The shipwreck had laid waste to the old hierarchies: every man had now been dealt the same miserable hand. Bulkeley observed that such conditions—cold, hunger, disarray—could “really make a man weary of life.” But amid this leveling and squalor, this democracy of suffering, Bulkeley seemed to thrive. He maintained his fine shelter and thinned out the vegetation surrounding it. And whereas many in the company seemed merely to be waiting for death, for eternal peace, he continued to forage fanatically: hunting birds, scraping seaweed off rocks, extracting what supplies he could from the wreckage. Any food that he obtained had to be placed in the communal store tent, but he was able to collect other prized materials for himself: planks, tools, shoes, strips of cloth. Money was worthless on the island, but, like a town merchant, he could barter these items for other necessities, as well as dole out favors. He also established a secret stash of guns and ammunition.

  Each morning, Bulkeley would emerge warily from his estate. He believed that he must be careful, as The Christian’s Pattern book said, “lest he be deceived by the devil, who never sleepeth but goeth about seeking whom he may devour.”

  He noticed that more and more of “the people,” as he referred to the castaways, were flocking to his house, and in particular to him, John Bulkeley, to figure out what the party should do next. One day Pemberton, the marine captain, pulled Bulkeley and his friend Cummins aside, and they all conferred in Pemberton’s dwelling. After ensuring that no one could overhear, Pemberton confided that he considered Lieutenant Baynes, the second-in-command, a nothing. What’s more, he viewed Captain Cheap “in the same light.” His allegiance now seemed to lie with Bulkeley, that instinctive leader.

  * * *

  At the moment, Captain Cheap was most worried about the thieves. Like insidious rats, they kept sneaking into the store tent at night and absconding with precious nuggets of food. With the company on the brink of mass starvation, the robberies—what Bulkeley called these “villainous practices”—enraged the rest of the castaways. Shipmates and messmates began to look at one another with growing suspicion: Who among them was stealing from their last remaining food?

  The only type of commander whom seamen despised as much as a tyrant was one who could not maintain order, and who failed to uphold an unspoken promise—that in exchange for the men’s loyalty, he would protect their well-being. Many of the castaways now despised Cheap for not safeguarding their supplies and catching the culprits. Some were clamoring for the food to be moved to Bulkeley’s shelter, insisting that he could better look after it.

  Bulkeley had not made such a demand, but he approached Cheap, seeking to “consult” about the robberies. He spoke as if he represented the people.

  Cheap believed that if he did not quell the disorder, it would destroy the outpost. And so he issued a proclamation: all his officers and the marines must take turns guarding the store tent. Cheap required Bulkeley to take one of the night watches and stand alone in the damp cold for hours—a reminder of his lower rank. “Strict orders were given,” Bulkeley wrote, to keep a “watchful eye.” Byron had to routinely serve on lookout as well. After being “fatigued with hunting all day in quest of food,” he noted, it was hard to “defend this tent from invasion by night.”

  One evening, while Byron was on duty, he heard something stirring. He still feared that a monstrous creature roamed the island after dark. On one occasion, he’d noted in his account, a seaman had claimed that, while sleeping, he had been “disturbed by the blowing of some animal at his face, and upon opening his eyes, was not a little astonished to see, by the glimmer of the fire, a large beast standing over him.” The seaman had relayed the story of his narrow escape with “horror in his countenance.” The excitable Byron later thought that he had detected a strange impression in the sandy ground: it was “deep and plain, of a large round foot well furnished with claws.”

  Byron now scoured the dark. There was nothing to be seen, but he heard the sound, insistent and wild. It was coming from inside the tent. Byron drew his gun and went in. There, before him, were the gleaming eyes of one of his fellow companions. The man had slithered under the tent and was in the process of pilfering food. Byron pointed his pistol at the man’s breast, then with a rope secured the thief’s hands to a post and went to alert the captain.

