## Metadata - Author: [[David Grann]] - Full Title: The Wager - Category: #books ## Review I did not finish this. I was very excited to read this. I like the books and articles of David Grann and I like books about the high seas, but this just didn't grab me. I gave up about 1/3 on the way through. ## Highlights *** > Most of the wood was hard oak, but it was still susceptible to the pulverizing elements of storm and sea. Teredo navalis-a reddish shipworm, which can grow longer than a foot ate through hulls. (Columbus lost two ships to these creatures during his fourth voyage to the West Indies.) Termites also bored through decks and masts and cabin doors, as did deathwatch beetles. A species of fungus further devoured the ship's wooden core. In 1684, Samuel Pepys, a secretary to the Admiralty, was stunned to discover that many new warships under construction were already so rotten they were "in danger of sinking at their very moorings”. (Page 16) *** > The average man-of-war was estimated by a leading shipwright to last only fourteen years. And to survive that long, a ship had to be virtually remade after each extensive voyage, with new masts and sheathing and rigging. Otherwise, it risked disaster. In 1782, while the 180-foot Royal George-for a time the largest warship in the worldwas anchored near Portsmouth, with a full crew onboard, began flooding its hull. It sank. The cause has been disputed, but an investigation blamed the "general state of decay of her timbers." An estimated nine hundred people drowned. (Page 16) *** > After peaceful efforts to man the fleets failed, the Navy resorted to what a secretary of the Admiralty called a "more violent" strategy. Armed gangs were dispatched to press seafaring men into service-in effect, kidnapping them. The gangs roamed cities and towns, grabbing anyone who betrayed the telltale signs of a mariner: the familiar checkered shirt and wide-kneed trousers and round hat; the fingers smeared with tar, which was used to make virtually everything on a ship more water-resistant and durable. (Seamen were known as tars.) Local authorities were ordered to “seize all straggling seamen, watermen, bargemen, fishermen and lightermen.” > > A seaman later described walking in London and having a stranger tap him on the shoulder and demand, "What ship?" The seaman denied that he was a sailor, but his tar-stained fingertips betrayed him. The stranger blew his whistle; in an instant a posse appeared. “I was in the hands of six or eight ruffians whom I soon found to be a press gang," the seaman wrote. "They dragged me hurriedly through several streets, amid bitter execrations bestowed on them from passers-by and expressions of sympathy directed towards me." > > Press gangs headed out in boats as well, scouring the horizon for incoming merchant ships the most fertile hunting ground. Often, men seized were returning from distant voyages and hadn't seen their families for years; given the risks of a subsequent long voyage during war, they might never see them again. > > Cheap became close to a young midshipman on the Centurion named John Campbell, who had been pressed while serving on a merchant ship. A gang had invaded his vessel, and when he saw them hauling away an older man in tears he stepped forward and offered himself up in his place. The head of the press gang remarked, “I would rather have a lad of spirit than a blubbering man. > > Anson was said to have been so struck by Campbell's gallantry that he'd made him a midshipman. Most sailors, though, went to extraordinary lengths to evade the "body snatchers"-hiding in cramped holds, listing themselves as dead in muster books, and abandoning merchant ships before reaching a major port. When a press gang surrounded a church in London, in 1755, in pursuit of a seaman inside, he managed, according to a newspaper report, to slip away disguised in "an old gentlewoman's long cloak, hood and bonnet." > > Sailors who got snatched up were transported in the holds of small ships known as tenders, which resembled floating jails, with gratings bolted over the hatchways and marines standing guard with muskets and bayonets. "In this place we spent the day and following night huddled together, for there was not room to sit or stand separate,” one seaman recalled. “Indeed, we were in a pitiable plight, for numbers of them were sea-sick, some retching, others were smoking, whilst many were so overcome by the stench, that they fainted for want of air." > > Family members, upon learning that a relative—a son, or a brother, or a husband, or a father—had been apprehended, would often rush to where the tenders were departing, hoping to glimpse their loved ones. Samuel Pepys describes, in his diary, a scene of pressed sailors' wives gathered on a wharf near the Tower of London: “In my life, I never did see such a natural expression of passion as I did here in some women's bewailing themselves, and running to every parcel of men that were brought, one after another, to look for their husbands, and wept over every vessel that went off, thinking they might be there, and looking after the ship as far as ever they could by moon-light, that it grieved me to the heart to hear them." (Page 21) *** > David Cheap, who believed that a good sailor must possess "honour, courage…..steadiness," was undoubtedly appalled by the quality of the recruits who lingered. It was common for local authorities, knowing the unpopularity of the press, to dump their undesirables. But these conscripts were wretched, and the volunteers were little better. An admiral described one bunch of recruits as being "full of the pox, itch, lame, King's evil, and all other distempers, from the hospitals at London, and will serve only to breed an infection in the ships; for the rest, most of them are thieves, house breakers, Newgate [Prison] birds, and the very filth of London." He concluded, “In all the former wars I never saw a parcel of turned over men half so bad, in short they are so very bad, that I don't know how to describe it." > > To at least partly address the shortage of men, the government sent to Anson's squadron 143 marines, who in those days were a branch of the Army, with their own