The Wager Disaster

by C. H. Layman

  This salvage operation was a complex task, and it may still be seen as an outstanding achievement considering the difficulties faced. These included sailing more than 300 nautical miles in open canoes, crossing the Ofqui isthmus through more than five kilometres of marsh and bog, recovering extremely heavy and bulky objects from the bottom of the sea, and then returning with them to Chiloé. For the underwater salvage the Spaniards probably employed Chono and Caucahue Indians owing to their remarkable free-diving skills. The objects recovered included ten iron six-pounder and four bronze three-pounder guns, an anchor, over a hundred cannon balls, over a thousand musket shot, three copper cauldrons, and various pieces of lead, iron and steel. Hauling over the swampy ground of the desecho the one ton six-pounders and the rest of the artillery, with frequent rains, must have been an extremely trying and arduous task.

  Evrard probably established two forts on the west coast of the eastern Guayaneco Island, now called Wager Island. The expedition returned successfully to Chiloé four months after setting off, apparently without any casualties. According to the Governor’s report the inappropriate size of the dalcas and lack of provisions prevented the recovery of other materials, leaving in place fourteen guns, iron ballast, nautical gear and anchors.

  The operation was considered a complete success by the Spanish authorities. The guns went straight to the Royal Treasury, and the other objects recovered paid for the expenses of the expedition. The Governor stressed the quality of the bronze three-pounder guns, probably light artillery field-pieces destined for the assault of Valdivia and other Spanish cities of Chile and Peru, remarking “Without exaggeration, I can say that I have never seen such perfect and refined artillery.” Then the Governor made an order forbidding all movements in the area before the rest of the materials could be recovered under orders of the King of Spain.

  In 1744 the guns salvaged from the Wager had carriages specially made from local timber, and were set up to reinforce the defences of the main military post in the island, the fortress of Chacao.

  Although no direct documentary evidence has been identified so far, some administrative documents indirectly suggest several other salvage operations to Guayaneco were performed between 1743 and 1748 during Governor Martínez de Tineo’s administration. Besides these Spanish expeditions, and in spite of the Governor’s restriction order, the remains of the Wager were also from time to time exploited by the local nomadic Indian groups which Byron and Campbell describe. During this period, Officer Pedro Mansilla was sent to Boca del Guafo, south of Chiloé, in search of Chono Indians “who had started recovering iron, anchors and wax that (the Wager) had on board”. After a long hunt through the islands, the Indian runaways were captured, their canoes claimed and the illegally salvaged materials were brought to the Spanish authorities in Chacao. Indian salvage efforts must have been considerable, for over half a ton of iron was recovered.

  An important consequence of Evrard’s 1743 expedition to Guayaneco was the accidental rediscovery of the Caucahues, an ethnic group which might be identified with the modern Alakaluf Indians. The Caucahues, along with other local indigenous groups living between the Gulf of Peñas and the Magellan Straits – Tayjatafes, Calenches, Leycheles, Requinagueres – would be from 1743 systematically Christianised and relocated by the Jesuit missionaries in the Island of Kaylin in southern Chiloé, which became the Kaylin Mission in 1764.

  From his voyages to the Guayaneco and Chonos Islands in 1743-4 and 1750, Evrard, now First Sergeant of Chiloé, prepared a chart which is indirectly known from three sources: the narratives of Pilot Francisco Machado, Jesuit Father José García Martí, and the Historia Geographica e Hidrographica, a report prepared for the King by the Spanish Governors of Chile. Evrard’s chart was in turn the basis for a map prepared by Father García from his own observations. The journal of García’s second expedition (1766-7), with Caucahue Indians from the Kaylin Mission, to Guayaneco in search of pagan Indians of the Calen and Tayjataf tribes, represents an invaluable ethnographical document. It was first published in Germany in 1809 in a German-Spanish edition by C.G. von Murr, and it includes a map in which the position of the wreck of the Wager is located between the two main Guayaneco Islands, which are named “Guayaneco” and “Ancanzcan”.

