It was one of the most barbarous catastrophes in the Royal Navy’s history, but the story of the shipwreck of HMS Wager in 1741 and her crew’s mutiny is largely forgotten and far less known about than the mutiny on the Bounty, which occurred almost half a century later.
Now the shocking tale is recalled in a previously unpublished letter written by the Wager’s captain and included in a new book by Rear Admiral CH Layman, a naval historian.
The Wager was wrecked off the inhospitable coastline of what is now Chilean Patagonia, in 1741, an episode involving murder, starvation slavery, and almost unimaginable adversity for the survivors.
In 1741 Britain and Spain were at war and Wager, a 160-man Admiralty vessel, captained by David Cheap, right, was in a small squadron dispatched to “annoy and distress” Spanish interests in the South Seas.
The convoy was so ill-equipped it included, despite the commander’s objections, 500 soldiers from the Corps of Invalids. Wager’s crew included midshipman John Byron, the poet’s grandfather, who later gave substantial evidence criticising Cheap’s captaincy, though he was not one of the mutineers.
Wager was driven on to rocks by hurricanes near an uninhabited island. There were 140 survivors, many of whom later died from starvation, drowning, hypothermia and violent ends. Only 36 people made it back home.
Writing in 1744, while a prisoner, Cheap described events, from the beginning: “My ship’s company at that unhappy juncture [when shipwrecked] were almost all sick, having not more than six or seven seamen, and three or four marines, that were able to keep the deck.”
They were so fatigued by the voyage that they could scarcely “do their duty”.
He claimed that, having fallen and injured himself, he was drugged by the ship’s surgeon, and that orders he gave were disobeyed.
For some months on the island he prepared several open boats for a perilous voyage home, trying to keep order, including shooting a drunken midshipman – “I even proceeded to extremities”.
Then 62 men mutinied, abandoning Cheap and those loyal to him, and taking the best boats to sail, they hoped, to Brazil, without charts. He recalled that they “bound” his hands, and held him under guard.
Cheap and 18 men, including Byron, eventually set sail in two small and hardly seaworthy boats. During an appalling voyage Cheap faced new mutinies. He, Byron and one other survived helped by friendly strangers though eventually they were held by the Spanish, and returned to England five years after leaving Portsmouth.
The mutineers, too, suffered dreadfully – from starvation, accidents, murder, abduction. Most died. The 30 survivors endured a 107-day, 2,500 nautical mile voyage. Getting back to England in 1743, some months before Cheap, they found their name blackened and facing an Admiralty inquiry. Probably to save Admiralty faces no mutiny charge was laid, and one officer was reprimanded for Wager’s loss. Byron had a distinguished naval career and emerged as one of Wager’s few heroes.
Cheap wrote too of his shock at the mutineers’ barbarity, and at their “carrying with them all our arms, ammunition, the few clothes that we had saved … everything that could be of the least use to us”. His letter is included in Layman’s book, The Wager Disaster: Mayhem, Mutiny and Murder in the South Seas, with a foreword by the Duke of Edinburgh, who describes it as a drama “with extremes in human behaviour, both heroic and despicable”.
Layman, a commander in the Falklands war, has knowledge of the sometimes tempestuous sea where the Wager sank.
Layman said of Cheap’s letter: “We’ve had the accounts of his midshipman, his officers, but the captain has never spoken to us. Now he does.”
In his book, Layman writes that the Wager tale must be one of the most sensational and dramatic episodes in the Royal Navy’s history. “Compared to the Bounty mutiny, for example, it is practically unknown; but it exceeds [it] in … its supreme record of human endurance against almost overwhelming hardships.”