officers. The marines were supposed to help with land invasions and also lend a hand at sea. Yet they were such raw recruits that they had never set foot on a ship and didn't even know how to fire a weapon. The Admiralty admitted that they were "useless." In desperation, the Navy took the extreme step of rounding up for Anson's squadron five hundred invalid soldiers from the Royal Hospital, in Chelsea, a pensioner's home established in the seventeenth century for veterans who were "old, lame, or infirm in ye service of the Crowne." Many were in their sixties and seventies, and they were rheumatic, hard of hearing, partially blind, suffering from convulsions, or missing an assortment of limbs. Given their ages and debilities, these soldiers had been deemed unfit for active service. Reverend Walter described them as the "most decrepit and miserable objects that could be collected." > > As these invalids made their way to Portsmouth, nearly half slipped away, including one who hobbled off on a wooden leg. “All those who had limbs and strength to walk out of Portsmouth deserted," Reverend Walter noted. Anson pleaded with the Admiralty to replace what his chaplain called "this aged and diseased detachment.” No recruits were available, though, and after Anson dismissed some of the most infirm men, his superiors ordered them back onboard. > > Cheap watched the incoming invalids, many of them so weak they had to be lifted onto the ships on stretchers. Their panicked faces betrayed what everyone secretly knew: they were sailing to their deaths. As Reverend Walter acknowledged, "They would in all probability uselessly perish by lingering and painful diseases; and this, too, after they had spent the activity and strength of their youth in their country's service." (Page 23) *** > The boatswain and his mates, the town criers, continued bellowing and blowing their whistles. They moved through the decks, holding lanterns and leaning over slumbering seamen, shouting, "Out or down! Out or down!" Anyone who didn't rise would have his hammock cut free from the rope suspending it, sending his body crashing onto the deck. (Page 28) *** > Yet, even for young nobles drawn to a life at sea, their sudden change in circumstances could be shocking. "Ye gods, what a difference!" one such midshipman recalled. "I had anticipated a kind of elegant house with guns in the windows; an orderly set of men; in short, I expected to find a species of Grosvenor Place, floating around like Noah's ark." Instead, he noted, the deck was "dirty, slippery and wet; the smells abominable; the whole sight disgusting; and when I remarked the slovenly attire of the midshipmen, dressed in shabby round jackets, glazed hats, no gloves, and some without shoes, I forgot all the glory... and, for nearly the first time in my life, and I wish I could say it was the last, took the handkerchief from my pocket, covered my face, and cried like the child I was." (Page 30) *** > During the age of sail, when wind-powered vessels were the only bridge across the vast oceans, nautical language was so pervasive that it was adopted by those on terra firma. To "toe the line" derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To "pipe down" was the boatswain's whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and "piping hot" was his call for meals. A "scuttlebutt" was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was "three sheets to the wind" when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To "turn a blind eye" became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior's signal flag to retreat. (Page 35) *** > When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be "under the weather”. (Page 51) *** > According to tradition, a body to be buried at sea was wrapped in a hammock, along with at least one cannonball. (When the hammock was sewn together, the final thread was often stitched through the victim's nose, to ensure that he was dead.) The stiffening corpse was placed on a plank and a Union Jack was draped over it, making it seem less like a mummy. Any of the deceased's personal effects, his clothes, his trinkets, his sea chest, were collected for auction, to raise money for his widow or other family members; even the most hardened seamen often offered exorbitant bids. (Page 52) *** > They were suffering from what a British captain had dubbed "the plague of the sea": scurvy. Like everyone else, Byron didn't know what caused it. Striking a company after at least a month at sea, it was the great enigma of the Age of Sail, killing more mariners than all other threats-including gun battles, tempests, wrecks, and other diseases-combined. On Anson's ships, scurvy appeared after the men were already ailing, leading to one of the most severe maritime outbreaks. "I cannot pretend to describe that terrible distemper," the ordinarily phlegmatic Anson reported, "but no plague ever equaled the degree we had of it." (Page 75) *** > Yet the solution was so simple. Scurvy is brought on by a defiof vitamin C, owing to a lack of raw vegetables and fruits in ciency one's diet. Such a deprived person stops producing the fibrous protein known as collagen, which holds bones and tissues together, and which is used to synthesize dopamine and other hormones that can affect moods. (Anson's men also appear to have been suffering from other vitamin deficiencies, such as insufficient levels of niacin, which can lead to psychosis, and of vitamin A, which causes night blindness.) Lieutenant Saumarez later sensed the power of certain nutrients. "I could plainly observe," he wrote, "that there is a Je ne sais quoi in the frame of the human system that cannot be renewed, cannot be preserved, without the assistance of certain earthly particles, or in plain English, the land is man's proper element, and vegetables and fruit his only physic." All Byron and his companions needed to combat scurvy was some citrus, and when they had stopped at St. Catherine to gather supplies, there had been an abundance of limes. The cure-that unforbidden fruit which decades later would be furnished to all British seamen, giving them the nickname Limeys – had been right within their grasp. (Page 77)