The castaways had decided that it was too “dangerous to suffer the Captain any longer to enjoy liberty,” Bulkeley wrote. And this time Lieutenant Baynes had joined the rebellion.

  Cheap looked bewildered, and turning to Bulkeley and the other officers, he said, “Gentlemen, do you know what you have done?”

  Bulkeley and his men explained that they were there to arrest him for the death of Cozens.

  “I am your commander still,” Cheap replied. “I will show you my instructions.” Allowed to fumble through his things, he retrieved the letter given to him by Commodore Anson naming him the captain of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager. He waved the sheet of paper. “Look at it. Look at it!” he told Bulkeley and the other officers. “I could not think you would serve me so.”

  “Sir, it is your own fault,” Bulkeley said. “You have given yourself no manner of concern for the public good…but have acted quite the reverse, or else have been so careless and indifferent about it, as if we had no commander.”

  Cheap turned away from his officers and addressed the rank-and-file seamen. “Very well, gentlemen, you have caught me napping….You are a parcel of brave fellows, but my officers are scoundrels.” The intruders had bound his hands behind his back. “My lads, I do not blame you,” he said again. “It is the villainy of my officers.” He added that these men would eventually answer for their deeds. The implication was unmistakable: they would be hanged.

  He then looked at Lieutenant Baynes and asked, “Well, sir, what do you design to do by me?” When Baynes explained that the officers planned to confine him in one of the tents, Cheap said, “I should be obliged to the gentlemen, if they would let me stay in my own.” His request was denied. “Well, Captain Baynes!” he said contemptuously.

  As Cheap—who was only half dressed but wearing his hat—was led outside into the blistering cold, he strove to maintain a dignified air. He said to the crowd of onlookers, “You must excuse my not pulling my hat off, my hands are confined.”

  Bulkeley couldn’t help conveying, in his written account, a certain admiration for his adversary. Here Cheap was, defeated, bound, humiliated, and yet he remained composed, steady, and courageous. He had finally, like a true captain, mastered himself.

  A moment later, the boatswain, King, sauntered over to Cheap, cocked his fist, and slugged him in the face. “It was your time, but now, God damn you, it is mine!” King said.

  “You are a scoundrel for using a gentleman ill when he is a prisoner,” Cheap said, his face streaked with blood.

  He and Hamilton were placed in a makeshift prison, watched over at all times by a phalanx of six seamen and an officer. No one was allowed in without being searched. Bulkeley seemed to be taking no chances—he didn’t want Cheap to break out or anyone else to break in.

  As the de facto commander, Bulkeley felt the burden of being fully in charge. “We now looked on [him] as Captain,” Campbell conceded. Bulkeley began making final preparations for the voyage to Brazil. He ordered the men to fill empty gunpowder barrels with rainwater for drinking, and to cut up and dress the few remaining portions of meat. Then he had their meager supplies, including some bags of flour, stored on the boats. Bulkeley also slipped his two precious possessions—his journal and the book The Christian’s Pattern—into the hold of the Speedwell, where they would stay drier. Byron, still stunned by the mutiny, fretted that the longboat’s food stock would last only a few days: “Our flour was to be lengthened out by a mixture of seaweed; and our other supplies depended upon the success of our guns.”

  Bulkeley was determined to quell the atmosphere of anarchy, and with his allies he drafted a set of rules and regulations to govern the party once it set off. They included:

  Whatever fowl, fish, or necessaries of life obtained during the passage shall be divided equally among the whole.

  Any person found guilty of stealing food shall, irrespective of rank, be cast upon the nearest shore and abandoned.

  To prevent broils, quarrels, and mutiny, any man who threatens the life of another or inflicts violence shall be left on the nearest shore and abandoned.

  Bulkeley declared that these commandments were for “the good of the community,” and every person who intended to embark on the voyage was required to sign the document, like a blood oath.

  There was one final pressing issue: what to do with Cheap? Altogether, out of the Wager’s original complement of some 250 men and boys, 91 were still alive, among them the seceders. To squeeze all the passengers onto the four boats, they’d have to be packed cheek to jowl. There was no separate space for a prisoner, and Cheap would be hard to restrain, while also posing a constant threat to the new order.

  According to Bulkeley, the plan was nevertheless to transport Cheap back home as a prisoner, so that the captain could stand trial for murder. But at the last moment, Cheap told Bulkeley that he’d “rather be shot than carried off a prisoner.” He asked to be left on the island with anyone who wanted to stick with him and with whatever supplies could be spared. Bulkeley wrote, in his account, that he conferred with several of the men, who said, “Let him stay and be damned!”

  Bulkeley and his closest fellow officers then prepared their most important document yet. This one was addressed directly to the Lord High Admiral of Great Britain. It stated that because of the difficulty of carrying Cheap as a prisoner “in so small a vessel, and for so long and tedious a passage,” and because he might carry out plots “in secret as may prove destructive to the whole body,” they had agreed to abandon their captain on Wager Island. It was necessary, they insisted, “in order to prevent murder.”

  * * *

  Cheap was sure that his enemies intended to do away with him, and were using the shooting of Cozens as a pretext. Surely they knew that his version of events might get them hanged.

