They paused onshore to sleep, and when they awoke the next morning, they realized that the date was December 25. They celebrated Christmas with a feast of sea-tangle and cups of fresh streamwater—“Adam’s wine,” as they called it, because that was all God had given Adam to drink. Cheap toasted to the health of King George II, before they packed up and sailed on.

  A few days later, they descended on the cape, the most critical point in the route. The seas converging here seethed with overpowering currents and colossal waves with frothing peaks, which Campbell referred to as the white of whites. Cheap ordered the men to lower the sails before they capsized, and they began to pull the oars with all their might.

  Cheap urged them on. After hours, they came abreast of the first of the three cliffs, but they were soon driven backward by the waves and the currents. Although they tried to retreat to a nearby bay, they were so tired that they couldn’t make it there before dark, and so everyone fell asleep on the boats, lying on their oars. After the sun rose, they recuperated in the bay until Cheap ordered them to try again for the cape. They must pull for their king and country. They must pull for their wives and sons and daughters and mothers and fathers and sweethearts and one another. This time, the castaways reached the second cliff, only to be hurled back and forced to retreat into the bay again.

  The next morning, the conditions were so severe that Cheap knew none of the men would dare try to navigate around the cape, and so they went ashore to hunt for food. They would need their strength. One of the castaways came upon a seal, raised his musket, and shot it. The men cooked it over a wood fire, tearing off chunks of fat and chewing them. Nothing was left to waste. Byron even made shoes of the skins, wrapping them around his nearly frostbitten feet.

  The men’s boats were anchored just offshore, and Cheap designated two men to each vessel, to keep watch at night. It was Byron’s lot to be on the barge. But he and the other men had been revived by the nourishment, and they fell asleep, in anticipation: perhaps the next day they would finally round the cape.

  * * *

  Something was thudding into the barge. “I was…awakened by the uncommon motion of the boat, and the roaring of the breakers everywhere about us,” Byron wrote. “At the same time I heard a shrieking.” It was as if the ghost from Wager Island had reappeared. The cries were coming from the yawl, anchored a few yards away, and Byron turned just in time to see this boat, with two men onboard, being capsized by a wave. Then it sank. One man was cast by the surf onto the beach, but the other drowned.

  Byron expected his own boat to flip at any moment. With his companion, he heaved the anchor and rowed with the barge’s bow pointed into the waves, trying to avoid being hit broadside and waiting for the storm to blow itself out. “Here we lay all the next day, in a great sea, not knowing what would be our fate,” he wrote.

  * * *

  After they made it ashore, they gathered with Cheap and the other survivors. The party now numbered eighteen, and without the yawl, there was no longer room to transport them all. Three more men could fit with difficulty in the barge, but four members of the party would have to remain behind—or they would all perish.

  Four marines were selected. Being soldiers, they lacked sailing skills. “The marines were fixed on, as not being of any service on board,” Campbell confessed, noting, “This was a melancholy thing, but necessity compelled us.” He recorded each of the marines’ last names: Smith, Hobbs, Hertford, and Crosslet.

  Cheap distributed to them some armaments and a frying pan. “Our hearts melted with compassion for them,” Campbell wrote. As the barge sailed away, the four marines stood on the beach, gave them three cheers, and cried, “God bless the King!”

  * * *

  Six weeks after Cheap and his party fled Wager Island, they reached the cape for the third time. The seas were more frenzied than ever, but he beckoned the men on, and they powered past one cliff and then another. There was just the last cliff. They were almost past it. But the crew collapsed, exhausted and defeated. “Perceiving now that it was impossible for any boat to get round, the men lay upon their oars till the boat was very near the breakers,” Byron wrote. “I thought it was their intention to put an end to their lives and misery at once.” For a time, not a soul moved or spoke. They were almost upon the breakers, the roar of the surf deafening. “At last, Captain Cheap told them they must either perish immediately, or pull stoutly.”

