Finally, Captain Cheap ordered that Cozens be taken to the sick tent.

  * * *

  Bulkeley visited Cozens there. He was being treated by a young man named Robert—the surgeon’s mate. Robert inspected the wound, which was hemorrhaging blood. The first textbook on medicine for sea surgeons warned that gunshot injuries “are always compound, never simple, and are the more difficult of cure.” Robert tried to trace the path of the bullet. It had entered Cozens’s left cheek, shattering his upper jaw, but there was no exit wound. The ball was still lodged inside Cozens’s head, about three inches below his right eye. Robert used bandages to try to stanch the bleeding, but if Cozens were to have a chance of surviving, the bullet would need to be surgically removed.

  The operation was scheduled for the following day. When the time came, though, the chief surgeon, Elliot, did not appear. Some attributed his absence to a previous fight between him and Cozens. The carpenter, Cummins, said he had heard that Elliot had intended to come but Captain Cheap had intervened. Midshipman Campbell said that he was unaware of the captain ever doing such a thing, suggesting perhaps that conflict was being stoked by disinformation—just as the rumor about Cozens’s wine rations being cut had been false. Despite Campbell’s insistence that Cheap was being maligned, the allegation that the captain had prevented the surgeon from treating Cozens spread among the company. “This was looked on as an act of inhumanity in the Captain,” Bulkeley wrote in his journal, “and contributed very much to his losing the affections of the people.” Bulkeley added that it would’ve been more honorable for Cheap to have killed Cozens with a second bullet, instead of denying him relief.

  Ultimately, Robert attempted the operation on his own. The medical textbook advised that a surgeon’s first duty was to God—“who seeth not as men see” and who “will direct our ways aright.” Robert opened the medical chest, which contained such metal instruments as incision knives, forceps, bone saws, and a cauterizing iron. None of these were sterilized, and the surgery, without anesthesia, was just as likely to kill Cozens as to save him. Somehow, Cozens survived the procedure. A sliver of the bullet had broken off, but Robert was able to reach the main piece and extract it.

  Cozens was conscious, but he was still in danger of dying from loss of blood, and there was also the risk of gangrene. He wanted to be moved to Bulkeley’s house to be among friends. When Bulkeley asked Cheap for his permission to do so, the captain refused, insisting that Cozens had mutinous intentions, which threatened their outpost. “If he lives,” Cheap said, “I will carry him a prisoner to the Commodore, and hang him.”

  On June 17, a week after the shooting, Robert performed a second operation on Cozens, in an effort to remove the remaining bullet fragment and a part of his splintered jawbone. The surgeon’s mate completed the procedure, but Cozens seemed to be fading. In such cases, the textbook advised, surgeons should not despair—“for God is merciful.” Cozens asked Robert for one last favor: to deliver to Bulkeley a small package containing the extracted bullet and piece of bone. Cozens wanted the evidence preserved. Robert agreed, and Bulkeley placed the disconcerting package in his shelter.

  On June 24, Bulkeley wrote in his diary, “Departed this life Mr. Henry Cozens, Midshipman, after languishing fourteen days.” Cozens might have unraveled on the island, yet, as Byron wrote, he remained “greatly beloved,” and most of the castaways were “extremely affected at this catastrophe.”

  Cold, filthy, ragged, they trudged outside and dug a hole in the mud; surrounding it were the unmarked graves of the men and boys who had, as Bulkeley’s journal put it, perished in “sundry ways since the ship first struck.” Cozens’s stiffening body was carried out from the sick tent and laid in the ground. There was no auction of his possessions to raise funds for his family back home: he had virtually no items and the men had no money. But the congregants took care to spread dirt over the body so that the vultures wouldn’t peck at it. “We buried him in as decent a manner as time, place, and circumstances would allow,” Bulkeley recalled.

