When Commodore Anson set out for the Pacific in 17440, to attack Spanish ships off the Chilean coast, he took eight ships with him. The Wager was effectively a transport ship, carrying stores and marines, but as the squadron rounded Cape Horn in fearsome weather she was damaged, fell behind and ran ashore on the Patagonian coast. The tale of mutiny, hardship and tenacity that ensued was told by two of the survivors, John Bulkeley, leader of those who repudiated the captain’s authority, and midshipman John Byron, who remained with the captain. Both eventually reached home by different routes, and their dramatic narratives caught the public imagination. Byron was the grandfather of the poet, Lord Byron, who much admired the book and based the shipwreck scenes in Don Juan on ‘my grand-dad’s Narrative’. Includes a new introduction by Alan Gurney.

Contents
   Introduction
   A VOYAGE TO THE SOUTH SEAS IN THE YEARS 1740-1
   Dedication
   Preface
   A Voyage to the South Seas
   THE NARRATIVE OF THE HONOURABLE JOHN BYRON
   Preface
   The Narrative
   Epilogue
 

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Interesting facts
Before he started on the Jack Aubrey novels, Patrick O’Brian wrote The Golden Ocean, a historical work based on the voyage of the Wager.

A Voyage to the South Seas in the years 1740-1 was first published by John Bulkeley and John Cummins in 1743, while John Byron published his Narrative much later, in 1768.

Excerpts

There follows an excerpt from John Bulkeley’s Voyage. Abandoned by their officers, who have left the ship for the safety of the shore, the seamen spend a unforgettable night on the wreck, where the sea is not the only source of terror:
At night it blow’d very hard at the north, with a great tumbling sea; we expected every moment that the ship would part, fetching such jirks and twistings as shock’d every person aboard…. Yet in the dismal situation we were in, we had several in the ship so thoughtless of their danger, so stupid, and insensible of their misery, that upon the principal officers leaving her, they fell into the most violent outrage and disorder: they began with broaching the wine in the lazaretto; then to breaking open cabbins and chests, arming themselves with swords and pistols, threatning to murder those who would oppose or question them: being drunk and mad with liquor, they plunder’d chests and cabbins for money and other things of value, cloathed themselves in the richest apparel they could find, and imagined themselves lords paramount.
Pages 10-11

Here is John Byron makes clear the gravity of the shipwrecked men’s situation: a damaged ship, soon to sink with all their supplies, or the relative safety of a desolate shoreline only reachable through a heavy sea.
It is natural to think that, to men thus upon the point of perishing by shipwreck, the getting to land was the highest attaining of their wishes; undoubtedly it was a desirable event; yet, all things considered, our condition was but little mended by the change. Which ever way we looked, a scene of horror presented itself; on one side, the wreck (in which was all we had in the world to support and subsists us) together with a boisterous sea, presented us with the most dreary prospect; on the other, the land did not wear a much more favourable appearance: desolate and barren, without sign of culture, we could hope to receive little other benefit from it than the preservation it afforded us form the sea. It must be confessed this was a great and merciful deliverance from immediate destruction; but then we had wet, cold, and hunger to struggle wit, and no visible remedy against any of these evils.
Pages 135-6