  The men picked up the oars, exerting themselves just enough to avoid the rocks and turn the boat around. “We were now resigned to our fate,” Byron wrote, having given up “all thoughts of making any further attempt to double the cape.”

  Many of the men attributed their failures to not having buried the seaman on Wager Island. The castaways went back to the bay, in the hope of at least finding the marines. Somehow, they resolved they would squeeze them onboard. As Campbell wrote, “We considered that if the boat sunk, we then should be free from the miserable life we led, and die all together.”

  Yet, except for a musket lying on the beach, there was no trace of them. They had undoubtedly perished, but where were their bodies? The castaways sought some way to commemorate the four men. “This bay we named Marine Bay,” Byron wrote.

  Cheap wanted to make one final attempt to round the cape. They were so close, and if they made it he was sure that his plan would succeed. But the men would no longer abide his devouring obsessions, and they decided to return to the place they had long been trying to escape: Wager Island. “We had now lost all hopes of ever revisiting our native country,” Campbell wrote, and they preferred to spend their last days on the island, which had become “a kind of home.”

  Cheap reluctantly assented. It took them nearly two weeks to circle back to the island, and by then the entire disastrous foray had lasted two months. They’d exhausted all of their food from the journey; Byron had even eaten the rancid, foul-smelling sealskins covering his feet. He heard a few of the castaways whispering about drawing lots and “consigning one man to death for the support of the rest.” This was different than when some of the men had earlier cannibalized dead bodies. This was killing a companion for food—a grisly ritual later imagined by the poet Lord Byron:

  The lots were made, and marked, and mixed, and handed,

  In silent horror, and their distribution

  Lulled even the savage hunger which demanded,

  Like the Promethean vulture, this pollution.

  In the end, the castaways could not go this far. Instead, they staggered up Mount Misery and found the decayed body of their companion—the man whose spirit, they believed, had been haunting them. They dug a hole and buried him. Then they went back to the outpost and huddled together, listening to the hush of the sea.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Day of Our Deliverance

  Bulkeley and the fifty-eight other castaways on the Speedwell were back on course, drifting slowly through the Strait of Magellan toward the Atlantic. The Speedwell, in its battered, leaking condition, was unable to sail close to the wind, and Bulkeley struggled to maintain his course. “It is enough to deject any thinking man to see that the boat will not turn to windward,” he wrote, adding that the vessel kept “swimming so poignant upon the sea.”

  Bulkeley also served as the chief navigator, and without a detailed chart of the region he had to piece together clues about the landscape from Narborough’s account and match them with his own observations. At night, dizzy and haggard, he read the stars to fix the ship’s latitude; during the day, he estimated its longitude through dead reckoning. He’d then compare these coordinates with those cited by Narborough—another piece of the puzzle. A typical entry in his journal read: “At eight saw two ledges of rocks, running two leagues out from a point of land which makes like an old castle.”

  As he and his men progressed through the strait, sometimes sailing, sometimes rowing, they floated past dusty wooded hills and blue glaciers, the Andes looming in the distance with their immortal caps of snow. As Charles Darwin later wrote, it was a coastline that made a “landsman dream for a week about shipwrecks, peril, and death.” The castaways rowed past a cliff where they spotted two indigenous men with white-feathered caps lying on their bellies and peering down at them before disappearing. They went past Cape Froward, the southernmost point of the continental mainland, where the two arms of the strait—one extending inward from the Pacific, the other reaching back from the Atlantic—conjoined.

  At this junction, the passageway twisted sharply to the northeast. After following this trajectory for more than twenty miles, Bulkeley and his men came upon Port Famine—the site of another exercise in imperial hubris. In 1584, the Spanish, determined to control access to the strait, had attempted to set up a colony here with some three hundred settlers, including soldiers, Franciscan priests, women, and children. But during the freezing winter they began to run out of food. By the time another expedition visited, nearly three years later, most of the colonists had, as one witness wrote, “died like dogs in their houses,” and the whole village was “tainted with the smell and the savor of the dead.”

