Shipwrecked

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1:03These are among, if not the worst seas in the world. They're at the very tip of the Americas and off the very end of Patagonia. And it's the only place on Earth where the seas flow uninterrupted around the globe. So over a span of 13 ,000 miles, these seas and these waves accumulate enormous power. You can have a wave that can dwarf a 90-foot mast. It is also the strongest currents on Earth, and then there are the winds, which can accelerate routinely to hurricane force and even reach as much as 200 miles per hour. This is author David Graham. He's talking about the ocean around Cape Horn, the southernmost point in South America.

1:52Herman Melville, the novelist who made it around the Horn, described it or compared it to a descent into hell in Dante's Inferno. There's an old sailor saying, Below 40 degrees latitude, there is no law. Below 50 degrees, there is no God. Cape Horn is at nearly 56 degrees latitude. Before the Panama Canal was completed, the only way to sail from the Atlantic Ocean into the Pacific was to sail around the bottom of South America. Hundreds of ships wrecked, trying it. It's said that sailors who survived going around Cape Horn wore a small gold hoop in their ear to show that they'd made it. In 1740, five British warships set off on a secret mission that would send them around Cape Horn.

2:46They were going after a Spanish ship. Twice a year, Spain sent a ship to the Philippines filled with silver to trade for silks and spices. People knew about it. It was called The Prize of All the Oceans, and the British decided to steal it. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

3:18A commodore named George Anson would lead the mission. He was told that he should create as much trouble for the Spanish as possible, quote, taking, sinking, burning, or otherwise destroying enemy ships along the way. But there's a problem. They didn't have enough sailors. So the Navy began sending out something called press gangs. And these press gangs would rove about. They would go into pubs. They would roam around towns. They would board ships coming into ports. And they would look for anybody who looked like a mariner. If you had a certain hat, and they'd say, oh, that looks like a mariner.

3:57Or if you had tar on your fingertips, which was used on ships, they'd say, oh, that must be a mariner. And they would essentially seize you and place you on a little boat, a tender, which was like a prison. You were held below. And you were brought onto the ship and sent on this voyage, this perilous voyage, which might last three years with no expectation just moments before that this was about to happen. The use of press gangs wasn't unusual at the time. There's one newspaper account of a man who was surrounded by a press gang while he was inside a church, and eventually snuck away dressed in, quote, an old Jenna woman's long cloak, hood, and bonnet.

4:36Some press gangs would even wait in boats to capture sailors returning home on merchant ships. The British Navy brought George Anson 500 men from a pensioner's home A home for elderly or injured veterans Who'd previously been considered unfit for active service Many of them couldn't board the ships by themselves And had to be carried on with stretchers There were also children working on board David Grant says it's possible some were as young as six years old Once on board, it was almost impossible to leave In those days, most seamen, the majority of seamen couldn't swim and they would anchor, part of the tactic was to anchor far enough away because when they were at shore, so many of the men ran and deserted At any opportunity, many of these people were trying to get the hell out of this expedition 250 men and boys were put on board the smallest warship the wager, about double the number it was meant to hold.

5:40By the time the expedition departed, sailors were getting sick. It was typhus, or as they called it, ship's fever. The surgeon on board the wager moved the infected men to the lower deck. This was a common practice with sailors who got sick at sea, and it's where the term under the weather comes from. Three months into the journey, the warships reached Brazil. While in Brazil, George Anson wrote to the admiralty to say 160 sailors had died since they'd left England. And when one of the ship's captains got sick and died, a man named David Cheep took over as captain on the wager. David Cheep was somebody who had always dreamed of becoming a captain.

6:29He was somebody who struggled on shore. He was kind of plagued by debts and chased by creditors. He had run off to sea many years before, and he kind of found refuge at sea. And on this expedition, through a twist of fate, he finally attains his dream of captaining his own ship and having a chance to potentially capture a lucrative prize ship. The Wager and the other ships kept heading south along the coast of South America. Once they went ashore to fix a broken mast and saw armadillos. The sailors called them hogs in armor. As they got further south, they saw penguins and sea lions. And once, a sailor on board the wager wrote that they nearly hit a whale.