  They had been trapped on the island for forty-one days.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Ark

  The men saw a sudden glimmer of salvation. The carpenter, Cummins, came up with a novel idea: if they could rescue the longboat that had been submerged with the wreck, they just might be able to remake it into an ark—one that could carry them off the island. In the days immediately after Cozens’s death, Captain Cheap had secluded himself in his hut, brooding, rationalizing, despairing. Would the Admiralty deem his shooting justifiable—or would he be hanged for murder? Bulkeley observed that the captain had grown more and more agitated, losing not only “the love of the men” but also “any composure of mind.”

  Now Cheap began to frenetically pursue Cummins’s plan. The first step was to cut away the longboat, which was entangled in debris. The only way to free it was to bore a hole in the side of the Wager. The task was hard and perilous, but the men did it, and the boat was soon heaved ashore. Cracked, waterlogged, and too cramped to hold but a fraction of the party, the vessel did not seem as if it could carry the castaways even around the island. Yet it contained the kernel of a dream.

  Cummins oversaw the engineering and remodeling of the craft. To fit more people in it, the thirty-six-foot hull would have to be extended at least another twelve feet. Many of the existing planks had rotted and would have to be replaced. And the boat would need to be transformed into a two-masted vessel so that it could power through the tremendous seas.

  Cummins estimated that the construction would take them several months, and that was assuming they could gather enough materials, not to mention stay alive that long. Everyone would have to lend a hand. Cummins also required another skilled craftsman, but his two carpenter’s mates, James Mitchell and William Oram, were both among the seceders. Although the madman Mitchell was no option, Cheap decided to send a small party on a covert mission to try to persuade Oram to defect from the defectors. There was no telling how Mitchell might respond if he were to learn of the overture, and Cheap was able to recruit only two men for the dangerous assignment. One was Bulkeley.

  As Bulkeley and his companion trekked across the island, humping with their heavy muskets over mountains and through lacerating thickets, they took care to remain undetected. “In this affair I was obliged to act very secretly,” Bulkeley wrote.

  When they reached the separatists’ camp, a few miles away, they waited until Oram appeared to be alone, then approached him. Bulkeley murmured that Captain Cheap had a proposition for him. Oram, who was twenty-eight, was facing a near-certain death sentence: he’d either starve with the other seceders or be executed for sedition. But if he returned to the main settlement and assisted with modifying the longboat, he’d receive a full pardon from the captain and might see his homeland again. Oram agreed to come back with them.

  By the middle of July, two months after being shipwrecked and three weeks after the death of Cozens, Cheap observed Bulkeley, Byron, and the rest of the company working busily—eagerly—on the ark. Byron noted that nothing seemed “so necessary towards the advancing our delivery from this desolate place.”

  First, the longboat had to be rested on thick blocks of wood, so that the hull was elevated from the ground. Next, Cummins sawed the boat in half. Then the real trick began: somehow stitching these pieces not only back together again but also in an entirely new form, one that was longer, wider, and stronger.

  Through rain and sleet, gales and lightning, Cummins—whom Bulkeley described as indefatigable—honed the design with his smattering of tools, including a saw, a hammer, and an adze, which resembled an ax. He sent the men to scour the forest for durable wood that had a natural bend. Once he had determined the boat’s overall shape, he began to place the pieces of wood into a riblike frame above the keel. A different sort of timber—long, thick, and straight—was required for planks, which had to be cut to precise measurements and then fastened at right angles to the curved frame. With metal nails in short supply, some of the castaways combed the drowned wreckage for additional ones. When these ran out, the carpenter and his mate hewed bolts from wood. The men also scraped together other essential materials: canvas for the sails, ropes for the rigging, candle wax for caulking.

  The men toiled even as many of them confronted the debilitating effects of malnourishment: their bodies thinned to the bone, their eyes bulging, their strawlike hair falling out. Bulkeley said of the castaways, “They are in great pain, and can scarce see to walk.” Yet they were compelled onward by that mysterious narcotic: hope.

  One day Cheap heard a panicked cry ring through the settlement. A rogue wave was surging up the beach, sweeping past the tideline and plucking at the boat’s skeletal frame. The men raced over and managed to heave the frame farther up the shore before the sea swallowed it. The work went on.