  When Bulkeley and his party passed the ruins of Port Famine, on December 7, 1741, they had been gone from Wager Island for nearly two months. Without more food and fresh water, they, too, would soon perish.

  Two days later, they spied a herd of guanacos along the wooded bank. Bulkeley, with the eye of a predator, described the animal—a wild cousin of the llama—as being “as large as any English deer, with a long neck; his head, mouth, and ears, resembling a sheep.” The creature, he added, “has very long slender legs, and is cloven-footed like a deer, with a short bushy tail, of reddish colour.” Though he noted that these animals were exceedingly “nimble, of an exquisite quick sight, very shy, and difficult to be shot,” he tried to bring the Speedwell close enough to the coast for some of the men to wade ashore with guns. But the williwaws blowing down from the mountains forced him to bear away. The herd flitted off; the men drifted on.

  As Narborough had described, the channel began to constrict. Bulkeley realized that they had entered what was known as the First Narrow. At its widest, the strait extended twenty miles, but here it tapered to just two. Navigating the narrowest point in the passageway was treacherous. The tide rose and fell some forty feet, and there were often countervailing winds and eight-knot currents. It was nighttime when the castaways began sailing through the nine-mile-long chute, and they strained to see in the dark. For hours, they maneuvered between the shrouded banks, trying to avoid the shoals and curtail the boat’s constant leeward drift, until, at dawn, they emerged from the chute.

  On December 11, as they rowed on, Bulkeley noticed a bluff in the distance with several majestic white cliffs. He felt a shiver of recognition. It was the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins, which he had passed with Anson’s squadron nearly a year earlier on the way to Cape Horn. Bulkeley and his party had reached the strait’s eastern mouth, and were being swept into the Atlantic. They had not only made it through the 350-mile passageway in their jury-rigged boat; they had also, thanks to a remarkable feat of navigation by Bulkeley, taken, even with their initial false start, only thirty-one days—a week faster than Ferdinand Magellan and his armada.

  Still, the port of Rio Grande, which was the closest settlement in Brazil, was more than sixteen hundred miles north, and to get there they would have to traverse a coastline (now part of Argentina) under Spanish control, which meant that they would face the added danger of being captured. And except for a bit of raw flour, they were out of food.

  The men decided that they had no choice but to risk landing a hunting party, and they set their course for a bay where Narborough had reported seeing a small island with seals. On December 16, they sailed into the bay, known as Port Desire. Bulkeley observed on the shore a “peaked-up rock, much like a tower, looking as though it was a work of art set up for a landmark.” Seeing no sign of Spanish inhabitants, he guided his party deeper into the harbor. Soon they found the small island: lounging upon it, as if unmoved from Narborough’s day, were numerous seals. Bulkeley was able to anchor close enough to the shore that he and the rest of the men, including the nonswimmers, could climb overboard with their guns, wading up to their necks in the water. As soon as they stepped onto the island, they began deliriously picking off the seals. They smoked the meat over a fire and ravaged their rations—“the people eating greedily,” as Bulkeley put it.

  Before long, many of the men had collapsed in sickness. Most likely, they were suffering from what is now known as refeeding syndrome, in which a starved person, after suddenly ingesting large quantities of food, can go into shock, and even die. (Scientists later noticed this syndrome when it befell prisoners released from concentration camps after World War II.) The purser, Thomas Harvey, perished after consuming several rations of seal, and at least one other castaway died shortly after tasting what he thought was his salvation.

  The surviving men resumed following the coastline northward. Not long afterward, their stores of seal began to run out. Bulkeley could not stop many of them from fighting over the last rations. Soon all the food was gone anyway. “To go from hence without meat or drink is certain death,” Bulkeley wrote.