7:16Sometimes it snowed. Eventually, it was time for the ships to turn west and enter the waters around Cape Horn. and it was also at that very moment where many of the men could no longer get out of their hammocks their skin is starting to change texture and color it's becoming blackened in places they're feeling aches and pains then many of them their teeth began to fall out then their hair began to fall out because they were suffering from this mysterious illness of scurvy incredibly even the the cartilage that seemed to be kind of holding together the bones seemed to be coming undone. So there was one man who had fought in a battle 50 years earlier, had broken a bone at that time.

8:01It had long since healed, and suddenly it just mysteriously fractured again in the very same spot. And some of the men lost their senses. They were described by one observer on board as going raving mad, that the disease had gotten into their brains, and they had gone raving mad. And of course, what they didn't know is that the solution was so simple. All they needed was more vitamin C. When they stopped in Brazil, there were plenty of limes. But they didn't know that eating them would help. No one knew that yet. What happens when the group enters the waters around Cape Horn? Tell me a little bit about where the wager is and what happens to the wager.

8:46So as they're coming around the Horn in just these tremendous seas, I mean, even the most experienced seamen all described it as the largest seas. They almost seemed unable to describe the seas. They almost used the same phrase just in their logbooks. They just kept describing it as these were the biggest wells we had ever seen. And the ships start to kind of, bits start to break apart. The wager loses one of its masts. And they're all striving to stay together because they know if they separate, There will be nobody there to rescue them if something were to happen to their ship. And so they are frantically firing their guns to signal their location.

9:26And yet around Cape Horn, all the ships eventually scatter in the storm. And the wager suddenly finds itself all alone and by itself. And there's no break. It's not like the winds and the seas die down so everyone can get a good eight hours of sleep. It's constant. It's constant. It is – you know, they in their own logs would describe it as – one described it as the perfect hurricane. But it really was a series of unending typhoons that just kept battering them with unrelenting waves and unrelenting winds. And another critical part that is happening to them is they have to – so imagine this. They're coming around Cape Horn.

10:09They're battling these unfoundly large waves, waves that are dwarfing their mass. They're top men who are kind of hanging off the mass at the very top. The ships are rocking so far, sometimes they touch the water. They touch the water. And yet they are also sailing on the wager and on the other ships partially blind because they do not know their longitude. because navigation at this point is pretty rudimentary it's very rudimentary they could determine their latitude by reading the stars that was pretty easy people had done it all the way back from Magellan and Columbus but your longitude to measure that you really needed a very reliable clock and such a clock did not yet exist and so they were forced to do what was called dead reckoning which essentially amounted to informed guesswork and a leap of faith And so as the wager, Captain Cheap decides he's going to, once he's all alone, he's going to try to get to a point off the coast of Chile that Anson had told them they should rendezvous if they were ever separated.

11:16So he's determined to do that. He manages to guide them around the horn. But it turns out that their longitude is not only wrong, it's wrong by hundreds of miles. They thought they'd gone far enough west to clear the Chilean coast. but they miscalculated and were too close to shore. And suddenly, one of the junior officers, petty officer who has climbed the mast to fix one of the sails, looks out and he sees they are barreling toward land. We'll be right back.

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14:33So what do you do if you've got a gigantic ship barreling towards? I mean, it's not like you can put the motor in reverse. No. And not only that, this isn't like modern sailboats. These sailboats to turn around took, you know, it could take as long as an hour. I mean to try to get one of these ships to turn around because you have to rework the sails, have men climb the mast. And so they, in a great panic, they do manage to come around. They narrowly miss the land, but they are still pinned against the shore and the wind is blowing them toward the shore. And so they are still in a completely perilous situation.

15:16They're desperately trying to get away from the rocks and the coast. And it's just about then where they feel the ship suddenly jolt and shudder. And they have hit a submerged rock. They are caught in a gulf, which is known as the Gulf, El Golfo de Penas, which translates as the Gulf of Sorrows, or as some prefer to call it, the Gulf of Pain. And so when they hit that rock, initially the rudder shatters, and about a two-ton anchor falls and ends up plunging through the floor of the ship, leaving a gaping hole. And then another wave comes, and it kind of propels the wager, careening through the Gulf of Pain, through a mine full of rocks, until at last it hits another bunch of rocks, and at that point begins to completely rip apart.

