The muddy middle-ground: representing the wreck of the Wager

Abstract

This article presents a narrative analysis of the wreck of the Wager, a small sixth rate converted Indiaman of 28 guns that functioned as a supply ship on the Anson expedition (1740–4). In 1741, despite the efforts of the crew to bring her about, she wedged between two rocky islets off the inhospitable Patagonian coast of Chile. Despite the carnivalesque insubordination of a section of the crew, about 140 men made shore and those who remained on board, to pillage the grog and coin, followed a few days later. They found themselves hiding from the harsh weather and foraging along a generally barren coastline. Increasing factionalism ensued as the commander, Captain Cheap, began to lose control of the men. The explanations for the growing dissent vary depending on whose narrative we read. This analysis contrasts various accounts, some of which vilify the ‘mutineers’ while others explain the ascendance of the gunner, John Bulkeley, and the carpenter, John Cummins, as an inevitable consequence of the multiple failures of the selfish, capricious and incompetent Cheap. These discrepancies are interpreted by reading the narratives alongside studies of the Georgian navy, the genre of shipwreck narrative and the dynamics of discontent and insubordination in the eighteenth century. The second part of the article turns to a contemporary representation of the wreck of the Wager – Patrick O'Brian's The unknown shore (1959) – and argues that the novelist's inability or refusal to engage the complexities of the politics of the castaways articulates with the generally conservative agenda of contemporary popular maritime fiction. This suggests that certain representations of dissent are perpetuated in the present at the (ideological) expense of others.