4:30 AM, 14 May 1741 — The End of HMS Wager
The first impact tore the tiller clean off. The ship lurched sideways, her hull grinding across submerged rock, and the sound — a deep, splintering crack that carried through the timber like a scream — told every man aboard that the Wager was finished. Freezing seawater surged through the lower decks. Below, in the darkness of the gun deck, dozens of men too ravaged by scurvy to stand lay strapped in their hammocks. They could hear the ocean coming. They could not move. Many of them drowned where they hung.
Above, what remained of the crew scrambled in the half-light of a Patagonian dawn. Their captain, David Cheap, was already below with a dislocated shoulder, drugged by the ship's surgeon, giving orders that no one could hear and fewer obeyed. The ship's gunner, John Bulkeley, fought to steer with sail alone — the tiller was gone, the rudder useless — and drove the Wager toward the only visible land: a dark, rain-lashed island with no name, no inhabitants, and no reason for any European to know it existed. Of the roughly 250 men who had been aboard, about 140 made it to shore in the ship's boats. They stood on black rock in freezing rain, watched the hull of their warship break apart in the surf, and faced a question that none of them were equipped to answer: what happens to the rules when the thing that enforced them is sinking?
The War Nobody Remembers and the Squadron That Should Never Have Sailed
An Ear, a Jar, and the Pretext for an Empire's War
In 1731, Spanish coast guards boarded the British merchant brig Rebecca in the Caribbean and, during the ensuing confrontation, sliced off the left ear of her captain, Robert Jenkins. Jenkins preserved the ear in a jar. Seven years later, he presented it to Parliament. The gesture was theatrical, but the outrage was strategic. Britain had been looking for a pretext to crack open Spain's monopoly on South American trade — silver from Peru, sugar and tobacco from the Caribbean, the entire extractive machinery of a continent. Jenkins's severed ear gave them one. In 1739, Britain declared what would become known as the War of Jenkins' Ear, one of the most absurdly named and genuinely consequential conflicts of the eighteenth century.
The early results were encouraging. Admiral Edward Vernon captured the Spanish port of Portobelo in November 1739 with just six ships. Emboldened, the Admiralty drew up a far more ambitious plan: a secret squadron under Commodore George Anson would round Cape Horn, attack Spanish possessions along the Pacific coast of South America, capture the port of Callao, seize Panama, and — if possible — intercept the legendary Manila galleon, a treasure ship that carried Spain's annual plunder between Acapulco and the Philippines. The orders were breathtaking in scope. They were also, as events would prove, breathtaking in their detachment from reality.
Anson's Doomed Armada: Chelsea Pensioners and Rotting Ships
Anson's squadron consisted of six warships — his flagship Centurion, plus the Gloucester, Severn, Pearl, Wager, and the sloop Tryal — along with two store ships, the Anna and Industry. On paper, it was a formidable force. In practice, it was a disaster before it left port. The ships needed extensive refitting. Able-bodied sailors were already consumed by the wider war effort, and press gangs could not fill the gaps. Anson was supposed to carry 500 marines as a landing force; none were available. The Admiralty's solution was one of the more grotesque improvisations in British naval history: it emptied Chelsea Hospital, a home for aged and disabled war veterans, and loaded the pensioners onto Anson's ships. These were men who had fought under the Duke of Marlborough decades earlier — experienced soldiers, certainly, but many of them elderly, crippled, or mentally unsound. They were in no condition for an ocean crossing, let alone a combat expedition to the far side of the world.
The Wager herself was not built for war. She was an East Indiaman — a merchant vessel designed to haul cargo from Madras, not to fight in the Southern Ocean. The Navy had purchased her in 1739 and bolted on 28 guns, but she remained, at her core, a trading ship with a trading ship's limitations. Her captain, David Cheap, was a competent but rigid officer, deeply conscious of rank and protocol. Her gunner, John Bulkeley, was a veteran seaman — practical, persuasive, and instinctively political. These two men would come to embody the two competing philosophies of authority that the wreck would expose: Cheap believed in command by appointment; Bulkeley believed in command by competence. They had not yet met the circumstances that would force them to choose.
