—that spark of civilization—and they huddled around the flames, trying to warm themselves. Byron, in his journal, described removing his wet clothing, wringing it out and beating it free of lice, then putting everything back on.

  The men pondered their situation. Though Cheap had punished the renegades, they remained a source of turbulence, especially Mitchell. And throughout the company Bulkeley heard growing “murmurings and discontent” about the captain. They blamed him for their misery and wondered what he was doing to rescue them.

  Without Commodore Anson to guide them, Bulkeley wrote, “things began to have a new face.” There was a “general disorder and confusion among the people, who were now no longer implicitly obedient.” In the British Navy, volunteer and pressed seamen stopped being paid after their ship was decommissioned, and, as two of the castaways argued, the loss of the Wager meant that for most of them, their earnings had likely ceased: they were suffering for nothing. Weren’t they therefore entitled to be “their own masters, and no longer subjected to command”?

  Bulkeley, in his journal, recorded some of the complaints about Cheap. If only the captain had conferred with his officers at sea, he wrote, “we might probably have escaped our present unhappy condition.” Yet Bulkeley was careful not to openly side with the agitators, noting that he’d “always acted in obedience to command.” Many of the disaffected still gravitated toward him. He’d proven his abilities on the voyage (had he not beseeched the captain to turn around?), and he now seemed to be the heartiest among them. He had even provided them shelter. In his journal, Bulkeley jotted a line from the poet John Dryden:

  Presence of mind, and courage in distress,

  Are more than armies to procure success.

  Bulkeley knew that none of them would survive much longer without additional sources of food. He tried to pinpoint the party’s location by mapping the stars and dead reckoning. He figured that they were stranded off the Chilean coast of Patagonia, at around 47 degrees south and 81:40 degrees west. But he had no sense of the island. Was the rest of it as inimical to human life? Given that mountains obscured what lay to the east, some of the castaways wondered if they might actually be on the mainland. This was farfetched. But that it was a question at all underscored that they were as starved for knowledge as they were for food. They required both if Bulkeley was ever to find a way back to his wife and five children.

  The storm momentarily waned, and Bulkeley glimpsed the alien sun. Loading his musket, he set out with a party to explore. Byron went with another armed group, insisting that they had no choice but to determine if there was any food beyond the shoreline.

  The ground was boggy, and their feet sank as they slogged through the grasslands and up the wooded hillsides. They scrambled around decaying trunks that had been uprooted by the winds, and the trees, both living and dead, were so densely packed together that it was like marching through hedges. Roots and creepers entangled the men’s limbs; thorns tore their skin.

  Byron, making a passage with bare hands, soon became exhausted, though he still marveled at the unusual plant life. “The wood here,” he wrote, “is chiefly of the aromatic kind: the iron wood, a wood of a very deep red hue, and another, of an exceeding bright yellow.” He did not see many birds inland. There were some woodcocks and hummingbirds, some thorn-tailed rayaditos and what he described as a “large kind of robin red-breasted,” which was a long-tailed meadowlark. Besides seabirds and vultures, he lamented, these appeared to be “the only feathered inhabitants.” (The British captain who surveyed the island nearly a century later wrote, “As if to complete the dreariness and utter desolation of the scene, even the birds seemed to shun its neighborhood.”)

  Once, when Byron was apart from his companions, he spotted a vulture sitting atop a hill, its head bald and obscene. Byron crept toward it, trying not to make a sound—to rustle the leaves or crack the brambles underfoot. He was aiming his musket when he suddenly heard a loud growling nearby. And then again, a totally unfamiliar sound. He bolted. “The woods were so gloomy I could see nothing,” he noted, “but as I retired this noise followed me close.” Clutching his musket, he stumbled through the clawing branches until he reached the rest of his party. Some of the men claimed that they had not only heard the growling but had glimpsed a “very large beast.” Perhaps it was merely a figment of their imaginations—as their minds, like their bodies, unraveled from hunger. Or perhaps, as Byron and many of the seamen now believed, a beast was out there, stalking them.

  * * *

  After a while, the castaways gave up trying to cross the island—it was too impenetrable. The only nourishment they had gathered was a couple of woodcocks, which they’d shot, and some wild celery. “As for food this island produces none,” Bulkeley concluded. Byron thought that the environment was “scarce to be paralleled in any part of the globe, in that it affords neither fruits, grain, nor even roots for the sustenance of man.”