  The date of this map is unknown, but it must be about 1770 (north is to the left: the Golfo de Peñas is in the centre.) The key to no. 21 reads “Sitio donde se perdio el Vaguér” (The place where the Wager was lost; Spanish does not use the letter W, which in the case of foreign names is usually replaced by V.)

  The map also shows the overland route, no. 12, by which the four survivors eventually escaped from the well-named Golfo de Peñas (Bay of Sorrows).

  The map was probably made for the Governor of Chiloé to accompany his report to the King of Spain about the Wager incident and its subsequent salvage operation. The wreck site is placed very accurately for latitude, but about 100 nautical miles in error for longitude, which was then based on the meridian of Lima.

  Father García visited the wreck site in January 1766, nearly 25 years after the loss of the ship, identifying the spot as “Port Teumaterigua”, which he described as “pampa without high mounts and looking fine for crops and potatoes” and finding “plenty of evidence of the lost ship and the numerous Englishmen who died there”. From some of the Caucahue Indians who claimed to have been in the area when the Wager was lost he obtained interesting accounts of the activities of the marooned English survivors.

  This missionary remarks that Ancanzcan Island (modern Byron Island) is called “Guayaneco” among the Indians, but this term is used by the Spanish to name the wreck-site, which in turn is called by the Caucahues “Camarigua”.

  A year after García’s visit (1767-8), the wreck was visited by another expedition led again by Second Lieutenant Pedro Mansilla with Pilot Cosme Ugarte, sent by the Governor of Chiloé, Manuel Fernández de Castelblanco, to explore the Guaitecas Islands and the isthmus of Ofqui. On 2nd February 1768, in the Gulf of Peñas, Mansilla’s party met Jesuit Father Juan Vicuña who was returning to his mission in Chiloé bringing converted Tayjatafe Indians. The missionary accompanied Mansilla and Ugarte in their exploration southwards to latitude 53° S, a six-day journey which would be very much criticized by geographers of the time. On his way back to Chiloé on the 27th February 1768 Mansilla recovered part of a large anchor which had already been cut in two by a previous Government expedition. On the return trip Father Vicuña’s canoe was wrecked and he was drowned, in what was to be the last Jesuit missionary voyage to Patagonia of the eighteenth century.

  Cannon at Juan Fernandez (see chart p161).

  When Anson watered and refitted the remnants of his squadron at Juan Fernandez it was undefended, and indeed uninhabited. His voyage made the Spanish aware of the vulnerability of their Pacific possessions, and they urgently set about strengthening them, here and elsewhere.

  The cannon shown in this photograph almost certainly include some taken from the wreck of the Wager in the salvage expeditions that took place during the period 1743-1769. The Governor of Chiloé admired the British workmanship, saying, “Without exaggeration, I can say that I have never seen such perfect and refined artillery.”

  One year later (1768-9) a new hydrographic and military expedition to the Magellan Straits sailed from Chiloé, led this time by Pilot Francisco Machado and Officer José de Sotomayor, sent by Governor Carlos de Beranger.

  Sotomayor disobeyed his orders to take his ship round the Taitao Peninsula, and carried on southwards across the traditional Ofqui isthmus track exclusively with dalcas. Machado was a fine seaman and skilful cartographer, and he surveyed and named several places in the area around the Gulf of Peñas, which can be seen on an unpublished Spanish chart of about 1770 (see p276).

  Back in Chiloé, the Governor, displeased with the results, ordered an investigation, and the expedition officers were sent for trial. Machado’s innocence was proved and he was released. Machado had visited the pl
ace of the wreck which he calls “Desposorio de Guayaneco” on 21st February 1769, which he describes as “not a port, nor anything but a haven for native canoes”. He observes that the Wager was wrecked at the west end of Guayaneco Island, characterised by an extended and dangerous reef system, near a shallow haven.

