The British Navy was known for its ability to coalesce fractious individuals into what Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson called a “band of Brothers.” But the Wager had an unusual number of unwilling and troublesome crewmen, including the carpenter’s mate James Mitchell. He frightened Byron even more than the boatswain, King; he seemed to burn with murderous rage. Byron could not yet know for certain the true nature lurking inside his fellow seamen or even himself: a long, dangerous voyage inexorably exposed one’s hidden soul.

  * * *

  Byron assumed his position on the quarterdeck. Those on watch did more than keep lookout: they had a hand in managing the complex ship, a leviathan that never slept and was constantly in motion. As a midshipman, Byron was expected to help with everything from trimming the sails to carrying officers’ messages. He quickly discovered that each person had his own distinct station—one that designated not only where he worked on the ship but also where he stood in its hierarchy. Captain Kidd, who presided from the quarterdeck, was at the pinnacle of this structure. At sea, beyond the reach of any government, he had enormous authority. “The captain had to be father and confessor, judge and jury, to his men,” one historian wrote. “He had more power over them than the King—for the King could not order a man to be flogged. He could and did order them into battle and thus had the power of life and death over everyone on board.”

  The lieutenant, Robert Baynes, was second-in-command on the Wager. About forty years old, he’d served in the Navy for nearly a decade and presented certifications from two former captains attesting to his abilities. Yet many of the crew found him maddeningly indecisive. Though he came from a notable family—his grandfather Adam Baynes had been a member of Parliament—they repeatedly referred to him as Beans, which, whether intentional or not, seemed apropos. He and other ranking officers on duty supervised the watch and made sure that the captain’s orders were being followed. As navigators, Master Clark and his mates plotted the ship’s course and instructed the quartermaster on the proper heading; the quartermaster, in turn, directed the two helmsmen who gripped the double wheel and steered.

  The nonseamen who specialized in trades formed their own social unit—the sailmaker mending canvases, the armorer sharpening swords, the carpenter repairing masts and plugging dangerous leaks in the hull, the surgeon attending to the sick. (His helpers were known as loblolly boys, for the porridge they served.)

  The seamen, too, were separated into divisions that reflected their abilities. The topmen, who were young and agile and admired for their fearlessness, scurried up the masts to unfurl and roll up sails, and to keep lookout, hovering in the sky like birds of prey. Then came those assigned to the forecastle, a partial deck toward the bow, where they controlled the headsails and also heaved and dropped the anchors, the largest of which weighed about two tons. The forecastle men tended to be the most experienced, their bodies bearing the stigmata of years at sea: crooked fingers, leathery skin, lash scars. On the bottom rung, situated on deck alongside the squawking, defecating livestock, were the “waisters”—pitiful landlubbers with no sea experience who were relegated to unskilled drudgery.

  Finally, in their own special category, were the marines: soldiers detached from the Army who were equally pathetic landlubbers. While at sea, they were governed by naval authority and had to obey the Wager’s captain, but they were commanded by two Army officers: a sphinxlike captain named Robert Pemberton and his hotheaded lieutenant, Thomas Hamilton. Hamilton had originally been assigned to the Centurion, but he was relocated after he got in a knife fight with another marine and threatened to duel him to the death. On the Wager, the marines mostly helped with heaving and hauling. And if there was ever an insurrection onboard, the captain would order them to suppress it.

  For the ship to thrive, each of these elements needed to be integrated into one crisp organization. Inefficiency, missteps, stupidity, drunkenness—any could lead to disaster. One sailor described a man-of-war as a “set of human machinery, in which every man is a wheel, a band, or a crank, all moving with wonderful regularity and precision to the will of its machinist—the all-powerful captain.”

  * * *

  In the morning hours, Byron would observe these components busily at work. He was still learning the art of seamanship, being initiated into a mysterious civilization so strange that it seemed to one boy as if he were “always asleep or in a dream.” Moreover, Byron, as a gentleman and a future officer, was expected to learn how to draw, fence, and dance—and to at least feign some understanding of Latin.

  One British captain recommended that a young officer in training bring onboard a small library with the classics by Virgil and Ovid and poems by Swift and Milton. “It is a mistaken notion that any blockhead will make a seaman,” the captain explained. “I don’t know one situation in life that requires so accomplished an education as the sea officer….He should be a man of letters and languages, a mathematician, and an accomplished gentleman.”

  Byron also needed to learn how to steer and splice and brace and tack, how to read the stars and the tides, how to use a quadrant to fix his position, and how to measure the ship’s speed by casting a line ribbed with evenly spaced knots into the water and then counting the number that slipped through his hands over a period of time. (One knot equaled a little more than a land mile per hour.)

  He had to decipher a new, mystifying language, cracking a secret code—or he would be ridiculed as a landlubber. When he was ordered to pull sheets, he’d better seize the ropes instead of his bedding. He must not speak of the privy but, rather, the head—essentially a hole on the deck through which the waste plunged into the ocean. And God forbid he should say he was on a ship rather than in one. Byron himself was baptized with a new name. The men began to call him Jack. John Byron had become Jack Tar.

