When the HMS Wager wrecked in 1741, the crew descended into a brutal mutiny.
In short: After the British warship HMS Wager shattered against the rocks of a desolate Chilean island, the surviving crew fractured into warring factions. Facing starvation and a desperate captain, the men turned on one another, leading to a harrowing saga of abandonment, survival, and a race back to England.
The HMS Wager, a 28-gun sixth-rate warship, was originally built as an East Indiaman in 1734 before the Royal Navy purchased her in 1739. In 1740, she joined Commodore George Anson’s squadron, tasked with attacking Spanish interests in the Pacific. The mission was plagued by misfortune; the squadron was overcrowded with invalids from Chelsea Hospital, and scurvy devastated the crew. When the Wager was separated from the fleet during a storm while rounding Cape Horn, her captain, David Cheap, found himself commanding a ship in poor condition with a crew increasingly hostile to his leadership.
Tensions reached a breaking point after the Wager wrecked on an uninhabited island in May 1741. Cheap, fearing a court-martial for the loss of his ship, insisted on attempting to rejoin Anson’s squadron to fulfill his secret orders. However, the crew, led by gunner John Bulkeley, favored a desperate escape attempt via the Strait of Magellan. The situation turned violent when Cheap shot and killed a midshipman, Henry Cozens, in a rage. In October 1741, the crew arrested Cheap, effectively mutinying, and departed on a modified schooner, the Speedwell, leaving the captain and a few loyalists behind to perish.
The journey for both groups was a struggle for survival. Bulkeley’s party endured months of starvation and exposure in an open boat, eventually reaching Rio de Janeiro in January 1742 with only a fraction of the men who had set sail. Meanwhile, Cheap and his remaining group were forced to return to the island after failing to navigate the coast. They were eventually rescued by indigenous Chonos, who guided them to the Spanish-inhabited Chiloé Archipelago. Remarkably, both Cheap and the surviving mutineers eventually returned to England, where their conflicting accounts of the disaster became a public sensation.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Wager Mutiny
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