  As Bulkeley and his men were preparing to set sail, they informed Cheap that they would give him the eighteen-foot yawl. Not only was it the smallest of the four boats; it had recently been cracked on the rocks. The yawl’s hull, Cheap observed, was “all in pieces.” The men also provided him, as he put it, just “a very small quantity of extraordinarily bad flour, and a few pieces of salt meat.” And they offered him a compass, a couple of poor guns, a telescope, and a Bible.

  Lieutenant Hamilton and the surgeon, Elliot, decided to stay with Cheap, but neither Byron nor Campbell nor anyone else from the outpost did. The seceders also planned to linger on the island—in part because there wasn’t space on the boats, and in part because they’d become used to living separately. This group had suffered its own attrition, and just recently Mitchell and two of his companions had disappeared, setting off on a flimsy raft in the hope of reaching the mainland. They were never heard from again; no doubt they’d met a grisly end. Just seven seceders remained, bringing the total number who would stay on the island—including Cheap—to ten.

  On October 14, 1741, five months after being shipwrecked and more than a year since departing England, Bulkeley’s party began to board the three boats. They were eager to flee their imprisonment in the wild, and also, perhaps, to flee what they’d become. Yet they were also afraid to be embarking on another voyage into the unknown.

  Cheap, released from his confinement, strolled down to the edge of the shore and watched as a parade of men, clad in rags, were squeezing into the three boats. He spotted his midshipmen, Byron, Campbell, and Isaac Morris. There was Master Clark, making sure that his boy was safe. There were the purser, Harvey, and the cook, Maclean, and the boatswain, King, and the seamen John Duck and John Jones. Altogether, fifty-nine bodies crammed into the longboat, twelve into the cutter, and ten into the barge. Bulkeley wrote, “We are so closely pent up for want of room that the worst jail in England is a palace to our present situation.”

  Several men called out to Cheap with what he described as the “utmost insolence and inhumanity.” They told him that he’d never see any Englishmen again, other than the few stragglers on the island with whom he would surely die.

  Bulkeley approached him, and Cheap stared at the man who had usurped him. He knew that each of them was about to face another agonizing ordeal, and perhaps he recognized a small part of himself in Bulkeley—the prideful ambition, the desperate cruelty, and the vestige of goodness. He put out his hand and wished him a safe passage. Bulkeley noted in his journal, “This was the last time I ever saw the unfortunate Captain Cheap.”

  At eleven in the morning, with Bulkeley in the commander’s perch on the Speedwell, the boats shoved off into Cheap’s Bay, the crews hoisting sails and driving with oars in order to overcome the crashing surf. Cheap had asked Bulkeley one favor: that if he and his party reached England to relay the entire history of what had transpired, Cheap’s side included. Yet, as the boats slipped away, Cheap realized that the island would likely become the place where he and his story were lost forever.

  Part Four

  DELIVERANCE

  CHAPTER 17

  Byron’s Choice

  As the boats headed out to sea, John Byron stared at Cheap standing forlorn on the shore in the spectral mist. Byron had been led to believe that Cheap would be brought along with them on the journey, at least as a prisoner. But they had just left him there. Left him without a working boat, no doubt to perish. “I had all along been in the dark as to the turn this affair would take,” Byron would write.

  He had originally made a choice that he could bear: abandoning the mission to return home was a decision that might subvert his naval career, but it would save his life. Doing this to Captain Cheap was different. To play a role in totally deserting his commander—no matter how flawed and tyrannical he was—threatened the romantic image of himself that he had clung to despite the horrors of the voyage. As he continued watching Cheap in the distance, he and some of the men shouted three cheers to their old captain. And then Cheap was gone and Byron’s decision seemed irreversible.

  Even before the boats sailed past Wager Island, the men were struck by a squall, as if they were already being punished for their sins. Then Byron heard a loud, unnerving sound: the makeshift foresail on the vaunted new longboat had split and was flapping uncontrollably. The party was forced to seek shelter in the lagoon of another island just west of Cheap’s Bay, where they could repair the sail and wait out the storm. They had traveled barely a mile.

  The next day, Bulkeley asked for volunteers to take the barge back to Wager Island and retrieve a discarded canvas tent in case they later needed extra sailcloth. Byron suddenly saw an opportunity. He offered to go with the party, as did Midshipman Campbell, and that afternoon they set off with eight other men, rowing through the jarring waves. Campbell shared Byron’s misgivings, and while the two young midshipmen were being tossed about and doused by spray, they began to conspire. If they wanted to escape the stain of dishonor and cowardice, Byron believed, they must retrieve Cheap. Campbell agreed, murmuring that now was the time.

  Hoping to sneak away with the barge, they tried to enlist the other men onboard, who included several of Cheap’s erstwhile supporters. They, too, had been shocked by the abandonment of the captain. Fearing they would be hanged if they ever made it back to England, they joined the counterplot.

  As Byron rowed on with the others, he became increasingly uneasy: what if Bulkeley and his men suspected that they had no intention of returning? They might not mind the defections—it would mean fewer bodies to transport and mouths to feed—but they would be enraged over the loss of the barge, which they would want for added space and to send hunting parties onshore. As night fell, Byron and his companions anxiously plowed through the waves in the dark until they spotted campfires flickering in the distance: the outpost. Byron and his party had made it safely back to Wager Island.