  During the age of sail, when wind-powered vessels were the only bridge across the vast oceans, nautical language was so pervasive that it was adopted by those on terra firma. To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.

  Not only did Byron have to learn to talk like a sailor—and curse like one—but also to endure a punishing regimen. His day was governed by the sound of bells, which measured each passing half hour during a four-hour watch. (A half hour was calculated by the emptying of a sandglass.) Day after day, night after night, he heard the bells tolling and scrambled to his station on the quarterdeck—his body shivering, his hands calloused, his eyes bleary. And if he violated the rules, he might be tied to the rigging or, worse, flogged with the cat-o’-nine-tails—a whip with nine long lashes that cut into the skin.

  * * *

  Byron was also learning the pleasures of life at sea. During mealtimes, the food—consisting largely of salted beef and pork, dried peas, oatmeal, and biscuits—was surprisingly plentiful, and he enjoyed dining in his berth with his fellow midshipmen, Isaac Morris and Henry Cozens. Meanwhile, seamen gathered on the gun deck, unhooking wooden planks that hung down from ropes from the ceiling to form tables, and sitting in groups of eight or so. Because the sailors chose their own messmates, these units were like families, and members would reminisce and confide in one another as they relished their daily ration of beer or spirits. Byron was beginning to form those deep friendships that emerged from being in such tight quarters, and he grew especially close to his messmate Cozens. “I never knew a better natured man,” Byron wrote—“when sober.”

  There were other moments of merriment, especially on Sundays, when an officer might yell, “All hands to play!” A ship of war would then transform into a recreational park, with men playing backgammon and boys skylarking in the rigging. Anson liked to gamble and earned a reputation as a crafty card player, his blank eyes masking his intentions. The commodore was also passionately fond of music, and every muster had at least a fiddler or two, and sailors would do jigs and reels across the deck. One popular song was about the War of Jenkins’ Ear:

  They cut off his ears and slit his nose…

  Then with a jeer, they gave him his ear,

  Saying “Take it to your master” in disdain.

  But our King I can tell, loves his subjects so well,

  That he’ll curb the haughty pride of Spain.

  Perhaps Byron’s fondest diversion was sitting on the Wager’s deck and listening to the old salts tell tales about the sea—tales of lost loves and near-wrecks and glorious battles. These stories pulsed with life, the life of the teller, the life that had escaped death before and might escape it again.

  Swept up in the romance of it all, Byron began what would become a habit of excitedly filling his journals with his own observations. Everything seemed “the most surprising” or “astonishing.” He noted unfamiliar creatures, such as an exotic bird—“the most surprising one I ever saw”—with a head like an eagle and feathers that were “as black as jet and shined like the finest silk.”

  * * *

  One day Byron heard that petrifying order eventually given to every midshipman: “Aloft you go!” Having trained on the smaller mizzenmast, he now had to clamber up the mainmast, the tallest of the three, which rose some hundred feet into the sky. A plunge from such a height would undoubtedly kill him, as it had another seaman on the Wager. A British captain recalled that once when two of his finest boys were climbing, one lost his grip and hit the other, sending them both plummeting: “They struck with their heads upon the muzzles of the guns….I was walking the quarter-deck and presented with this most horrid spectacle. It is impossible to tell you what I feel on the occasion, or even to describe the general grief of the ship’s company.”

  Byron had an artistic sensibility (a friend said that he was drawn to connoisseurs), and he was sensitive about seeming like a delicate fop. Once, he told a member of the crew, “I can bear hardships as well as the best of you, and must use myself to them.” Now he began his ascent. It was critical for him to climb on the windward side of the mast, so that when the ship heeled his body would at least be pressed against the ropes. He slipped over a rail and placed his feet on some ratlines—small horizontal ropes that were fastened to the shrouds, the near-vertical ropes holding up the mast. Using this mesh of rope as a wobbly ladder, Byron hoisted himself upward. He went up ten feet, then fifteen, then twenty-five. With each roll of the sea, the mast swayed back and forth, while the ropes trembled in his hands. About a third of the way up, he came abreast of the main yard, the wooden spar that extended from the mast like the arms of a cross, and from which the mainsail unfurled. It was also where, on the foremast, a condemned mutineer got hanged from a rope—or, as the saying went, took “a walk up Ladder Lane, and down Hemp Street.”

  Not far above the mainyard was the maintop—a small platform used for lookouts, where Byron could rest. The simplest and safest way to get there was to slip through a hole in the middle of the platform. Yet this so-called lubber hole was considered strictly for cowards. Unless Byron wanted to be ridiculed for the rest of the voyage (and would it not be better to plunge to his death?), he had to go around the rim of the platform by holding on to cables known as futtock shrouds. These cables were slanted on an angle, and as he shinnied along them his body would tilt farther and farther until his back was nearly parallel to the deck. Without panicking, he had to feel with his foot for a ratline and pull himself onto the platform.

