In 1748, two years after the court-martial, Reverend Walter finally published his account, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740–1744 by George Anson. At nearly four hundred pages, it was the longest and most detailed of the various narratives, and it was illustrated with beautiful sketches made during the expedition by a lieutenant on the Centurion. Like many travelogues of the time, the book suffers from stilted prose and the tedious minutiae of a logbook, but it successfully conveys the pulsing drama of Anson and his men confronting one disaster after another. In a brief discussion of the Wager affair, the account sympathizes with Cheap, arguing that he had “done his utmost” to save the crew and only shot Cozens because he was the “ringleader” of a band of violent agitators. Walter also lent credence to the reason that none of the castaways were ever prosecuted, claiming that the “men conceived, that by the loss of the ship, the authority of the officers was at an end.” Ultimately, in Walter’s hands, the sinking of the Wager becomes just one more impediment in the Centurion’s quest to capture the galleon. The book concludes with the stirring words: “Though prudence, intrepidity, and perseverance united are not exempted from the blows of adverse fortune,” in the end they “rarely fail of proving successful.”

  But there is something odd about the book. For the work of a clergyman, it contains conspicuously little mention of God. And though the narrator writes in the first person while describing the Centurion’s engagement with the galleon, Walter was not present for this battle—he had departed from China for England shortly before the engagement. Later, sleuthing historians discovered that Walter was not the book’s sole author; much of it had been ghostwritten by a pamphleteer and mathematician named Benjamin Robins.

  In fact, there was yet another hidden force behind the book—none other than Admiral Anson himself. He had what he admitted was an “aversion to writing,” and in his dispatch after capturing the galleon, he had offered little more than “I got sight of her and gave chase.” Anson, however, had engineered Walter’s book—providing the source materials, choosing the reverend to compile it, reportedly paying Robins a thousand pounds to breathe life into it, and making sure that it reflected his perspective on every page.

  The expedition was touted as “an enterprise of so very singular a nature,” and Anson himself was depicted throughout as a commander who “constantly exerted his utmost endeavours” and “always kept up his usual composure”—a man who was as “remarkable for his lenity and humanity” as for “his resolution and courage.” Moreover, the book is one of the few accounts that seems deeply conscious of Britain’s imperial interests, praising, on the first page, the country for once more demonstrating its “manifest superiority” over its enemies, “both in commerce and glory.” The account was secretly Anson’s version of the events, designed to burnish not only his reputation but also that of the British Empire. Even the book’s illustration of the battle between the Centurion and the galleon, which became an iconic image, altered the dimensions of the vessels to make it look as if the galleon was the larger and more formidable of the two, rather than the other way around.

  The book went through one printing after another and was translated around the world—a best-selling smash, in today’s parlance. An official of the Admiralty noted, “Everybody has heard of, and multitudes have read, ‘Anson’s Voyage Round the World.’ ” The book influenced Rousseau, who, in one of his novels, described Anson as “un capitaine, un soldat, un pilote, un sage, un grand homme!” Montesquieu wrote a forty-plus-page annotated summary of the book. Captain James Cook, who described Reverend Walter as “the ingenious author of Lord Anson’s voyage,” carried a copy on the Endeavour during his first expedition around the world, and so did Darwin on his journey on the Beagle. The book was hailed by critics and historians as “a classic story of adventure,” “one of the pleasantest little books in the world’s library,” and “the most popular travel book of its time.”

  Just as people tailor their stories to serve their interests—revising, erasing, embroidering—so do nations. After all the grim and troubling narratives about the Wager disaster, and after all the death and destruction, the empire had finally found its mythic tale of the sea.

  Epilogue

  In England, the men from the Wager resumed their lives as if the sordid affair had never happened. With Admiral Anson’s support, David Cheap was made captain of a forty-four-gun man-of-war. On Christmas Day in 1746, eight months after the court-martial, he was sailing off Madeira with another British ship when he spotted a thirty-two-gun Spanish vessel. Cheap and the other British ship gave chase, and for a moment he resembled the leader that he had always wanted to be: perched on the quarterdeck, guns ready, barking out orders to his men. He later informed the Admiralty that it was his “honour” to reveal that his party had overtaken the enemy in “about half-an-hour.” Moreover, he reported that he had discovered onboard the vessel more than a hundred chests of silver. Cheap had finally captured what he called “so valuable a prize.” After receiving a substantial share of the money, he retired from the Navy, bought a large estate in Scotland, and married. Yet even after his victory he could not entirely purge the stain of the Wager. When he died in 1752, at the age of fifty-nine, an obituary noted that after being shipwrecked he had shot one man “dead on the spot.”