  After the Society of Jesus was expelled from the Americas in 1767 by King Charles III, Jesuit missionaries were replaced by Franciscans. The Franciscan Order of San Idelfonso of Chillán arrived in Chiloé in 1769, and they were in turn subsequently replaced by the Franciscans of the Colegio Santa Rosa of Ocopa, Lima.

  In consequence, nearly ten years later, the Guayaneco Islands were visited again by a missionary expedition searching for “indios gentiles” (heathen Indians), this time led by Fray Benito Marín and Fray Julián Real. On 5th January 1779 they rounded Guayaneco Island from the west with the intention of identifying the place where the ship belonging to Anson’s fleet was lost. They found evidence of an Indian settlement formed by four dwellings which had been recently constructed in front of the wreck. The next summer season (1779-80) Fray Francisco Menéndez and Fray Ignacio Vargas repeated this voyage to the Gulf of Peñas, and verified from local information that the Wager wreck-site was still being visited by nomadic waterborne Indians. This is the last occasion when the place is mentioned in Spanish Colonial documents.

  Nearly half a century later, during the surveying voyages of the Patagonian channels and the coasts of Tierra del Fuego, ordered by the British Admiralty in the years 1826 to 1830 and carried out by HMS Adventure (Captain Philip Parker King) and the famous HMS Beagle (Captain Pringle Stokes, later Captain Robert Fitzroy), the first modern hydrographic charts of the Gulf of Peñas were completed.

  By using the information of the Franciscan expeditions to Guayaneco contained in González Agüero’s Descripción Historial de la Provincia y Archipiélago de Chiloé and Byron’s narrative, the two islands where the Wager was lost were identified and named Wager and Byron Islands by Captain Parker King. Several other geographical features commemorate the Wager story: Canal Cheap, Speedwell Bay, Caleta Elliot, and the islands Hereford, Crosslet, Hales, and Smith, named after the Marines left to their fate in the north of the Gulf in 1742. All these names remain on the charts to this day as a tribute to our shared heritage.

  In 1829 Captain Parker King appointed Lieutenant W. G. Skyring to command the sloop HMS Adelaide and to survey the Guayaneco Islands, but despite his efforts to locate the exact place of the wreck along the northwest coast of Wager Island, no remains were found. Parker King described meeting a very old man in Chiloé, Pedro Osorio, who had participated in the last missionary expeditions to Guayaneco and who even claimed he remembered the Wager survivors: “Don David” (Captain David Cheap); “Don Juan” (John Byron); “Hamerton” (Hamilton); and “Plasta” (Alexander Campbell?).

  During the late twentieth century, there were several informal reports of finds in the area by fishermen and yachtsmen. Finally, in November 2006 two different and independent expeditions coincided in the islands, one formed by a party of British exploration divers and another by a group of Chilean marine archaeologists. Although with very different aims and approaches, both were extremely interested in the Wager events. With some on-the-spot collaboration, they were able to start unravelling a new chapter of this fascinating story.

  Chapter 28

  The Finding of the Wager, 2006

  By Major Chris Holt, MBE

  It is not every day that one is asked by the legendary British explorer John Blashford-Snell of the Scientific Exploration Society to lead an expedition to find a lost warship, in a completely remote and uninhabited island off Patagonian Chile. During my service in the Army I had been employed as a commando and a military diver, which meant that I was relatively well equipped to plan and mount such a challenging expedition. However, it has to be said that the planning for Wager Quest was paper thin, owing to the sparseness of contemporary information about the wreck site.

  The Scientific Exploration Society (SES) had been hoping to mount an expedition to find the wreck of the Wager since the mid-1980s. The arrival of Commander Charles le May as the Chilean Naval Attaché to London was the catalyst needed to make things happen. Commander le May took a personal interest in the search to find this piece of shared heritage, and with his help and that of other Chilean authorities, the SES was finally able to gain the practical support required to undertake such an ambitious project.