  Cheap placed the man under confinement, hoping to deter further incidents. Not long after, the armed purser, Thomas Harvey, was out for a walk when he spotted a figure crawling through the bushes by the supply tent. “Who goes there?” It was a marine named Rowland Crusset. Harvey seized and searched him. He was found to be carrying, Bulkeley recorded, “upwards of a day’s flour for ninety souls, with one piece of beef under his coat,” and he had stashed three more slabs of beef in the bushes.

  Another marine, Thomas Smith, who was Crusset’s messmate, had been guarding the store tent at the time and was arrested as an accomplice.

  News of the arrests hummed through the settlement, agitating the listless inhabitants into a vigilante frenzy. Cheap told Bulkeley and several other officers, “I really think that for robbing the store tent—which, in our present circumstances, is starving the whole body of people—the prisoners deserve death.” No one disagreed. “This was not only the Captain’s opinion but indeed the sentiments of every person present,” Bulkeley noted.

  Ultimately, though, Cheap decided that the accused men must be “governed by the rules of the Navy, and to stand or fall by them.” And based on these regulations, he resolved that they would be hauled before a court-martial: if there was crime on Wager Island, there would be a trial.

  Even in the midst of the vast wilderness—far from England and the prying eyes of the Admiralty—Cheap and many of the castaways clung to Britain’s naval codes. They hastily arranged a public trial with several officers appointed to serve as judges. According to naval regulations, they were supposed to be impartial, though in this case no one could have been unaffected by the alleged crimes. The judges, in their tattered clothing, were sworn in and the defendants brought out. As the wind blew against their bodies, the charges were recited aloud. Witnesses—who swore to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”—were called. The accused men’s only defense seemed to be that they would have done anything, no matter how cruel or cunning, to avoid starvation. None of the proceedings lasted long: all three defendants were found guilty.

  In reviewing the Articles of War, it was determined that the “crime did not touch life,” and thus did not merit the death penalty. Instead, each guilty man was condemned to be given six hundred lashes—an amount so extreme that it would have to be administered in increments of two hundred, over three days. Otherwise, it would be lethal. A sailor in the Navy who was once about to be flogged severely remarked, “I am sure I cannot go through the torture; I would rather have been sentenced to be shot or hung at the yardarm.”

  Yet many of the castaways thought that six hundred lashings were insufficient. They wanted the ultimate punishment: death. Bulkeley then spoke up, and proposed what he called “a way next to death”—one that would “strike a terror in all for the future.” After the guilty men had been flogged, he suggested, they should be banished to a rocky islet off the coast, which contained at least some mussels, snails, and fresh water, and be left there until the company had means of returning to England.

  Captain Cheap seized on the idea. Surely, after such a severe punishment, no one else would dare to defy his orders and put his own needs above those of the company.

  Cheap gave the command for “all hands to witness punishment,” and the castaways gathered in a hailstorm as one of the prisoners, Crusset, was led outside by sentries. The men had traveled halfway around the world with the condemned marine—sharing watches, battling hurricanes, surviving a wreck. Now they looked on as their companion’s wrists were bound to a tree. The feuding company was momentarily united by a common hatred.

  Crusset’s shirt had been stripped off, exposing his back; stones of ice struck him first. Then one of the men seized the whip and with all his might began to thrash Crusset. The whip slashed his skin. One witness to a flogging noted that, after two dozen lashings, the “lacerated back looks inhuman; it resembles roasted meat burnt nearly black before a scorching fire; yet still the lashes fall.”

  The man tasked with administering the flogging whipped Crusset until he was too exhausted to whip anymore. Then a fresh inflictor took over. “When a poor fellow is being punished, his agonizing cries pierce you to the soul,” another witness to a flogging recalled.

  Crusset received fifty lashes, then another fifty, and another. After taking his total of two hundred lashes for the day, he was untied and helped away. The next day the beating resumed. The other guilty parties were similarly whipped. Some of the marines grew so horrified by the sight of their anguished comrades that, in at least one case, they balked at carrying out the third installment. Afterward the prisoners were rowed out in a transport boat and deposited on the islet, where they were left half conscious and bleeding.