  John Bulkeley escaped to a land where migrants could discard their burdensome pasts and reinvent themselves: America. He moved to the colony of Pennsylvania, that future hotbed of rebellion, and in 1757 he published an American edition of his book. He included an extract from an account that Isaac Morris had written, though he cut out the part in which Morris accused him of cruelly abandoning him and his party. After the American publication, Bulkeley vanished from history as abruptly as he had inserted himself. The last time his voice can be heard is in the new dedication to his book, in which he mentions that he hopes to find in America “the Garden of the Lord.”

  John Byron, who married and had six children, stayed in the Navy, serving for more than two decades and ascending the ranks all the way to vice-admiral. In 1764, he was asked to lead an expedition around the globe; one of his orders was to keep an eye out in the unlikely event that any Wager castaways had survived on the shores of Patagonia. He completed the voyage without losing a ship, but wherever he went at sea, he was hounded by dreadful storms. His nickname became Foul-Weather Jack. An eighteenth-century naval biographer wrote that Byron had “the universal and justly acquired reputation of a brave and excellent officer, but of a man extremely unfortunate.” Nevertheless, in the cloistered wooden world he seemed to find what he had longed for—a sense of fellowship. And he was widely praised for what one officer called his tenderness and his care toward his men.

  Bound by naval tradition, he kept quiet about the Wager affair, carrying with him his anguishing memories: how his friend Cozens had gripped his hand after being shot; how the dog that he found was slaughtered and eaten; and how some of his companions had turned, as a last resort, to cannibalism. In 1768, two decades after the court-martial—and long after Cheap had died—Byron finally published his own version of the events. It was called The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron…Containing an Account of the Great Distresses Suffered by Himself and His Companions on the Coast of Patagonia, from the Year 1740, Till Their Arrival in England, 1746. With Cheap no longer alive, he could be more candid about his former captain’s dangerously “rash and hasty” conduct. Marine Lieutenant Hamilton, who continued to vehemently defend Cheap’s conduct, accused Byron of doing a “great injustice” to the captain’s memory.

  The book was praised by critics. One called it “simple, interesting, affecting, and romantic.” And though it never received a lasting readership, it cast a spell on Byron’s grandson, whom he never met. In Don Juan, the poet wrote that the protagonist’s “hardships were comparative / To those related in my grand-dad’s ‘Narrative.’ ” He also once wrote:

  Reversed for me our grandsire’s fate of yore,—

  He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.

  Admiral George Anson went on to win more naval victories. During the War of the Austrian Succession, he captured an entire French fleet. But his greatest impact came not as a commander but as an administrator. While serving for two decades on the Board of the Admiralty, he helped to reform the Navy, addressing many of the problems that had caused so many calamities during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The changes included professionalizing the service and establishing a permanent marine corps under Admiralty control, which would avoid invalids being sent to sea and the kind of hazy command structure that had contributed to the disorder on Wager Island. Anson was hailed as the “Father of the British Navy.” Streets and towns were named in his honor, including Ansonborough in South Carolina. John Byron named his second son George Anson Byron.

  Yet within decades even the fame of Byron’s old commodore began to wane, overshadowed by subsequent generations of commanders such as James Cook and Horatio Nelson, with their own mythic tales of the sea. After the Centurion was decommissioned and broken apart, in 1769, its sixteen-foot wooden lion’s head was given to the Duke of Richmond, who had it placed on a pedestal at a local inn with a plaque that read:

  Stay, traveller, awhile, and view

  One who has travelled more than you:

  Quite round the globe, through each degree,

  Anson and I have ploughed the sea

  Later, at the King’s request, the lion’s head was moved to Greenwich Hospital, in London, and placed in front of a ward for seamen, which was named for Anson. But over the next hundred years the artifact’s significance faded, and it was eventually dumped in a shed, where it decayed into pieces.

  Occasionally, a great teller of sea tales would be drawn to the saga of the Wager. In his 1850 novel White-Jacket, Herman Melville notes that the “remarkable and most interesting narratives” of the castaways’ suffering make for fine reading on “a boisterous March night, with the casement rattling in your ear, and the chimney-stacks blowing down upon the pavement, bubbling with rain-drops.” In 1959, Patrick O’Brian published The Unknown Shore, a novel inspired by the Wager disaster. Though a fledgling, less polished work, it provided O’Brian with a template for his subsequent masterful series set during the Napoleonic Wars.

  Yet the Wager affair, despite these occasional reminders, has now been all but forgotten by the public. Maps of the Golfo de Penas contain references that are baffling to most contemporary seamen. Near the northernmost headlands, which Cheap and his group tried futilely to row past, four small islands are identified as Smith, Hertford, Crosslet, and Hobbs—the names of the four marines left behind when there wasn’t room for them on the one remaining transport boat. They had cried out “God bless the King” before disappearing forever. There is Canal Cheap and Byron Island—the place where Byron had made his fateful choice to leave Bulkeley’s party and return to his captain.