  Cheap’s plan, meanwhile, was taking on new, hidden dimensions. Poring over charts, he began to believe that there was a way to not only preserve their lives but also fulfill their original military mission. He calculated that the nearest Spanish settlement was on the island of Chiloé, which was off the Chilean coast and some 350 miles north of their present location. Cheap was sure that the company could sail there using the ark along with the three smaller transport boats—the yawl, the cutter, and the barge. Once they arrived in Chiloé—and, to him, this was the magnificent part—they could mount a daring attack on an unsuspecting Spanish trading ship; and, having taken this vessel and its stores of food, sail to the rendezvous point and search for Commodore Anson and any surviving members of the squadron. Then they’d proceed on the quest for the galleon.

  The risks were daunting, and Cheap, aware that he would have to persuade the men of his plan, did not immediately share these details with them. But as he later put it, “We need not fear taking prizes, and may have a chance to see the Commodore.” There was still, he believed, a possibility of glory—and redemption.

  * * *

  On July 30, Bulkeley stopped by Byron’s solitary hut on the edge of the village. There he found the scrawny, grimy nobleman’s son subsumed in his sea tales; he was reading Sir John Narborough’s chronicle again. Bulkeley asked to borrow the book, though strictly for pragmatic reasons. Narborough had explored the Patagonian region, and Bulkeley thought that the account—essentially a detailed log—might hold critical clues for how to navigate the ark safely away from Wager Island.

  Byron loaned Bulkeley the book after securing Captain Cheap’s permission, since it belonged to him. Then Bulkeley took it back to his quarters and began studying the text as intently as he did The Christian’s Pattern. Narborough had described his journey through the Strait of Magellan, that 350-mile passageway between the end of the South American mainland and Tierra del Fuego, which offered an alternative route between the Pacific and the Atlantic that avoided the Drake Passage around Cape Horn. “At any time if you have a desire to enter the Strait of Magellan” from the Pacific side, Narborough wrote, “it will be safest, in my opinion, to bear in for the land, in the latitude of 52 degrees.” This opening was about four hundred miles south of Wager Island, and Bulkeley was seized by an idea. With their eventual new longboat and three small transport crafts, he thought, the castaways could cross through the strait and into the Atlantic, then head north to Brazil; its government, being neutral in the war, would surely provide them a safe haven and facilitate their passage back to England.

  The total distance from Wager Island to Brazil would be nearly three thousand miles. And Bulkeley conceded that many would deem it a “mad undertaking.” The strait was winding and narrow in places, and it often splintered into a bewildering maze of dead-end offshoots. Shoals and rocks cluttered the waters, and there were blinding fogs. “A man may mistake the right channel, and steer in among the broken islands and rocks, so far as to endanger his ship,” Narborough warned. And though the strait was more sheltered than the Drake Passage, it was notorious for unpredictable squalls and for glacial blasts—now known as williwaws—that left ships heaped on the banks. That is why Commodore Anson, navigating a sailing fleet of large, unwieldy men-of-war by dead reckoning, had preferred to risk the violence of the open seas around Cape Horn.

  However, Bulkeley observed, “desperate diseases demand desperate remedies,” and he believed this route to Brazil was their only feasible option. The Drake Passage, four hundred miles farther south, was too distant, and its seas were too lethal for their small boats. As for the obstacles in the strait, Narborough had recorded a safe course. Moreover, he had reported finding sources of sustenance, to ward off starvation. Along with mussels and limpets, he wrote, “here are ducks, white and pied-brant geese, grey gulls, sea mews, sea divers, and penguins.”

  For Bulkeley, this route seemed to have another, deeper seduction. They would be charting their own destiny, emancipating themselves from a naval mission that had been bungled by government and military officials back home—a mission that had been doomed from the outset. The castaways would now choose to survive rather than venture north through the Pacific, where a Spanish armada would likely pulverize or capture them. “Our going through the Strait of Magellan for the coast of Brazil would be the only way to prevent our throwing ourselves into the hands of a cruel, barbarous, and insulting enemy,” Bulkeley concluded. “Our longboat, when finished, can be fit for no enterprise but the preservation of life. As we cannot act offensively, we ought to have regard to our safety and liberty.”

