Not long before David Grann’s The Wager, I read Endurance and Maurice and Maralyn . So I seem to have a soft spot for shipwreck stories.

The HMS Wager was a Navy warship. In 1740 the British Admiralty sent it to South America to attack Spanish colonies and transport ships. The book portrays what happened to the crew of the Wager after it sinks while trying to round Cape Horn. Most of the crew make it to a small island just off the Patagonian coast.

The most interesting part is how quickly the strict hierarchy of the Navy broke down and several factions formed and competed with each other. The biggest group around the gunner, John Bulkeley, staged a mutiny against captain David Cheap.
Eventually two groups make it separately back to England. All of them sail on makeshift barges to Chile/Brasil/Argentina. From there they make it back to England. Cheap’s crew of 4 people arrive 2 years after Bulkeley’s group.

The two groups’ narratives of what happened on the island strongly disagreed. Was it mutiny by Bulkeley’s group or was Captain Cheap not fit to lead? Was the Navy hierarchy formally active after the crew was shipwrecked and on land?

It is interesting to compare the fate of the crew with that of Shackleton’s Edurance   that got stuck in 1915 on the way to the Antarctic. In contrast to Cheap, Shackleton managed to maintain order and command and ensured everyone survived. According to Alfred Lansing’s book Shackleton carefully managed his decisions in how they affect morale, when to push the crew, when to give them rest and food, and how to silence troublemakers. Cheap on the other hand became captain only during the journey, had less leadership experience, and was blamed by some of the crew for the shipwrecking. He also had a strong sense of duty to the mission and prioritized this over all other considerations.

A fun fact is that John Byron   , grandfather of the poet Lord Byron   , was a midshipman of the Wager and played an important role in helping Captain Cheap get off the island.

There is an interesting documentation   about an expedition in 2006 to Wager Island to find the wreck.