  Once again, they attempted to land a hunting party. But now the seas were so rough that they had to anchor at a distance from the shore. A man would have to swim through the breakers to reach the land. Most of the castaways, unable to swim and paralyzed with exhaustion, did not budge. Bulkeley, a nonswimmer as well, was required to helm the ship. But the boatswain, King, the carpenter, Cummins, and another man—propelled by courage or desperation or perhaps both—leapt into the water. Galvanized by the sight, eleven others, including John Duck, the free Black seaman, and Midshipman Isaac Morris, followed. One marine grew tired and began to flail. Morris tried to reach him, but the marine drowned within twenty feet of the beach.

  The other swimmers tumbled onto the sand, and Bulkeley tossed overboard four empty casks, which the surf carried ashore. They were to be filled with fresh water. Bulkeley had lashed to these casks several guns, and some of the men took them and began to hunt. They discovered a horse branded with the letters AR. The Spanish must be near. The castaways, who were increasingly anxious, shot the horse and a few seals, butchered them, then grilled the meat. Cummins, King, and four others swam back to the boat, bringing some food and fresh water. But a squall drove the Speedwell out to sea, and eight men, including Duck and Morris, were left stranded on land. “We still see the people ashore, but can’t get them off,” Bulkeley wrote.

  That night, as the boat banged in the waves, part of the rudder broke off, making it even harder to maneuver. Bulkeley discussed with Baynes, Cummins, and the others what they should do. They summed up their decision in another signed document. Dated from onboard the Speedwell—“on the coast of South America, in the latitude of 37:25 S. longitude from the meridian of London, 65:00 W. this 14th day of January”—it stated that after the rudder broke they “expected every minute the vessel would founder,” and it was “every man’s opinion that we must put to sea or perish.” They placed some guns and ammunition, as well as a letter explaining their decision, in a barrel, and then tossed it overboard, letting the waves wash it ashore. They waited until Duck, Morris, and the six others had received it. When the men read the letter, they fell to their knees and watched as the Speedwell sailed away.

  Was God seeing the things they did out here? Bulkeley still sought solace from The Christian’s Pattern, but a passage in it warned, “Hadst thou a clear conscience, thou could not fear death. It were better to avoid sin than to flee death.” Yet was it a sin to want to live?

  The broken rudder made the boat wander, as if it were following its own cryptic path. Within days, the men were out of food and virtually all their water. Few stirred. Bulkeley had noted, “There are not above fifteen of us healthy (if people may be called healthy that are scarce able to crawl). I am reckoned at present one of the strongest men in the boat, yet can hardly stand on my legs ten minutes together….We that are in the best state of health do all we can to encourage the rest.”

  Lieutenant Baynes, who was ill, wrote of “our poor fellows dying daily, looking with their ghastly countenances at me to assist them, which was not in my power.” On January 23, Master Thomas Clark, who had so devotedly protected his young son, died, and the following day his son died, too. Two days later, the cook, Thomas Maclean—the oldest man on the voyage, who had endured hurricanes and scurvy and shipwreck—took his last breath. He was eighty-two.

  Bulkeley still jotted scratchily in his journal. If he was writing with the future in mind, then he had to believe that, somehow, his journal would one day make it back to land. But his mind was fading. Once, he thought he saw butterflies snowing from the sky.

  On January 28, 1742, the boat was blown toward the shore, and Bulkeley perceived a tableau of strange shapes. Was it another mirage? He looked again. The shapes, he was sure, were wooden structures—houses—and they were situated on the edge of a major river. It had to be the port of Rio Grande on the southern border of Brazil. Bulkeley called to the other crew members, and those who were still conscious grabbed the ropes and tried to work what remained of the sails. After the castaways had spent three and a half months traversing nearly three thousand miles, they had reached the safety of Brazil.

  As the Speedwell drifted into the port, a crowd of townspeople gathered. They gaped at the battered, waterlogged vessel with its sun-bleached, shredded sails. Then they saw the almost unrecognizable human forms strewn about the deck and piled on top of one another in the hold—half-naked figures with protruding bones, their skin peeled off from the sun, as if they had emerged from a scalding fire. Manes of salted hair fell about their chins and down their backs. Bulkeley had written in his journal, “I believe no mortals have experienced more difficulties and miseries than we have.”