  Bulkeley asked Master Clark and the other navigators to review the route that he had sketched based on Narborough’s information. They, too, agreed that the plan represented their best chance to survive. Bulkeley shared his vision with the other men, who were faced with a fundamental choice. They were tired of the war—tired of death and destruction—and longed to go home, but to turn back meant they’d be abandoning their mission and possibly the rest of the squadron. And to make things worse, Captain Cheap had just announced that he expected them to do their patriotic duty and head in the opposite direction. They would find the commodore, he vowed, and never retreat.

  * * *

  Byron watched as the outpost, briefly united over building the ark, now split into two rival forces. On one side were Cheap and his small but loyal cadre. On the other were Bulkeley and his legions of partisans. Until then, Byron had maintained his neutral stance, but that was becoming untenable. Although the dispute centered on a simple matter of which way to go, it raised profound questions about the nature of leadership, loyalty, betrayal, courage, and patriotism. Byron, an aristocrat who aspired to rise within the naval ranks to one day captain his own ship, wrestled with these questions as he was forced to choose between his commanding officer and the charismatic gunner. Knowing the stakes of his decision, Byron was somewhat circumspect in his writings. But it is clear that he felt duty bound to Cheap, and that he viewed Bulkeley, who seemed to relish his newfound status, as someone who was undermining the captain and fueling his deep insecurities and paranoia. Moreover, Cheap, in laying out his plan, had evoked the kind of imperial heroism and sacrifice—that mythopoetic life of the sea—extolled in the romances Byron so loved.

  On the other hand, Bulkeley seemed far more composed and suited to command the men in their nightmarish circumstances. Unrelenting, ingenious, and cunning, he had emerged as a leader on his own merits. By contrast, Cheap’s expectation that the men would unwaveringly follow him was based solely on the chain of command. And in his desperation to maintain his authority, he had become even more fanatical. As Bulkeley observed of Cheap, “The loss of the ship was the loss of him; he knew how to govern while he was a commander on board, but when things were brought to confusion and disorder, he thought to establish his command ashore by his courage, and to suppress the least insult on his authority.”

  On August 3, Byron learned that Bulkeley was gathering with most of the men to discuss their next steps. Should Byron go, or stay faithful to his commander?

  * * *

  The following day, Cheap saw Bulkeley approaching with an entourage. When the gunner was within a few feet of him, he paused and held up a piece of paper. He said that it was a petition and began to read it aloud, as if he were on the floor of Parliament:

  WE, whose names are under-mentioned, do upon mature consideration…think it the best, surest, and most safe way for the preservation of the body of people on the spot to proceed through the Strait of Magellan for England. Dated at a desolate island on the coast of Patagonia.

  Though carefully worded, the statement had an unmistakable intent. At a meeting the previous day, Bulkeley had invited the men who wanted to sign the petition. One by one, they’d done so, including the head of the marines, Pemberton, and Master Clark, who continued to protect his young son, and the ancient cook, Maclean, still clinging to life, and the seaman John Duck. Even Cheap’s fierce enforcer Midshipman Campbell had added his signature. Byron had scribbled his name, too.

  Now Bulkeley handed the smudged paper to Cheap, who saw the long list of squirrelly signatures at the bottom. So many of Cheap’s men had backed the petition that it would be hard for him to single any one of them out—including the chief instigator, Bulkeley—for punishment.

  Cheap could count on one hand the number of his men who had not defied him: the purser, Harvey; the surgeon, Elliot; the marine lieutenant, Hamilton; and the steward, Peter Plastow. And there was one other name, perhaps the most significant, missing from the document: Lieutenant Baynes. Cheap still had on his side the second-highest-ranking naval officer on the island. The top chain of command remained aligned.