  Cheap was astonished by the men’s arrival, and when he learned what they had resolved to do he seemed invigorated. He welcomed Byron and Campbell into his dwelling, and, along with the surgeon, Elliot, and the marine lieutenant, Hamilton, they stayed up late, chatting hopefully about their prospects now that they were free of the men behind the rebellion. There were twenty people on the island: thirteen at the main settlement, and another seven at the seceders’ camp. Cheap and his party had at least one usable boat—the barge—and they could also try to repair the yawl.

  When Byron awoke the next morning, though, he confronted the grim reality. He had nothing to put on but a hat, torn trousers, and the remaining threads of a waistcoat. His shoes had disintegrated, leaving him barefoot. Most distressing, he had no reserves of food—not even a slaugh cake. And the rest of the men who had returned with him also had nothing. Their scant rations had been stored on the Speedwell with the very people they’d just double-crossed.

  Cheap shared some of his meat—it was rotten, and in any case there wasn’t enough of it to sustain them for long. Byron, who had constantly been guided by the whims of superiors, finally tried to formulate a plan of his own. He decided that he must go back to the mutineers and claim the portion of food owed his party. It would be risky, perhaps even foolhardy, but what other option was there?

  When Byron proposed the idea, Cheap warned that his enemies would seek vengeance and commandeer the barge, once more leaving the rest of them stranded.

  Byron had thought about that. He said that he and Campbell and a small party could land the barge some distance away from the lagoon. Then, while most of them guarded the boat, he and Campbell would complete the trek to Bulkeley’s party. They would be vulnerable to retaliation, but the temptation of food was too overpowering. And with Cheap’s encouragement, Byron and his small party embarked that morning.

  After they paddled to the other island, they hid the barge in a secluded area. Byron and Campbell bade farewell to their companions and began their arduous trek. They slogged through sticky swamps and knotted forests until, that night, they reached the edge of the black lagoon. They heard voices in the darkness. Most of the mutineers, including their leaders, Bulkeley and Baynes, were on the shore scouring for food—that perpetual quest.

  Bulkeley appeared baffled by the two midshipmen’s sudden appearance. Why had they arrived overland and without the barge?

  Byron, summoning his courage, declared that they would not desert Cheap.

  Bulkeley seemed stung by Byron’s defection. He assumed that Byron had been coerced by Campbell—either that, or the aristocratic midshipman had reverted to the embedded orders of class and hierarchy. (In a veiled comment in his journal, Bulkeley wrote that “the Honourable Mr. Byron” could not quite accommodate himself to “lie forward with the men.”)

  When Byron and Campbell asked for their party’s share of food, Bulkeley and Baynes demanded to know where the barge was. Campbell told them that they intended to keep the boat—after all, it was meant to carry ten castaways, and ten of them were now staying with Cheap. One of the mutineers snapped, “Damn you,” and warned them that unless they brought back the barge they would be given nothing.

  Byron made a plea directly to the rest of the men, but they told him that if he did not bring the barge the next day, they’d arm the cutter and come after him.

  Byron walked away; then, distraught, he walked back and asked again. It was futile. He wondered how people could be so cruel.

  As he departed, he lost his hat in a gust of wind. The seaman John Duck walked over to his old companion and generously gave him his own hat.

  Byron was overcome by this flash of kindness. “John!” he exclaimed. “I thank you.” But insisting that he could not leave Duck without a hat, he returned it.

  Then Byron hurried away with Campbell, back to the barge and across the sea with his party, occasionally glancing behind him to see if they were being pursued by a cutter gleaming with guns.

  CHAPTER 18

  Port of God’s Mercy

  The moment the winds calmed, Bulkeley, Lieutenant Baynes, and the other men on the two remaining boats shipped out. They were within striking distance of the outpost, but Bulkeley ignored pleas to launch an assault to take the barge and instead led his men in another direction—south toward the Strait of Magellan. There would be no more looking back.

  As they forged onward, it became clear, even to old sea dogs like Bulkeley, that the journey in the castaway boats would be unlike anything they had ever experienced. The Speedwell was not that much bigger than the original longboat, which had been designed to fit twenty oarsmen and to ferry supplies over short distances. Now the Speedwell was jammed with enough casks of water to last them a month and with enough guns and ammunition to ward off an attack. Most of all, the boat was crammed with men—men squeezed on the bow, around the masts, by the tiller, in the hold belowdecks. The boat looked as if it had been jury-rigged with human limbs.

  With fifty-nine people onboard, there was no space to lie down, and it was nearly impossible for the crew to move about to raise a sail or pull a rope. After serving several hours on watch, the men on deck would struggle to switch places with those below in the hold, which was as dank and dark as a coffin but provided a measure of protection from the elements. To urinate or defecate, a person had to lean over the side of the hull. The stench of the men’s wet clothes alone, Bulkeley wrote, “makes the air we breathe nauseous to that degree that one would think it impossible for a man to live.”