I had never heard of this book by David Grann until my book club elected to read it. I don’t like to look up a book if I know I’m going to read it because I like to go in completely cold, without any preconceptions about it. That meant that I was about halfway through the first chapter before realizing this book is nonfiction, and not, in fact, a novelization of an historical event.
I had heard a little bit about the events covered in this book. I had heard that at some point some sailors washed up on the shores of Brazil saying they had been shipwrecked and been living on a deserted island before they managed to put together a boat from the wreckage of the ship and escape.
Then some more sailors washed up on the shores of Chile claiming the first batch of sailors were not castaways, but mutineers. That’s literally everything I knew about the story before reading this book.
I did not realize the ship that had been wrecked, called the Wager, was just one of five ships on a mission to track down and attack some Spanish ships as part of a war between England and Spain.
So many people died on that trip that the captain who was mutineed against wasn’t even the original captain of that ship on that journey. He was the second or third captain, and he had already lost a lot of his crew to illness (including scurvy) before they ever reached the treacherous Cape Horn.
The book talks about how awful scurvy is and the fact that the sailors had no idea what was happening or why they were getting so sick. I had to look up when the connection between scurvy and Vitamin C was discovered, and according to Wikipedia, it was discovered and forgotten several times over the centuries! So suffice to say, this was before English sailors were called Limeys.
I was also surprised to see that Lord Byron’s grandfather was among the crew. He was just a kid, so despite the fact that most of the ship’s crew died on this journey, I always knew Byron would be safe because he had to get back home so he could get married and have kids so one of them could grow up to become a famous poet.
It’s kind of amazing how badly things went on this trip from beginning to end. It started with the building of the ship taking much longer than originally planned, then they couldn’t get enough men to work the ship. They had to bring old and maimed sailors out of retirement, some of whom were so weak they had to be carried on the ship, so what good are they going to be as a crew member?
Also there was a typhus outbreak on the ship before they even left the harbor, so that was a pretty solid indication of how things were going to go.
When they couldn’t get volunteers or old men, they would kidnap sailors coming back home and force them into service. Yikes!
Oh, and criminals were also forced to work on the ship. So it’s not hard to imagine that there were men making things difficult on the ship before they even got to Cape Horn. One man in particular probably killed at least two or three men, but none of the survivors who made it back home ever saw him killing anyone, so it’s all just speculation.
They managed to safely get around Cape Horn, which was the most dangerous part of the trip, but once on the other side of South America, they misjudged the distance to the shore and end up getting shipwrecked.
They use the smaller boats to get to a nearby island to take stock of their surroundings, and it is not good. This is no lush tropical island. They’re about 1,000 miles from the Antarctica, give or take. It’s freezing and the terrain is rocky. There also appears to be little to no fish or birds for them to live on. When they finally encounter some natives, it turns out the natives know how to find fish and live off the land and can’t figure out why these pale men are so helpless.
But of course some of the sailors have to make trouble with the indigenous people, who then leave the pale men to freeze and starve on their own. They leave one of their dogs behind, but if you can’t stand the thought of bad things happening to dogs, don’t read this book.
Eventually, they get three boats fixed up and they set off, but Captain Cheap turned out to be such a bad captain that almost all of the men mutineed against him. At first, they took him with them, but kept him tied up. He said he would rather be left on the island to die than to be taken with them bound, so they left him on the island.
Byron initially went with the mutineers, but had second thoughts about participating in a mutiny and abandoning his captain, so he decided to go back. The island where he made that decision is still called Byron’s Island.
If you think it was smooth sailing from there, you haven’t been paying attention. The head of the mutineers decides to go through the Straight of Magellan, because it’s easier than going around Cape Horn. From there they can sail up to Brazil, which is neutral in the war between England and Spain. They do make it up there, but not without losing even more men to storms, starvation, and disease.
Of course Byron and the captain eventually make it off the island and to Chile with the help of some more natives. They still feel superior to these “savages” even while relying on them to get to safety. At one point, one of the “savages” knocks a handful of poisonous berries out of Byron’s hand as he’s about to eat them.
The book made it sound like the trial to determine whether the group that landed in Brazil was guilty of mutiny was a really big deal. Mutiny was, after all, punishable by death. And Bulkeley, the leader of the mutineers, apparently kept a diligent record of everything that happened on their journey, then published it for the public to read as his way of getting his version of the story out there first.
But then Captain Cheap and Byron and a few other men appeared in England to tell a different story.
The trial itself was fairly anticlimactic. Apparently the navy didn’t really want to charge anyone with mutiny. They questioned Captain Cheap and Bulkeley, but they didn’t ask any truly probing questions about the mutiny. Bulkeley was allowed to keep his head, and even to continue serving in the navy, as was Captain Cheap.
Byron also went back into service and rose up the ranks of the navy, which surprised me. I can’t believe anyone could have barely made it back home alive, just to get back on a ship and risk doing it all over again!
Oh, and Byron published his own account of what happened years after Cheap died. Considering all the storms and shipwrecks, I can’t believe everyone’s journals seemed to make it back to England safely.