![]() ![]() Social hierarchies didn't stop at water's edge, but rather applied to the "wooden world" as the ships tacked across the Atlantic.Īnson's armada floundered while rounding Cape Horn, battered by punishing gales and towering waves. (Grann draws heavily from their journals.) Among the hundreds of men onboard were John Bulkeley, a robust, charismatic gunner and teenaged John Byron, an aristocratic midshipman and grandfather of the future poet. A lesser vessel, the Wager was captained by the egomaniacal David Cheap, Anson's protégé, determined to prove his mettle. ![]() This is the stuff that sea shanties and sailor yarns are made of.Īs the two countries mustered arms, the Crown dispatched Commodore George Anson and a small armada on a side mission: to vanquish a Spanish galleon laden with treasure. ![]() In his enthralling, seamlessly crafted "The Wager," David Grann re-creates an all-but-forgotten episode from that conflict: the calamitous voyage and shipwreck of HMS Wager off the coast of Chile, and the survivors' fraught treks home. The War of Jenkin's Ear (1739-1748) has long slipped beyond the horizon of popular imagination and into the study carrels of aspiring historians, but at the time it was a flex for the Spanish and British empires as they expanded influence and filled coffers. ![]()
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