The squadron finally departed Portsmouth on 18 September 1740, months behind schedule. The late departure meant they would reach Cape Horn in the worst possible season — autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, when the Drake Passage becomes one of the most violent stretches of ocean on Earth.
Cape Horn and the Killing Season
Scurvy, Storm, and the Drake Passage
The squadron reached the Strait of Le Maire — the gateway to the passage around Cape Horn — on 7 March 1741, in weather that briefly seemed fair. It did not last. Within days, the storms arrived. Gale-force winds from the south slammed into the ships, pushing them backward, sideways, anywhere but west. The seas were mountainous. One swell — the largest Bulkeley had ever witnessed — swept entirely over the Wager and briefly submerged the ship, washing the gunner across the quarterdeck. Below decks, the conditions were medieval. Men weakened by months at sea now faced scurvy — the disease that would kill more of Anson's men than any storm or Spanish cannon.
The Navy had issued the crews several popular remedies of the day: vinegar, a sulfuric acid mixture called "elixir of vitriol," and a patent laxative called Ward's Drop and Pill. None of them worked. Scurvy is a deficiency of vitamin C, a fact that would not be definitively established for another decade, and the treatments were useless. Men developed discolored blotches across their bodies. Their gums rotted. Their legs swelled. Old wounds reopened as if freshly inflicted. The slightest exertion — even being moved in a hammock — could kill a man whose connective tissue had begun to dissolve. On the Centurion alone, 43 men died in April. That number doubled in May. By the time Anson regrouped in the Pacific, roughly two-thirds of his original 1,900 men were dead, the vast majority from disease. It remains one of the worst medical disasters in the history of seafaring.
The squadron scattered. The Severn and Pearl turned back for the Atlantic. The Wager, separated from the other ships in the chaos, was alone.
Into the Gulf of Penas: The Missed Sighting That Doomed a Ship
Cheap had secret orders — orders even his own officers did not know about. The squadron's secondary rendezvous was not, as Bulkeley believed, the island of Juan Fernández, the real-life Robinson Crusoe Island off the Chilean coast. It was the Spanish-held port of Valdivia, far to the north. Cheap was carrying siege guns in the Wager's hold, needed for an assault on the port, and he was determined to fulfill his mission. He turned north too soon, before clearing the coast, and the Wager drifted into uncharted waters.
At 9:00 am on 13 May 1741, the ship's carpenter, John Cummins, went forward to inspect the chain plates. He caught a fleeting glimpse of land to the west. He told Lieutenant Robert Baynes, the first lieutenant, who was standing nearby. Baynes saw nothing and did not report the sighting. It was the single most consequential failure of the entire voyage. The Wager had entered the Gulf of Penas, a vast, uncharted bay, and no one aboard knew it.
By 2:00 pm, land was unmistakable — dead ahead, to the west and northwest. Cheap called all hands to turn the ship. In the scramble, he fell down the quarterdeck ladder and dislocated his shoulder. He was carried below, incapacitated, while his officers tried to claw the damaged ship free of the bay. At 4:30 am on 14 May, the Wager struck rocks. The impact smashed her tiller. She struck again and ran hard aground. Below decks, invalids too sick to climb from their hammocks drowned as water flooded in.
The HMS Wager had found her grave — an uninhabited island in the Guayaneco Archipelago, at the bottom of the world, in the dead of a Patagonian winter.
The Island at the End of the World
Drunken Sailors and Drowning Men
The men who made it ashore were the disciplined ones. A large party of their crewmates never tried. As the ship broke apart on the rocks, they broke into the spirit room. They drank. They looted the officers' quarters, dressed themselves in stolen finery, and fought each other on the tilting decks of a dying ship. Some fired pistols. Others simply sat in the rising water, too drunk to move. The next morning, 15 May, the hull split open amidships. The men still aboard drowned where they lay.