  Gone from the coastal waters are the nomads of the sea. By the late nineteenth century, the Chono had been wiped out by contact with Europeans, and by the early twentieth century there were only a few dozen Kawésqar, who had settled at a hamlet about a hundred miles south of the Golfo de Penas.

  Wager Island remains a place of wild desolation. Today, it looks no less forbidding, its shores still battered by unrelenting winds and waves. The trees are knotted and twisted and bent, and many have been blackened by lightning. The ground is sodden from rain and sleet. A near-permanent mist enshrouds the top of Mount Anson and the other peaks, and it sometimes creeps down the slopes to the rocks along the water’s edge, as if the whole island were being consumed by smoke. Few creatures seem to move in the haze, except for a white-chinned petrel or other aquatic bird that flies over the surf.

  Near Mount Misery, where the castaways built their outpost, a few stalks of celery still sprout, and you can forage for scattered limpets like those the men survived on. And a short way inland, partially buried in an icy stream, are several rotted wooden planks that, hundreds of years ago, washed up onto the island. About five yards long and hammered with treenails, these boards are from the skeletal frame of an eighteenth-century hull—His Majesty’s Ship the Wager. Nothing else remains of the ferocious struggle that once took place there, or of the ravaging dreams of empires.

  John Byron was a sixteen-year-old midshipman on the Wager.

  * * *

  An eighteenth-century painting of a British press gang

  * * *

  David Cheap, the Centurion’s first lieutenant, dreamed of becoming a captain.

  * * *

  An eighteenth-century painting of the Deptford dockyard, where the Wager was launched

  * * *

  Life of a man-of-war: the machinery on a gun deck

  * * *

  Life of a man-of-war: 1742 medical diagram for how to amputate limbs

  * * *

  A burial at sea

  * * *

  A logbook from the Centurion, with entries detailing horrific disease and storms

  * * *

  An albatross off Cape Horn

  * * *

  A Centurion officer sketched the squadron arriving in St. Catherine, Brazil, in December 1740. The Wager is the second ship from left.

  * * *

  The Wager before it wrecked—painted by Charles Brooking, c. 1744

  * * *

  Wager Island

  * * *

  In this 1805 engraving, the castaways are shown building their encampment on Wager Island.

  * * *

  Mount Misery can be seen looming over the men in this eighteenth-century illustration.

  * * *

  The castaways found Wager Island’s mountainous terrain virtually barren of food. They were forced to consume bits of seaweed and celery.

  * * *

  A Kawésqar man hunting sea lions, photographed by the anthropologist Martin Gusinde in the early twentieth century

  * * *

  The indigenous people in the region spent much of their time in canoes and survived almost exclusively off marine resources.

  * * *

  A coastal Kawésqar camp, photographed by the anthropologist Gusinde

  * * *

  Murderous violence erupted among the Wager’s castaways, as depicted in this 1745 engraving.

  * * *

  An eighteenth-century painting of the Centurion engaged in battle, its sails and British flag torn from cannon fire

  * * *

  George Anson led the British squadron that included the Wager.

  * * *

  A remnant of the Wager wreck that was discovered in 2006

  * * *

  The castaways had a copy of John Narborough’s account of his British expedition to Patagonia, and they carefully studied his map of the Strait of Magellan.

  * * *

  An eighteenth-century painting of men crowded in a small transport boat, similar to the one that the survivors on Wager Island used

  * * *

  To escape, the castaways from the Wager would have to navigate through the violent seas along the Chilean coast of Patagonia.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book can sometimes feel like navigating a ship on a long, stormy voyage. And I’m grateful to so many people who kept me afloat.

  The distinguished British naval historian Brian Lavery patiently gave me tutorials on everything from eighteenth-century shipbuilding to seamanship, and he generously reviewed my manuscript before publication and offered his wise comments. Daniel A. Baugh, a leading naval historian, provided enormous insights and guidance during my research. And so many other historians and experts kindly answered my pestering calls, including Denver Brunsman and Douglas Peers. Rear Admiral C. H. Layman, who has done his own considerable research into the Wager affair, responded to my inquiries and allowed me to reprint several illustrations from his collection.

  In 2006, Colonel John Blashford-Snell, who runs the Scientific Exploration Society, organized a joint British and Chilean expedition to uncover the wreck of the Wager. He shared with me critical information, and so did Chris Holt, one of the leaders of the party, who also allowed me to reprint several of his photographs.

  Yolima Cipagauta Rodríguez, a whirlwind explorer who had helped to arrange the society’s expedition, assisted me in organizing my own three-week journey to the island. We departed from Chiloé Island on a small boat, which was heated by a wood stove. The vessel was operated by a skilled and knowledgeable captain, Noel Vidal Landeros, and his two extremely capable crew members, Hernán Videla and Soledad Nahuel Arratia. Because of their remarkable abilities and the aid of Rodríguez, I was able to reach Wager Island, locating pieces of the wreck and better understanding what the castaways had experienced.