Part Five: Judgment
Epilogue
Part Five: Judgment centers the crew’s conflicting narratives on center stage, revealing how different perspectives and motivations can alter how people remember history. The book’s final chapters also show the fragility of the social order, as the former castaways of the Wager find it difficult to abandon the lawlessness they had grown accustomed to on Wager Island. While the Speedwell survivors stay in Brazil before trickling back to England, the unruly boatswain John King directs a gang of allies to break into the house where Bulkeley is staying to try to steal his journal. King and the others are evidently afraid of how Bulkeley’s account of their time on Wager Island will reflect on them, especially in the eventuality that Captain Cheap actually manages to survive and return to England himself. Paranoia and infighting are once again rife among the men, with Lieutenant Baynes trying to save himself from a possible court-martial by telling first Brazilian and then British officials that Bulkeley and John Cummins were responsible for Cheap’s fate.
In March 1742 and January 1743, respectively, Baynes and then Bulkeley and Cummins arrive in England. Bulkeley presents his journal as evidence against Baynes’s accusations, but without Cheap to verify one side or the other, the Admiralty is stymied. In the aftermath of their arrival back in England, the castaways are consigned to legal limbo until Cheap is either officially reported dead or returns himself. To defend himself in the eyes of the public, Bulkeley decides to publish his journals as a book co-authored with Cummins, A Voyage to the South-Seas, in the Years 1740-1. The book draws criticism from the Admiralty and within the upper class, but it convinces much of the public that Bulkeley and the other mutineers were in the right. This enables Bulkeley to live a relatively peaceful life despite having been exiled from the navy, at least until Cheap returns to England to tell his side of the story.
Grann spends Chapter 22: The Prize detailing the rest of Commodore Anson’s expedition. In 1743, two years after the disappearance of the Wager, Anson is still attempting to intercept the treasure-filled Spanish ship, a galleon called Our Lady of Covodonga. Grann tells the story of Anson’s battle against the Covodonga, which he eventually wins, earning a massive treasure worth nearly $80 million for himself and his crew. However, Grann is careful to emphasize that Anson’s Centurion is not an underdog, despite its reputation in historical accounts. For example, in Chapter 26: The Version That Won, Grann argues that the Centurion is actually larger and more technologically impressive than the Spanish galleon, though illustrations of the battle depict the opposite. In multiple published accounts of Anson’s voyage, including one by Richard Walter, the chaplain of the Centurion, Anson is hailed as an exceptional hero of British empire. Walter’s propagandistic version, which Grann believes was actually written by Anson, also shows Great Britain in the best possible light and emphasizes its superiority over the people it conquers. In this way, Grann argues that the success of the mission of the Centurion serves as a case study for how imperial powers and their agents perpetuate their own self-serving mythology.
Chapter 23: Grub Street Hacks follows Captain Cheap and his remaining men after they bury the seaman murdered by James Mitchell. Cheap, Byron, and the others encounter a small group of native Patagonians who help them eventually navigate from Wager Island to Chiloé Island. Due to more desertion and death, only four of the castaways reach Chile: Cheap, Byron, marine lieutenant Thomas Hamilton, and midshipman Alexander Campbell. In Chile, they are captured by Spanish colonists as prisoners of war. During their time as prisoners, they are regularly taken out of their small, windowless prison so that guards can charge spectators a fee to see them. Back in Chapter 11, Grann had noted that members of the nomadic Kawésqar were kidnapped and exhibited in a Parisian zoo during the 19th century. These two events starkly demonstrate Grann’s pervasive argument that the hierarchies that humans impose upon one another are absurd, artificial, and arbitrary—particularly when it comes to imperial powers and their so-called right to rule.
In March 1746, Cheap, Hamilton, and Byron arrive in England. When they begin to tell their interpretation of events, tabloid journalists called “Grub Street Hacks” capitalize on it by publishing sensationalized, conflicting reports from both sides. The Admiralty summons the survivors of the Wager to a court-martial on April 15, 1746. All of the former castaways may be eligible for execution, from John Bulkeley and his men for mutiny, to Captain Cheap for the murder of Henry Cozens. Grann highlights the danger by referencing other historical court-martials in which men were executed for lesser crimes. But this court-martial ends up being more anticlimactic. The men are tried only for the circ*mstances surrounding the wreck of the Wager rather than for mutiny or murder. Sensing they may be able to escape blame, each crew member remains carefully neutral during interrogations, and they are finally all acquitted of any significant charges. Grann attributes these mild proceedings to Great Britain’s wish to hide the truth of what happened on Wager Island for fear that it would undermine the empire’s claims to civility and moral superiority, claims through which Britain justifies its imperialism.
Great Britain’s attempt to minimize the story of the Wager is only one example among many in which narratives are intentionally altered for both political and personal reasons. In Chapter 26, Grann ties these threads together by showing how the book’s central figures and imperial powers also control which stories are never told. Midshipman Isaac Morris and free Black seaman John Duck, for example, also survive after the Speedwell leaves them stranded on the Patagonian coast. While Morris is able to publish his account of the journey of the Wager when he returns to England, Duck is captured and sold into slavery in Argentina before he can return home. The absence of Duck’s firsthand narrative points to what Grann highlights as a pattern of historical erasure of stories from oppressed people, which reinforces silence about that oppression. In the end, Grann argues that the disturbing full story of the Wager has been largely forgotten by history because it reflects poorly on the British empire. By contrast, the story of George Anson’s voyage, polished and altered to improve the British Empire’s reputation, has lived on.