  Byron and a few companions climbed the small mountain overlooking their encampment, hoping to at least get a better sense of where they were situated. The mountain was so steep that they had to cut steps into its side. When Byron reached the summit, breathing in the thin air, the view was breathtaking. There was no doubt that they were on an island. It extended about two miles from the southwest to northeast, and nearly four miles from the southeast to the northwest, where the encampment had been set up.

  In every direction Byron looked, the wilderness spanned into more wilderness: remote, impassable, and chillingly beautiful. To the south, he saw another seemingly desolate island, and to the east, in the far distance, he could make out a series of icebound peaks—the Andes on the mainland. Surveying the island where the Wager had run aground, he noticed that it was battered on all sides by a wild, frothing sea—“a scene,” as he put it, “of such dismal breakers as would discourage the most daring from making attempts in small boats.” There seemed to be no escape.

  CHAPTER 10

  Our New Town

  Captain David Cheap emerged from the native dwelling carrying a pistol. The men continued to look at him doubtfully, as if they had found out some secret about him. After less than a week on the island, he was in danger of losing their trust as they realized the full extent of their predicament. Not only were the three boats unable to weather a long journey; they were too small to carry most of the castaways. And even if they located tools and materials to build a larger vessel, it would take them months to complete the task. They were stuck here for the foreseeable future, with winter approaching, and they were already showing signs of physical and psychological deterioration.

  Cheap knew that unity was paramount to their survival, intuiting a principle that science would later demonstrate. In 1945, in one of the most comprehensive modern studies of human deprivation, known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, scientists assessed the effects of hunger on a group of individuals. During a six-month period, thirty-six male volunteers—all were single, fit pacifists who had shown an ability to get along with others—had their calorie intake cut in half. The men lost their strength and stamina—each shedding roughly a quarter of his body weight—and they became irritable, depressed, and unable to concentrate. Many of the volunteers had hoped that self-abnegation would lead them, like monks, to a deeper spirituality, but instead they began conniving, stealing food, and coming to blows. “How many people have I hurt with my indifference, my grouchiness, my overbearing perversion for food?” one subject wrote. Another subject shouted, “I’m going to kill myself,” then turned on one of the scientists and said, “I’m going to kill you.” This person also fantasized about cannibalism and had to be removed from the experiment. A report summarizing the results of the study noted that the volunteers were shocked at “how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be.”

  The castaways on Wager Island, already depleted from the voyage, were receiving far less caloric intake than those in the experiment did, and they were under far greater distress: nothing about their environment was controlled. Captain Cheap, ill and hobbling, had to cope with his own torments. Yet he domineered. He hated consulting with other officers, and there was no time to waste. And he began to forge a plan to carve out an outpost in this wilderness, planting the seed of the British Empire. To prevent them from falling into a Hobbesian state with “every man against every man,” Cheap believed the castaways needed binding rules and rigid structures—and their commander.

  Cheap summoned everyone and reviewed the Articles of War, reminding them that the rules still applied on land, particularly those prohibiting any “mutinous assemblies…practices, designs”—on “pain of death.” The men all needed to pull together, each fulfilling his designated tasks with steadiness and courage; they were still part of that human machinery moving with precision to the captain’s will.

  Given the potential threats on the island and the lack of food, Cheap decided that his men must salvage the wreckage of the Wager, where a few segments of the quarterdeck and forecastle were still above water. “My first care was to securing a good quantity of arms, ammunition and some provisions,” he wrote in a report.

  He began to put together an excavation team. For this hazardous mission, he chose the gunner, John Bulkeley, though he considered him to be an argumentative sailor, a so-called sea lawyer who was always ready to insist that he knew better than his superiors. Ever since the wreck, Bulkeley seemed to carry himself with smug independence, building his own great cabin and holding forth to the other men. But, unlike Lieutenant Baynes, Bulkeley was a ferocious worker—a survivor—and other members of the excavation team would perform better with him in charge. Cheap also sent along the midshipman John Byron, who had faithfully served him during the voyage and who had helped him escape the sinking ship.

  As Cheap looked on, Bulkeley, Byron, and the small team of recruits set off in a boat; the welfare of the entire group was now in their hands. As they rowed alongside the fragments of the Wager, the waves thrashed them. Once their boat was fastened to the man-of-war, they slithered onto the wreckage, crawling along the caved-in deck and cracked beams, which continued to break apart even as the men were perched on top of them.