  Cheap believed that he had quelled any further insubordination among the men. “I endeavoured…to bring them to reason and a sense of their duty,” he insisted in a report. But before long it was discovered that four bottles of brandy and four bags of flour had disappeared from the store tent; privation was a greater threat than any punishment Cheap could inflict.

  A mob of castaways stormed some of the shelters, searching for the missing food. As these men rummaged through the tents of several marines, turning them inside out, they discovered the stolen bottles and bags. Nine marines were charged with the crime, but five managed to escape, joining the band of seceders. The four others were tried, convicted, whipped, and exiled.

  The robberies continued; the beatings escalated. After another person was repeatedly whipped, Cheap ordered Byron and several men to row the thief out to the islet. The man seemed near death. Byron recalled, “We, in compassion, and contrary to order, patched him up a bit of a hut, and kindled him a fire, and then left the poor wretch to shift for himself.” A few days later, Byron went with some companions to sneak the man some nibbles of food, only to find him “dead and stiff.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Extremities

  Captain Cheap saw a long white trail, like sprinkled flour, snaking toward his dwelling. He examined it more closely. It was gunpowder. Had it been accidentally spilled there or was it part of some plot? Midshipman Byron said that he’d heard from someone else that Mitchell and his band of separatists had slipped into the camp to “perpetuate their wicked design of blowing up their commander, when they were with difficulty dissuaded from it by one who had some bowels and remorse of conscience left in him.”

  It was hard for Cheap to know what to believe. Facts, too, can become casualties in a warring society. There were rumors and counterrumors, some perhaps intentionally promulgated to create greater confusion, to further undermine him. He was no longer sure whom he could trust. Even among the officers, he detected signs of disloyalty. The head of the marines, Pemberton, had lost, in Cheap’s words, “all sense of honour or the interest of his country.” The wishy-washy Lieutenant Baynes appeared to shift allegiances with the latest breeze, and the boatswain, King, incited so many quarrels that his own companions had booted him from their shelter. Then there was John Bulkeley, the seeming worm in the apple. Cheap had probed him regarding his loyalties, and Bulkeley had assured him that he and “the people”—there was that phrase again—“never would engage in any mutiny against him.” But the gunner was constantly holding meetings in his makeshift hotel and forming alliances, building his little empire, as if he were the monarch of the island.

  As Cheap listened to the tumult of shrieking winds, cracking thunder, drumming hail, and roaring surf, he paced with his cane. When Anson had given him his captaincy, it was more than a promotion: it brought a measure of the respect and honor that Cheap had long coveted. And it meant that he had a chance to burnish himself in glory, as a leader of men. All of that was now being undermined, along with the outpost. And he was being tormented—by hunger and seemingly by his own thoughts, obsessing feverishly over, as he put it, “the repeated troubles and vexations that I met with.” Byron observed that Cheap was “jealous to the last degree” of his power as captain—power that he saw “daily declining, and ready to be trampled upon.”

  On June 7, nearly a month after the Wager had run aground, he gave a simple order to Midshipman Henry Cozens to roll a cask of peas salvaged from the wreck up the beach and into the store tent. Cozens, appearing unsteady from liquor, insisted that the cask was too heavy, and began to turn away. A midshipman refusing his captain!

  Cheap shouted that Cozens was drunk.

  “With what should I get drunk, unless it be with water?” Cozens replied.

  “You scoundrel! Get more hands and roll the cask up.”

  Cozens made a half-hearted gesture of calling for others, but no one came, and Cheap smacked him with his cane. Then Cheap ordered Cozens seized and imprisoned in a tent, under the guard of a sentinel. “This day Mr. Henry Cozens, midshipman, was confined by the Captain,” Bulkeley recorded in his journal. “The fault alleged against him was drunkenness.”

