Before the Panama Canal was built, ships traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific went around the tip of South America, through the Drake Passage. During the Age of Exploration, they only went through during the Southern Hemisphere's summer months, because the cold storms during the rest of the year gave the rocky passage the nickname the sailor's graveyard. In 1741, the British navy sent the HMS Wager on a mission that was delayed so long that the ship found itself in the midst of the Drake Passage in April.
Aboard Wager, veteran ship’s gunner John Bulkeley was the officer of the watch, overseeing the ship’s navigation in the midst of a violent storm. The sky was a wet, howling tempest, the sea undulated with mountainous swells. Wager’s timbers creaked and her sails thrashed as the air and ocean conspired to smash the ship to pieces. Bulkeley had seen a lot of storms in his day, but nothing like this. One ocean swell—the largest he had ever witnessed—swept over the ship and briefly submerged Wager and her 160 crew in frigid water, washing Bulkeley across the quarter-deck.
Wager had entered the Drake Passage about a month earlier. She had been accompanied by seven other Royal Navy ships, all part of a secret squadron on a wartime mission heading for Patagonia on the west coast of South America. A principle hazard in sailing westward in the Drake Passage is that the winds and currents are powerful, relentless, and moving in exactly the wrong direction. Temperatures are frosty in autumn at such a southern latitude, and precipitation is nearly constant. In the era of sailing ships, the Drake Passage was a perilous venture even for a robust vessel manned by an intrepid crew in the calm season—a collection of characteristics that utterly failed to describe HMS Wager.
Wager’s speed and maneuverability were compromised due to the loss of a mast in the storm. Her captain was dead, her acting captain was bedridden, and many of the men were deathly ill. Wager had lost contact with the other ships of the squadron, having fallen hopelessly far behind. And her crew’s troubles had only just begun.
Everything that could have possibly gone wrong with the mission did go wrong, both before and after the ship wrecked. Yet some survivors made it back to England to tell the story. Read the saga of the HMS Wager in a thrilling account by Alan Bellows at Damn Interesting.