On the beach, the legal architecture of the Royal Navy was collapsing as fast as the ship. In 1741, an officer's commission was valid only for the vessel to which he had been appointed. The loss of the ship implied, in the eyes of many sailors, the loss of all official authority — and, critically, the end of their pay. The men who stood shivering on that shore were, by their own reckoning, no longer sailors at all. They were castaways. And a castaway owes obedience to no one.
Mount Misery: Starvation on a Patagonian Shore
The island was a nightmare of dense forest, steep ravines, and relentless rain. The survivors named the headland above their camp Mount Misery — a promontory so steep they had to cut steps into the rock face to climb it. The Wager had been the squadron's store ship, so the men were able to salvage some provisions, but Cheap kept the food in a guarded tent, rationing it strictly. The rations were not enough. The men ate seaweed, shellfish, whatever the shoreline yielded. Some killed the ship's dog. Wild celery grew on the island — one of the few sources of vitamin C that might have eased the scurvy — but most men did not recognize it as food.
The cold was constant. The rain was horizontal. Men died of exposure in the open, unable to build adequate shelters from the sodden timber they dragged off the wreck. Others drowned attempting to fish from the rocks. Violence became routine. Theft of food — any food — could mean a death sentence. Some men, driven beyond the limits of hunger, resorted to cannibalism, eating the bodies of those who had already died. By the end of June, the number of survivors had dropped sharply. The island was killing them faster than the sea had.
The Captain, the Gunner, and the Death of Authority
A Bullet in the Face of a Midshipman
The breaking point came with a gunshot. Henry Cozens was a midshipman — young, drunk, and openly contemptuous of Cheap's authority. He had clashed with the captain before. One night, an altercation erupted outside Cheap's tent. Cozens was involved. Cheap stormed out in a fury and shot the unarmed midshipman in the face at point-blank range, without warning, without any kind of proceeding.
Cozens did not die immediately. The bullet lodged in his cheek. He was carried to the sick tent, where he lay for days in agony. The ship's surgeon failed to appear for the surgery to remove the bullet — a failure widely blamed on Cheap himself, who was accused of denying Cozens medical care. The midshipman suffered for over a week before he finally died. The killing was not an act of battlefield justice. It was an act of rage by a captain who felt his authority slipping and responded with lethal violence against an unarmed subordinate.
The effect on the survivors was immediate and irreversible. Whatever residual loyalty the men felt toward Cheap evaporated. The shooting of Cozens became the fulcrum on which everything that followed turned.
Life and Liberty vs. Duty and Honor
Bulkeley was not a reckless man. He was methodical, persuasive, and — crucially — literate. He kept a detailed journal of every event on the island, every decision, every confrontation. He knew that if they ever returned to England, the Admiralty would want an accounting, and he intended to have his version written down in ink before anyone else could speak. His rhetoric was populist and deliberate. He rallied the men with phrases about "life and liberty." Cheap countered with appeals to "duty and honor" and the sacred obligation to rejoin Anson's squadron. The two men were not just arguing about which direction to sail. They were arguing about whether authority is something you are given or something you earn.
Bulkeley proposed a plan. The ship's carpenter, Cummins, would lengthen the Wager's longboat and convert it into a schooner capable of carrying dozens of men. They would sail south through the Strait of Magellan and make for Brazil. Cheap refused. His orders were to go north, to Valdivia, to rejoin the commodore. The orders were secret — Bulkeley and the crew did not know about them — and Cheap would not explain. To the men, his insistence on heading north looked like either madness or suicide.
On 9 October 1741, armed seamen entered Cheap's hut, bound him, and declared him their prisoner. He was charged with the murder of Henry Cozens. Lieutenant Baynes, the weak and incompetent first lieutenant who had failed to report the carpenter's sighting of land, sided with the mutineers — a betrayal that prompted Cheap to snarl at him from his bonds: "Well, 'Captain' Baynes! You will doubtless be called to account for this hereafter."
