I just finished a great history about an 18th century event which reverberated throughout Western culture in ways I wasn’t aware of. It’s The Wager, by David Grahm, author of Killers of the Flower Moon. The story revolves around a British warship that was part of a small expedition to seize a Spanish silver galleon, but which ran aground during its passage of Cape Horn, stranding the remaining crew. The horrors of what they went through on the voyage, and their efforts to return home, were astounding.
Graham is a powerful writer, and the book is real page turner. Beyond the story itself I loved the connections he draws. For example, the term “under the weather”, used to describe someone as being ill, derives from the naval habit of sequestering ill seamen in holds under the deck of the ship, out of the belief it was exposure to the elements1 that had triggered their illness. Hence when you were sick you were “under the weather”.
Graham fills the book with fascinating historical connections, too. For example, he links a major French mutiny in World War I (which I’d never heard of, despite having read a fair bit about World War I) to the mutiny at the heart of the Wager’s tale which could’ve resulted in a number of people being sentenced to death when they were court-martialed in England:
A mutiny, especially in times of war, can be so threatening to the established order that it is not even officially recognized as one. During the First World War, French troops in various units on the western front refused to fight, in one of the largest mutinies in history. But the government’s official account described the incident merely as “Disturbances and the Rectification of Morale.” The military records were sealed for fifty years, and it wasn’t until 1967 that an authoritative account was published in France.
The official inquiry into the Wager affair was permanents closed. [Captain] Cheap’s deposition detailing his allegations eventually disappeared from the court-martial files. And the upheaval on Wager Island became, in the words of Glyndwr Williams, “the mutiny that never was.”
Well worth checking out!
which, as you might imagine, could be pretty damn awful, particularly around places like Cape Horn ↩