  As for leads to follow, we had little more information than is available in the preceding chapters of this book. While tremendously helpful with the planning of safety and logistics, neither the Chilean authorities nor the locals had any information relating to conditions on the extremely remote island which is now called Isla Wager. More importantly, no one in the world of maritime history or archaeology was prepared to risk a reputation to give me even a vague indication of where the Wager might lie along some ten miles of rugged and rocky coastline on the northern shores of Wager Island.

  The only slight lead was through a Chilean historian named Fernando Hartwig, who indicated in an email that the wreck had been salvaged by the Spanish with the assistance of some local Indians in about 1745. They had recovered some cannons, the ship’s forge, and some other items of value to them such as iron nails, but the detail was sketchy.

  Having trawled through the historical accounts, scanned satellite imagery, spoken to round-the-world yachtsmen, made contact with Chilean historians and studied general academic information about the area, we concluded that there were three possible locations where the Wager might have come to rest. These three locations were chosen primarily because of information gleaned from the accounts of Bulkeley and Byron and are shown in Figure 1.

  The plan before departure was fairly simple – and had to be. With such flimsy information, it was necessary to remain as flexible as possible, and the only certainty seemed to be that any plan would have to adapt to changing circumstances. In outline the key details were as follows:

  The team would consist of twelve divers from the SES and two divers from the Armada de Chile. The divers would include a maritime archaeologist, Andrew Torbet, a doctor, Richard Booker, and our camera lady Lynwen Griffiths.

  Once in Chile, we would travel by land to the logging village of Tortel on the Rio Baker, and then, using two small fishing boats, we would make the 120km journey to Isla Wager, where we would stay for around three weeks.

  We would camp on the beaches of the island as close as possible to what we felt was the survivors’ beach (Cheap’s Bay), and mount our searches from there using small inflatable craft.

  Once established on the island, we would dive in the areas that were consistent with the descriptions in the accounts of the time, and, if something was located, conduct a simple survey to act as a start point for a professional archaeological expedition.

  In the case of a medical emergency, we would rely first on assistance from the Armada de Chile and second on the civilian emergency rescue organisation Mariscope, operating in Patagonia. Either way, we could expect to be at least twenty-four hours away from medical evacuation should things go wrong. If the weather was bad, this could be as long as five days.

  Figure 1.

  Our initial assessment of where we would find the Wager led us to identify three search areas.

  Wager Quest Team.

  Standing left to right: Chief Diver Jaime Soto (Armada de Chile), Dr Richard Booker, Lynwen Griffiths, Eric Neime, Andy Torbet, Jamie Hannah, Newton Hau, Mathew Buckland-Hoby, Davy Carson, Mike Smeaton, Lt Martin Guajardo (Armada de Chile), Paul Blunt. Seated left to right: Chris Hunter, Chris Holt.

  As is always the way with SES expeditions, there would also be a local aid element to our trip. In addition to the diving team, a land party would take part in the expedition and would operate in the area of Tortel. This land team would take scientific observations of two glaciers, and would also assist with a water supply and sanitation project for the village.r />
  Having said our goodbyes in the UK and negotiated hard about excess baggage, we headed off for a month, not really sure what might happen or whether we had any chance of success. I kept a journal during the expedition and it forms a useful summary of our activities.

  5th November 2006

  …I spent the time before take-off wondering whether I had done enough in the way of preparation. This has been a recurring concern particularly in the week running up to departure. The conclusion I keep drawing is that there is very little I can do in terms of planning and that the basis of the plan is pretty much to make one up when we get there! I am of course entirely comfortable with this; it is after all the way I seem to run my life.

  Arriving in Chile, we moved straight to our ‘base camp’ in Coyhaique, which is the gateway to Chilean Patagonia. This small town runs on logging, salmon farms and tourism. It was here that we made our first contact with CONAF, the Chilean National Forest Corporation. They would provide us with facilities and manpower to assist with the drawing-together of our equipment and were hugely useful throughout the entire trip, particularly to the land-based team. We also became aware of a group called CIEP who were the focal point for all scientific research activity in Patagonia. After two days in Coyhaique making friends with the locals, we headed off early on the morning of 7th November for the tiny logging village of Tortel.