The mutiny was complete. Cheap was finished. Or so everyone believed.
Two Voyages from the Same Wreck
The Speedwell and the 2,500-Mile Gamble Through the Strait of Magellan
On 13 October 1741, the lengthened longboat — now christened the Speedwell — sailed from Wager Island with 81 men aboard, accompanied by a cutter and a barge. Cheap refused to board. He agreed to be left behind with two marines who had been shunned by the group for stealing food. Everyone expected him to die on the island, which would make the mutineers' story much simpler to tell when they reached England.
The voyage south was a horror in its own right. The Strait of Magellan is one of the most treacherous waterways on Earth — narrow, storm-lashed, flanked by rock. Food ran out. The weather was freezing. Men died of starvation and exposure. Others were abandoned on shore when they became too weak to continue. The cutter was lost. Factions formed within the mutineer group itself. In Brazil, the boatswain, John King, joined a local gang and terrorized his former crewmates. When the Speedwell finally washed up on the coast of Brazil on 28 January 1742, only 30 of the 81 men who had left Wager Island were still alive. One more died shortly after landing.
Bulkeley and Cummins eventually secured passage back to England aboard HMS Stirling Castle, arriving on 1 January 1743. They walked into an Admiralty that had no idea what had happened to the Wager. Lieutenant Baynes had beaten them there and given a self-serving account that made the other officers look criminal while exonerating himself. Bulkeley was briefly detained, then released when the Admiralty decided to wait for either Anson or Cheap to return before holding a trial. Bulkeley, with characteristic nerve, asked the Admiralty for permission to publish his journal. They told him it was his business.
Byron's Choice: The Midshipman Who Went Back
Two days after the Speedwell departed, the wind tore her sails apart. Bulkeley sent the barge back to the island to retrieve spares. John Byron — a young midshipman who had been told that Cheap would be brought along on the schooner, and who discovered only after sailing that the captain had been abandoned — quietly climbed aboard the barge and returned to the island. He chose the disgraced captain over the mutineers. It was the decision that would define his life.
Byron was nineteen years old. He would later become an admiral, a circumnavigator in his own right, and the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. The account he eventually published of his ordeal on Wager Island and the journey north would become one of the defining narratives of eighteenth-century survival literature. The story of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island is more famous, but the Wager's competing survivor accounts predate it by half a century and ask a harder question: what happens when both sides have a legitimate case?
The Chono Guide and the Long Walk North
Cheap's party now numbered around 20. Their plan was to head north by boat, hugging the coast, until they reached Spanish-controlled territory. The journey was a slow-motion catastrophe. Men starved. Men drowned. The weather was relentless. By the time the group encountered a band of indigenous Chono people, their numbers had dwindled drastically.
The Chono chief, Martín Olleta, agreed to guide the survivors north in exchange for the longboat and some guns. He led them on a route through the interior of the Taitao Peninsula — through what is now Presidente Ríos Lake — bypassing the lethal Tres Montes Peninsula entirely. It was a route no European could have navigated alone. Olleta's knowledge of the waterways, the tides, and the terrain was the only reason any of them survived at all.
Three men reached Chiloé Island in June 1742: Cheap, Byron, and midshipman Alexander Campbell. A fourth, Marine Lieutenant Thomas Hamilton, was rescued by a Spanish search party three months later. Of the 20 who had stayed with Cheap on Wager Island, these four were all that remained. They were taken to Santiago as prisoners, treated with surprising generosity by the Spanish, and eventually returned to England via a French ship and a circuitous route through the Caribbean. Cheap, Byron, and Hamilton landed at Dover on 9 April 1745 — more than two years after the mutineers had already arrived.
The Trial That Tried Nothing
Two Truths, One Empire
Cheap walked into an England that had already heard Bulkeley's version of events. The gunner's published journal had been a bestseller — a gripping tale of survival, seamanship, and justified rebellion against a murderous captain. Byron and Campbell would later publish their own accounts, offering a third perspective sympathetic to Cheap. The British public devoured all of it. The Wager disaster became an eighteenth-century media sensation, generating more published survivor narratives than almost any other maritime disaster of its era.