  That evening, Cheap checked on his prisoner. Cozens hurled a torrent of curses at him, the insults ringing through the camp. Cozens shouted that Cheap was even worse than George Shelvocke, an infamous British buccaneer who, two decades earlier, had wrecked his ship, the Speedwell, on one of the Juan Fernández Islands. After returning to England, Shelvocke was accused of deliberately sinking the ship to defraud his investors. “Though Shelvocke was a rogue, he was not a fool,” Cozens said to Cheap. “And, by God, you are both.”

  In a fury, Cheap raised his cane to beat Cozens—beat him into submission—but he was restrained by the sentinel, who insisted that the captain should “strike no prisoner of his.” Cheap quickly recovered himself, and in a surprising act he released Cozens from confinement.

  But some of the men gave the midshipman more liquor, and he began to cause another ruckus, this time quarreling with the captain’s close ally the purser, Thomas Harvey. When sober, Cozens was always congenial, and Byron believed that some of the cabalists had fed his friend liquor to turn him into their own destructive agent.

  A few days later, the rain fell especially hard, the water dripping from leaves and streaming down the sides of Mount Misery. Cozens was in line awaiting his share of the rations, which the purser, Harvey, distributed from the store tent, when he heard a rumor: Cheap had decided to cut his amount of wine. In an instant, Cozens stampeded toward Harvey to demand his share. The purser, still simmering from their earlier dispute, drew his flintlock pistol with its roughly foot-long barrel. Cozens continued advancing. Harvey cocked the hammer and took aim, calling Cozens a dog and accusing him of intending to commit mutiny. A seaman standing beside Harvey interceded and knocked the barrel upward just as Harvey pulled the trigger. The bullet soared past Cozens.

  Hearing the shot and the shouting about mutiny, Cheap burst out of his dwelling. His eyes were ablaze, his pistol already in hand. Squinting in the rain, he looked around for Cozens, whom he was certain had fired the bullet, and shouted, “Where’s that villain?”

  There was no reply, but he spied Cozens amid the growing crowd. Cheap walked over and, with neither questions nor ceremony, placed the cool tip of the barrel against Cozens’s left cheek. Then, as he would later describe it, he “proceeded to extremities.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Affections of the People

  At the sound of the blast, John Byron ran from his hut and saw Cozens on the ground, “weltering in his blood.” Captain Cheap had shot him in the head.

  Many of the men stood back, afraid of Cheap’s rage, but Byron went over and knelt by his messmate’s side as the rain washed over him. Cozens was still breathing. He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. Then he “took me by the hand,” Byron recalled, “shaking his head, as if he meant to take leave of us.”

  The crowd was becoming uneasy. Bulkeley observed that Cozens’s “notorious disrespectful words to the Captain might probably make the Captain suspect his design was mutiny,” but it was clear that Cozens had no weapon. Byron thought that however wrong Cozens’s actions had been, Cheap’s response was inexcusable.

  The onlookers continued to stir as Cozens lay before them, barely alive. “The unhappy victim…seemed to absorb their whole attention,” Byron recalled. “The eyes of all were fixed upon him; and visible marks of the deepest concern appeared in the countenances of the spectators.”

  Amid the rising clamor, Cheap ordered the men to stand in assembly. Bulkeley wondered if he and his men should get their weapons. “But, on consideration, I thought better to go without arms,” he recalled.

  Cheap’s once-solid frame had been eaten away by hunger. Yet, as he faced the line of men, he held his ground, gripping his pistol. He was flanked by his allies, including the surgeon, Elliot, and the marine lieutenant, Hamilton. After Bulkeley indicated that his own men were unarmed, Cheap lay down his gun in the mud and said, “I see you are, and have only sent for you to let you all know I am still your Commander, so let every man go to his tent.”

  There was a moment of uncertainty as the sea broke against the shore. Bulkeley and his men knew that if they refused to comply, they would be taking the first step toward overthrowing their appointed captain and upending the rules of the Navy—the rules that they had lived by. Cheap’s rash shooting of Cozens, Byron noted, had nearly provoked “open sedition and revolt.” But eventually Bulkeley retreated, and the rest of the castaways followed suit. Byron, who went to his hut alone, observed that the company’s resentment seemed “smothered for the present.”