16:09when the masts come down, the decks cave in, the planks shatter. But the ship managed to kind of wedge itself between two pillars of rocks. And so it did not yet immediately sink. And so some of the men, they climb up onto the ruins of their ship, what had been their home, the place they knew, their security, their fortress. They climb up to the top of these ruins and they peer out in the mist and there they see a desolate island. Sailors began evacuating in the few small boats that the wager had on board. At first, some of them refused to leave and broke into the wager's liquor supplies. I mean, I think you saw all sorts of reactions, as one does in extreme circumstances.

16:56You saw some behave very heroically and helping to get people off the ship, but you saw others behave selfishly, and you saw some kind of just, you know, almost lose it after all the suffering and just begin to drink and break into the officer's chest and put on their clothing. But that's how some of them conduct themselves until they are eventually retrieved from the ship. What is the island like that they've landed on? Yeah, so the island, which is off the Chilean coast of Patagonia, you know, they hoped it might be their salvation. But when they get there, it turns out to be freezing cold. It turns out to be constantly raining or sleeting.

17:43They have no shelter. And worst of all, they can find no food whatsoever. And so, well, they find a little bit. They find some muscles, which they soon exhaust. But there's virtually no food. And one British officer later compared the island to a place in which the soul of the man dies in him. Captain Cheap believes that he was the commander of the ship he should remain commander on the island and he believes they should be governed by the same rules and that their only way of surviving was to work in this kind of cohesive, almost machine-like quality with him guiding the way but there is some discontent the fact that they had shipwrecked there's grumblings about Captain Cheap who could be very temperamental.

18:33And at the same time, Cheap decides that they must try to salvage some food from the ship. They begin taking these small rowboats out to the ship, which is, you know, three-quarters underwater. Waves are smashing against it. And they are trying to see if they can get supplies, almost, you know, an excavation so that they can try to survive. They were able to recover some flour, meat, peas and oatmeal, and casks of liquor. And Captain Cheap made a plan to ration everything out. There were about 150 men left. They started calling the place they had landed, Wager Island. And initially, they tried to try to see if they can build an outpost and survive on this desolate, barren, windswept, cold, hopeless place.

19:28So they'll set up the society just as they had on the wager. Captain Cheap will be in charge. There'll be law. There'll be order. We'll monitor the provisions. And this is the way we'll keep ourselves sane and alive. Exactly. Exactly. That is his vision. And that's what he believes. And initially, despite some grumbling from some of the men, for the most part, they do do that. and they begin to try to build almost like a little village. They build various huts and little thatch dwellings, and they begin to try to extract food and to parcel it out. But gradually, as they run lower on food, order begins to break down, and the first fracture comes from a kind of group that is a smaller group, maybe about a dozen or so, who the others describe as the seceders.

20:24They break apart from the camp. They set up their camp elsewhere on the island, but they're kind of roaming wild on the island. They're like these marauders, these thieves, and the rest of the camp is afraid of them, afraid they may come and attack and pillage. And the leader or one of the main figures within those marauders is believed to have already or early on killed at least one man for his supplies, his rations. One day, some of the sailors spotted men in canoes. It was a group of indigenous people called the Cuescar, who lived as nomads, traveling up and down the Chilean coast. For a while, they helped the men from the wager.

21:06They brought them fish, mussels, and even sheep. But according to David Gran, some of the sailors began mistreating the Cuescar and made a plan to steal some of their canoes. So the quest car left. The food stores are running low on the island, and Captain Cheap made the decision to cut back on rations. And you start to see as some of them, in their desperation, they begin to break into the store tent to steal food, which is, one must understand, when you're stealing food, when you have no food and that's your last bit of sustenance, It is equivalent or close to the equivalence of taking a gun and shooting you because you're taking away your only means of staying alive.

21:53And so they decide they need to kind of create order, and Cheap is determined to create order. And so he creates a system of punishment. They hold trials. They hold a court martial. The denouement of these trials is not in doubt. They happen fairly hastily. and then these men are whipped, and they are whipped severely. They are lashed, in some cases, 600 times, an amount that if it was done consecutively, they would have killed them, so they have to break it out over a few days. And then after that, Cheap decides with some of his other followers that they shall then banish these condemned, these thieves, to a little islet that's kind of off the island.