The Admiralty was trapped. Cheap wanted to charge Bulkeley and the other mutineers. Bulkeley wanted to charge Cheap with the murder of Henry Cozens. If the Admiralty opened the door to either charge, the other would follow, and the resulting trial would expose the Navy's catastrophic planning, its use of invalids as crew, and its failure to provide adequate ships or supplies. Someone advised Cheap — the record does not say who — that pressing mutiny charges would inevitably lead to his own prosecution for murder. Cheap went silent.
The court martial convened in 1746. The proceedings were astonishing in their narrowness. The Admiralty examined only one question: what caused the shipwreck? Not the mutiny. Not the murder. Not the cannibalism, the abandonment, or the months of suffering. The events on the island were placed entirely outside the scope of the inquiry. Lieutenant Baynes was admonished for failing to report the carpenter's sighting of land. Everyone else was acquitted. The mutineers argued that their pay had stopped the day the ship was lost, and that they were therefore no longer subject to naval law — an argument the Admiralty chose not to contest. As one historian later noted, a conviction for mutiny would have been deeply unpopular with the British public, which had already decided the men were heroes.
Cheap was promoted. Bulkeley went on to command a forty-gun privateer. Byron became an admiral. Nobody was punished for anything that happened on Wager Island.
The Laws That Changed Because of One Island
The Admiralty's embarrassment did not end with the acquittals. The legal loophole that had enabled the mutiny — the argument that a captain's authority died with his ship — was a gaping hole in the foundation of naval discipline. In 1751, George Anson himself, now First Lord of the Admiralty, closed it. New provisions in the Articles of War established that the authority of a captain and officers survived the loss of a vessel, and that castaways would continue to receive their pay for as long as they remained under naval jurisdiction. The provisions were read aloud to every crew in the Royal Navy, every single day.
The wreck of the Wager also contributed to the formal establishment of the Royal Marines as a permanent, shipboard force — a body of men whose loyalty to the Crown would be independent of the ship they served on, providing a counterbalance to potential mutinies by ordinary seamen. The island at the bottom of the world had, in its own accidental way, reshaped the operating system of the most powerful navy on Earth. The RMS Titanic is remembered as the shipwreck that changed maritime safety law. The Wager is the shipwreck that changed the law of command itself.
The Island That Time Pushed Higher
Tectonic Ghosts: How Earthquakes Remade the Crime Scene
Wager Island sits near the Chile Triple Junction, where three tectonic plates — the Nazca, Antarctic, and South American — collide. The Liquiñe-Ofqui Fault system runs directly past the island's southern coast. Since 1741, at least 94 recorded earthquakes have struck the region, including the Great Chilean Earthquake of 1960 — the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, at magnitude 9.5. The cumulative effect has been extraordinary: the island has been pushed approximately 7 meters higher out of the sea since the Wager struck its rocks.
The geography that Cheap, Byron, and Bulkeley knew no longer exists. The inlet where the survivors made their camp — described in their accounts as a bay connected to the sea, flanked by a steep headland — is now an inland lake, sealed off from the ocean by centuries of tectonic uplift. What was once a shoreline camp is now landlocked. The wreck site itself has shifted. The coastline has changed shape. Searching for the Wager's remains means searching for a ship in a landscape that has rearranged itself around the evidence.
The 2006 Expedition and the Search for the Wreck
In 2006, the Scientific Exploration Society, led by Colonel John Blashford-Snell, mounted a 30-day expedition to Wager Island. The team sailed from Caleta Tortel aboard a chartered Chilean vessel, established a base on the island, and conducted the first systematic archaeological survey of the wreck site and the survivors' camp. They found fragments of the ship's wooden hull bearing burn marks — damage consistent with the documented Spanish salvage expeditions of the late eighteenth century, in which salvors hacked sections from the wreck, dragged them to the nearest beach, and burned the timber to extract valuable metal fittings.
