The HMS Wager began around 1734 as an East Indiaman, a wide cargo hauler, and the Royal Navy bought her for a little over 3,900 pounds and spent about 7,000 more at Deptford Dockyard to make her a 28 gun sixth rate. Assigned as the supply ship for Commodore George Anson’s 1,800 man expedition against Spain’s Pacific coast of South America, she was crewed with aged, sick, and invalid men while the best sailors went to the warships. Her experienced captain, Dandy Kidd, died, and Lieutenant David Cheap took command. Separated from Anson in a storm off Cape Horn, Cheap pushed on toward Chile, and on May 13 and 14, 1741, in the Gulf of Penas, the carpenter glimpsed land but said nothing, Cheap dislocated his shoulder in a fall, and the ship struck rocks.

Invalids drowned in their hammocks, drunken crewmen looted the stores, and the survivors on Wager Island discovered that naval pay and a captain’s authority ended when the ship was lost. Gunner John Bulkeley led 81 men away in the boats while about 20 stayed with Cheap, among them midshipman John Byron, grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. More than five years later only a handful of Bulkeley’s group and four of Cheap’s reached England.

• Under the Articles of War, a warrant officer like the carpenter risked a charge of mutiny by questioning officers about navigation.
• The pay rule was meant to make crews fight to save a ship, but the stranded men used it to reject Cheap’s command.
• Fearing a British base, Spain fortified the region, including a new fort town at Ancud on Chiloe Island.
• A 2006 Scientific Exploration Society expedition found a 1740s hull section in a riverbed well inland, scorched by Spanish scavengers seeking iron and copper.
• The region has had 94 earthquakes since the wreck, lifting Wager Island about seven meters and turning the survivors’ inlet by Mount Misery into a lake.