  When he stood on the maintop, he had little time to celebrate. The mast was not a single long wooden pole; rather, it consisted of three great “sticks” stacked on top of one another. And Byron had ascended only the first section. As he continued upward, the shroud ropes converged, the gaps between them growing narrower and narrower. An inexperienced climber would fumble to find a perch for his feet, and at this height there was no longer any space between the horizontal ratlines to wrap his arm around for a rest. With the wind buffeting him, Byron went past the main-topmast yard, from which the second large canvas sail was fastened, and past the crosstrees—wooden struts where a lookout could sit and get a clearer view. He kept ascending, and the higher he went, the more he felt the mast, and his body, lurching from side to side, as if he were clinging to the tip of a giant pendulum. The shrouds he gripped shook violently. These ropes were coated in tar against the elements, and the boatswain was responsible for making sure that they remained in good condition. Byron confronted an inescapable truth of the wooden world: each man’s life depended on the performance of the others. They were akin to the cells in a human body; a single malignant one could destroy them all.

  At last, nearly a hundred feet above the water, Byron reached the main topgallant yard, where the highest sail on the mast was set. A line was attached to the base of the yard, and he had to shuffle along it, while leaning his chest over the yard to balance himself. Then he awaited his orders: to furl the sail or reef it—roll it up partly to reduce the amount of canvas spread in heavy winds. Herman Melville, who served on a US warship in the 1840s, wrote in Redburn, “The first time we reefed top-sails of a dark night, and I found myself hanging over the yard with eleven others, the ship plunging and rearing like a mad horse….But a few repetitions, soon made me used to it.” He continued, “It is surprising, how soon a boy overcomes his timidity about going aloft. For my own part, my nerves became as steady as the earth’s diameter….I took great delight in furling the top-gallant sails and royals in a hard blow, which duty required two hands on the yard. There was a wild delirium about it, a fine rushing of the blood about the heart; and a glad, thrilling, and throbbing of the whole system, to find yourself tossed up at every pitch into the clouds of a stormy sky, and hovering like a judgment angel between heaven and earth.”

  As Byron now stood at the peak, high above all the strife on the decks below, he could see the other great ships in the squadron. And beyond them the sea—a blank expanse on which he was ready to write his own story.

  * * *

  At five in the morning on October 25, 1740, thirty-seven days after the squadron’s departure from England, a lookout on the Severn spotted something in the emerging light. After the crew flashed lanterns and fired several guns to alert the rest of the squadron, Byron saw it, too—a jagged outline on the rim of the sea. “Land ahoy!” It was Madeira, an island off the northwest coast of Africa that was known for its perennial spring climate and superb wine, wine that seemed, as Reverend Walter noted, “designed by Providence for the refreshment of the inhabitants of the torrid zone.”

  The squadron anchored in a bay on the eastern side of the island—the expedition’s last stop before the nearly five-thousand-mile crossing of the Atlantic to the southern Brazilian coast. Anson ordered the crews to quickly replenish their water and wood, and to load up on copious amounts of the prized wine. He was eager to move on. He had wanted to complete the passage to Madeira in no more than two weeks, but because of contrary winds it had taken three times that. Any lingering hopes of circling South America during the austral summer seemed to evaporate. “The difficulties and dangers of the passage round Cape Horn in the winter season filled our imaginations,” Reverend Walter confessed.

  Before they weighed anchor, on November 3, two events sent further shudders throughout the fleet. First, Richard Norris, the captain of the Gloucester and the son of Admiral John Norris, abruptly asked to resign his post. “Having been extremely ill ever since I left England,” he wrote in a message to Anson, “I am apprehensive my constitution will not permit me to proceed upon so long a voyage.” The commodore granted his request, though he despised any lack of valor—so much so that he later persuaded the Navy to add a regulation specifying that any person found guilty of “Cowardice, Negligence or Disaffection” during battle “shall suffer Death.” Even Reverend Walter, whom a colleague described as “rather a puny, weakly, and sickly man,” said of fear, “Fye upon it! It is an ignoble passion, and beneath the dignity of man!” Walter noted starkly that Norris “quit” his command. Later in the war, when Richard Norris was captaining another ship, he would be accused of betraying the “greatest signs of fear” by retreating in battle, and ordered to face a court-martial. In a letter to the Admiralty, he insisted that he welcomed the opportunity to “remove that infamy which malice and falsehood have thrown upon me.” But before the hearing he deserted and was not heard from again.

  Norris’s departure initiated a cascade of promotions among the commanding officers. The captain of the Pearl was appointed to the Gloucester, a more powerful warship. The Wager’s captain, Dandy Kidd—whom another officer described as a “worthy and humane commander, and universally respected onboard his ship”—moved to the Pearl. Taking his place on the Wager was George Murray, a nobleman’s son who had been in charge of the Trial sloop.