The expedition confirmed that the likely location of the survivors' camp was near the now-landlocked lake at the island's northwest corner — exactly where the tectonic evidence suggested. A Jesuit priest named Pedro Flores had conducted the first known salvage operation on the wreck in late 1742, recovering nearly 100 kilograms of iron. Subsequent Spanish and indigenous expeditions continued into the 1760s. The main body of the wreck — the section where the Wager actually came to grief — may still lie undiscovered offshore, preserved in the cold, deep waters of the Guayaneco Archipelago. Chilean marine archaeologists continue to study the site.
Reaching Wager Island: The Atlas Entry
Patagonia's Most Remote Shipwreck Site
Wager Island is not a place you visit casually. The nearest settlement is Caleta Tortel, a village of wooden boardwalks built on stilts over the water, located 107 kilometers to the east. The next closest is Villa Puerto Edén, 165 kilometers to the south — one of the most remote communities in all of Chile. There is no regular transport to the island. Reaching it requires a chartered vessel, expedition-level planning, and a tolerance for some of the roughest weather in the Southern Hemisphere. The Guayaneco Archipelago receives heavy rainfall year-round, and the seas around Wager Island are as unpredictable now as they were in 1741.
The island itself is thickly forested with Magellanic subpolar vegetation, cut by steep ravines and headlands. Monte Wager, the highest point, rises to 586 meters. Monte Anson — named for the commodore who never knew what became of his store ship — stands at 377 meters. The adjacent island to the west is named Byron Island, after the midshipman who chose to go back. There are no structures, no markers, no memorials. The island does not advertise its history. Visitors who make the journey will find what Byron found: dense forest, vertical rock, and rain.
The Weight of Standing Where Authority Died
Most shipwreck sites carry a particular kind of weight — the knowledge that the sea took something human technology was supposed to protect. Wager Island carries something different. The sea did its damage on the first night. Everything that followed — the murder, the mutiny, the cannibalism, the two rival voyages, the trial that refused to judge — was entirely human. The Wager's crew were not destroyed by nature. They were destroyed by the gap between the world they were trained to obey and the world they actually found themselves in.
Standing on Wager Island — if you ever reach it — means standing at the exact point where the British Empire's most fundamental assumption about order was tested and found to be fiction. Rank did not save David Cheap. Eloquence did not save John Bulkeley. The only thing that saved anyone was the knowledge of a Chono chief named Martín Olleta, who knew the waterways that no European chart had ever recorded, and who guided three broken men to safety for the price of a longboat and a few guns. The empire called it a mutiny. The men called it survival. The Admiralty called it nothing at all. The island, indifferent to all of them, simply kept rising out of the sea.
FAQ Section
Where is Wager Island and how do you get there?
Wager Island is located in the Guayaneco Archipelago off the coast of Chilean Patagonia, at approximately 47°40′S, 75°02′W. The nearest settlement is the village of Caleta Tortel, about 107 kilometers to the east. There is no regular transport, no ferry service, and no airstrip on the island. Reaching it requires chartering a vessel from Caleta Tortel or a similar port, expedition-level planning, and preparedness for extremely harsh weather — heavy rainfall, strong winds, and rough seas are the norm year-round. The island has no infrastructure, no marked trails, and no facilities of any kind.
What caused the HMS Wager to wreck?
The Wager was part of Commodore George Anson's squadron, which left England in September 1740 to attack Spanish interests in the Pacific during the War of Jenkins' Ear. The squadron arrived at Cape Horn months behind schedule, hitting the worst of the autumn storms. Scurvy and storms devastated the crew. The Wager became separated from the squadron and drifted into the Gulf of Penas, an uncharted bay on the Chilean coast, after the ship's carpenter spotted land that the first lieutenant failed to report. Captain David Cheap fell and dislocated his shoulder during the emergency. At 4:30 AM on 14 May 1741, the crippled ship struck rocks and ran aground.
