The Wager by David Grann made a splash in 2023, rapidly rising to the top of nonfiction bestsellers list. It offers a daring tale of an 18th century British shipwreck, and what happened to its crewmen. It has been praised for its extensive descriptions of the world at sea and the strong narrative voices of its characters, presenting a world of the bygone days of the British Navy at its least romantic. It also gives the reader a glimpse at another long-gone artifact: a world where the Church is an arm of the State (and the State an arm of the Church) and where Providence is always the true determinant of a man’s fate.
Pre-Reformation England had had a navy, but it was a small coastal defense force. The Royal Navy as we think of it, of men at sea thousands of miles from home for God and Country, is an Anglican institution.
The book opens with introducing us to Captain David Cheap, a career Navy man. His father had been the second Laird of Rossi, which Grann describes as a title ‘that evoked nobility even if it did not quite confer it.’ After his father’s death, however, his older half-brother was disinterested in paying for his younger half-siblings’ upkeep, and Cheap ran away from his apprenticeship at 17 to join the Navy. He was born in 1697, firmly in the early modern period, but in many ways to us as 21st century readers, still seemingly quite medieval. There were huge families with high infant and maternal mortality, and wealth was derived primarily from land ownership in a system where the eldest son received it all. But there had been numerous changes in the preceding two hundred years, and one of them, of course, was religion. There had once been thousands of young men from situations like Cheap’s who had swelled the ranks of the church not solely out of devotion but because they had nowhere better to be.
The navy was in a way a floating priory for a country that no longer had any. One of the primary characters of the book, John Byron (the grandfather of the romantic poet Lord Byron) was even born on an estate that had been a monastery. He was a younger son who needed a living, but the priesthood seemed too dull. If he had been born in 1423 instead of 1723, his wandering heart could have entered the friary, and set across Europe to preach; but now the churchman’s life was one of quiet village duty. And so at 16 he entered the navy, as did many other younger sons of the gentry.
They had spent their adolescence reading hagiographical narratives of a life at sea, sometimes adapted journals of real sailors or sometimes novels like Robinson Crusoe. The navy also offered promises of a grand career and political stature, particularly as Samuel Pepys had enacted a policy in 1676 where a young man who spent six years as an apprentice on a warship would be made an officer. Yet some thought these high born men should do something else; Samuel Johnson considered Byron entering a ‘perversion.’
Just like the romantic but quickly disabused notions of religious life, so did many young aristocratic men like Byron quickly realize life on a ship was not the world they’d read about in fiction. But it was too late: they’d signed up for a life of hard work, austere conditions, obedience, and abstinence from women. Of course, they could leave…eventually. But until their term of service was up (and in Byron’s case, returned from being a castaway), they were obligated to follow the navy’s strict rules and deal with its harsh disciplines in service to Britannia – which also meant being in service to God.
The HMS Wager set sail in 1740 as part of a squadron set forth during the War of Jenkins’ Ear against the Spanish. This war was fought over access to markets. But it is also the war that produced the song Rule Britannia, where Britain is described as rising out of the sea at Heaven’s command and guardian angels tell Britain to rule the waves. There was no separating religion and a belief in God’s favor or disfavor from every other part of life in the 18th century.
Yet as Grann describes in detailed depictions drawn from surviving accounts, favor is not upon them. There are numerous delays before they can even leave England, and then deaths of their already largely sick, press-ganged crew soon after they begin the treacherous months-long journey across the Atlantic. This was before the knowledge of limes to prevent scurvy became commonplace, and so men’s teeth began to fall out as their bodies started to feel the effects of a condition they knew not how to prevent. Their shipwreck upon the desolate, bitterly cold island they would name Wager Island would provide them with wild celery containing Vitamin C but not much else. The remaining crew would spend months growing increasingly hungrier and in greater depths of despair, eventually turning to violence and mutiny.
But some of them did survive. The ship’s gunner, John Bulkeley, wrote that the fact that any of them survived at all was proof of God’s existence, and anyone who disagreed deserved “the wrath of an incensed deity.” His faith is a continuing strand throughout the book. He carries around The Christian’s Pattern, or a Treatise on the Imitation of Christ by medieval Catholic theologian Thomas à Kempis, and rescues it from the shipwreck. He sees its survival as evidence of Providence comforting him. Grann suggests that Bulkeley felt that his time at sea was a way of getting closer to God: the book says that suffering can “make a man enter into himself” but that in this world of temptation, “the life of man is a warfare upon earth.”
It is also a book that emphasizes solitude and silence. No one had ever been farther from civilization than an 18th century seaman. St Anthony’s hermitage was 200 miles from Cairo. The Wager was thousands of miles from anything.
Bulkeley also complained that there were no regular worship services – even though "the publique Worshipp of Almighty God according to the Liturgy of the Church of England" was the very first rule of the Articles of War that governed the navy.
Of course, some men are more faithful than others; but all men are Anglicans. One survivor accused another of converting to Catholicism, which would have been unacceptable for an officer. The accuser was himself a Scotsman, but any allegiance he may have had to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland on land would have had to be put aside.
Not everyone was a Bulkeley or a Byron or a Cheap: many of the men on the Wager hadn’t wanted to be there at all, and had been dragged out of soldiers' hospitals or from the streets to serve. The Lollardites had complained about boys being dropped off at monasteries by their parents’ bequest. That had ended, but forced obligations had not, and the need for bodies to labor for the service of something larger than themselves was still there.
This is not a religious history book, and aside from Bulkeley, the characters are not overtly religious. But if you approach it knowing that they were all reared in a world of faith and in a society where the Church of England was an omnipresent aspect of life, on a ship that was in theory supposed to also be a church, you will gain a better understanding of the way they lived.