22:40They would row them out there and leave them to themselves. David Graham says that Captain Cheep was starting to feel like he was losing control over the men on the island. He began having problems with a sailor named Henry Cousins. He seemed to be constantly drunk, and once ignored a simple order from Captain Cheep to roll a cask of peas into the tent where they kept their food. And then there comes a point where Cheep hears a fight outside his hut. And he hears somebody cry, you know, kind of accuse Cousins of mutiny, even though he wasn't committing mutiny. Cheep bursts out of his hut. He's holding a pistol in his hand.

23:28He approaches Cousins, who he calls that villain. He takes his pistol, and without asking any questions, he proceeds to what he calls extremities, which the other men in their own accounts say cheap shot the man right in the head and killed him, or eventually killed him. He didn't die instantly. And what was the reaction within the group to this? That was really, in some ways, the beginning of the end of his authority, because even though at that moment of horror, he comes out and he says, I am still your commander, and there's a moment of tension, they eventually retreat. But at that point on, more and more of the men turn on Captain Cheap.

24:11And so rather than in this kind of mad, violent act of desperation to kind of maintain authority, it does the exact opposite and it diminishes authority, creates greater levels of discontent. Many of the sailors had begun to gravitate towards a man named John Bolkley, who'd been in charge of the weapons on the wager. Some of the men helped John Bolkley build a thatched hut, a hut that was bigger than Captain Cheap's. John Bolkley wrote in his journals that sometimes he disagreed with how Captain Cheap was running things. Soon the wager's carpenter, a close friend of John Bolkley's, came up with an idea to get off the island.

24:55They would build a boat. so the castaways together the two main factions one led by cheap and a few of his followers and the one led by bulkley which has now the majority of the followers for a brief moment they unite around a scheme to try to build a castaway boat to get off the island and so they begin to collect bits of wood they take a kind of shattered transport boat which they got off the wreck, and they begin to try to expand it and build it into this, into a castaway boat, their art. But even while they're building this, tensions and the war between the factions breaks out anew. And partly it breaks out because how they want to use this castaway boat, if they complete it, are very different.

25:43John Bolkley wanted to sail through the sometimes very narrow Strait of Magellan to get back to the Atlantic Ocean without going around Cape Horn. He thought that they might be able to navigate the strait, since they would not be in a large ship. John Bolkley wrote in his journals that people might think it was a mad undertaking. The strait was known for its unpredictable storms and maze-like channels, and they had no good maps. But he believed that if they could get to the Atlantic Ocean, they could find safety in Brazil. And the main point of his plan is, we're done with this expedition. We want to get the hell out of here.

26:24We want to get home. But Captain Cheap wanted to continue. Cheap's idea is to take this arc, this castaway boat, when it's completed and sailed north, and try to see if they can then capture a Spanish ship, despite their weakened condition, and eventually continue with the expedition. One day, John Bolkley brought a petition to Captain Cheap that had been signed by the majority of the crew. John Bolkley read it aloud. We think it the best, surest and most safe way to proceed through the Strait of Magellan for England, dated at a desolate island on the coast of Patagonia. Captain Cheap didn't agree.

27:09Two days later, he told them the petition had given him, quote, a great deal of uneasiness. He said he hadn't been sleeping. Nearly three weeks passed. And then John Bolkley had a secret meeting with a small group of men he trusted. And Bolkley and his men began to discuss that forbidden subject of mutiny.

27:37We'll be right back.

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28:52Early one morning, a few days after the sailors completed construction on their boat, named the Speedwell, John Bolkley and a group of men surprised Captain Cheap in his hut and tied his hands behind his back. They said they were arresting him for shooting Henry Cousins. They forced Captain Cheap into a tent that served as a makeshift prison. Five days later, John Bolkley and about 80 men left Captain Cheap on Wager Island, along with his two remaining supporters, and headed for Brazil. You have to imagine, these are men who have battled typhoons, tidal waves, scurvy, shipwreck. They are then on an island for months, starving.

29:43Many of them died of starvation in the party that was on the island. They have watched their men die left and right. And now they have to get on this little boat, packed so tightly that they can barely move. They don't have provisions. They have a little bit of flour. And somehow, you know, they have to navigate, try to navigate this journey led by, for the most part, led by Bulkley. The trip took three and a half months, and most of the men died. You know, by the time they're starting to drift toward the coastline in Brazil, they're delirious. There's only, you know, by that time their numbers have dwindled to about 30.