What happened to the survivors of the HMS Wager?
Of the roughly 250 men aboard, about 140 reached the island alive. Over the following months, many died of starvation, hypothermia, drowning, and violence. The survivors eventually split into two groups. A group of 81 mutineers, led by gunner John Bulkeley, sailed south in a lengthened longboat called the Speedwell, reaching Brazil in January 1742 with only 30 survivors. Captain David Cheap and a loyalist group of about 20 headed north with the help of an indigenous Chono guide named Martín Olleta. Only four from this group — Cheap, midshipmen John Byron and Alexander Campbell, and Marine Lieutenant Thomas Hamilton — survived the journey to Chiloé Island. In total, just 36 men from the entire ship's company returned to England.
Why did the crew mutiny against Captain David Cheap?
Tensions had been building for months over starvation, the collapse of naval authority after the shipwreck, and a fundamental disagreement about what to do next. Cheap wanted to head north to rejoin Anson's squadron — a mission based on secret orders he refused to share. The crew believed their best chance of survival was to head south through the Strait of Magellan to Brazil. The breaking point came when Cheap shot an unarmed midshipman named Henry Cozens in the face during a drunken confrontation and then allegedly denied him medical care, leaving him to die over the course of more than a week. On 9 October 1741, armed seamen arrested Cheap and charged him with murder.
What happened at the court martial for the Wager mutiny?
The court martial was held in 1746 after both the mutineers and Captain Cheap had returned to England. In a remarkable decision, the Admiralty chose to examine only the cause of the shipwreck and explicitly excluded all events that occurred on the island from the scope of the inquiry. Cheap did not press mutiny charges because he was warned that doing so would invite a murder charge for the killing of Cozens. Lieutenant Baynes was admonished for failing to report the carpenter's sighting of land. Everyone else was acquitted. The mutineers argued that their pay had stopped when the ship was lost, meaning they were no longer subject to naval law — an argument the Admiralty chose not to challenge.
Has the wreck of HMS Wager been found?
In 2006, the Scientific Exploration Society led an expedition to Wager Island that conducted the first systematic archaeological survey of the wreck site. The team found fragments of the ship's wooden hull bearing burn marks consistent with Spanish salvage operations documented in the late eighteenth century. The island has been pushed approximately 7 meters higher out of the sea by at least 94 earthquakes since 1741, dramatically altering its geography — the inlet where the survivors camped is now an inland lake. The main body of the wreck may still lie undiscovered offshore. Chilean marine archaeologists continue to study the site.
Sources
- [The Wager Disaster: Mayhem, Mutiny and Murder in the South Seas] - Rear Admiral C. H. Layman, Uniform Press (2015)
- [The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder] - David Grann, Doubleday (2023)
- [The Wager Mutiny] - Captain S. W. C. Pack, Alvin Redman (1964)
- [A Voyage to the South-Seas, and to Many Other Parts of the World (The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron)] - John Byron (1768)
- [A Voyage to the South Seas, in His Majesty's Ship the Wager] - John Bulkeley and John Cummins (1743)
- [A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740–1744 by George Anson] - Compiled by Richard Walter, John and Paul Knapton (1748)
- [The Prize of All the Oceans: The Dramatic True Story of Commodore Anson's Voyage Round the World] - Glyn Williams, Viking Press (2000)
- [Anson's Navy: Building a Fleet for Empire, 1744 to 1763] - Brian Lavery, Seaforth Publishing (2021)
- [Medicine and the Navy, 1200–1900, Volume III: 1714–1815] - Christopher Lloyd and Jack L. S. Coulter, E. and S. Livingstone (1961)
- [British Warships in the Age of Sail 1714–1792: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates] - Rif Winfield, Seaforth Publishing (2007)
- [SES Expedition Report: Wager Island 2006] - Major Chris Holt, in Layman (2015)
