BRIG “TOPAZ” OF NEWBURYPORT, BUILT IN 1807
Original in the Marine Room, Peabody Museum, Salem. Painted by Anton Roux, Marseilles
The officers and crew, who had escaped into different parts of the ship, were anxious only for their own safety, and incapable of forming any plan for quelling the insurrection. The yells of the Indians, indeed, the groans of the wounded, and the confused clamors of the crew, all heightened by the obscurity prevailing, greatly magnified the danger at first. The Spanish, likewise, sensible of the disaffection of the impressed men, and at the same time conscious of the barbarity their prisoners had experienced, believed that it was a general conspiracy and that their own destruction was inevitable.
A strange interval of silence fell upon the bloodstained ship as she rolled, without guidance, to the impulses of a gentle sea, while the canvas flapped and the yards creaked as the breeze took her aback. The conquering Indians were vigilant and anxious, unable to leave the quarter-deck, where they held the mastery, the Spanish crew lying low, as it were, and wondering what might happen next. Orellana promptly broke open the arms-chest, which had been conveyed to the poop a few days previously as a safeguard against mutiny. In it he confidently expected to find cutlasses enough to equip his men, and with these weapons they would hew their way into the great cabin and cut down the surviving officers. Alas! for the cleverly contrived plans, the chest contained only muskets and pistols, and the Indians had never learned how to use firearms.
Meanwhile that high and mighty personage Admiral Pizarro was using animated language in the great cabin, and Spanish oaths are beyond all others for crackling eloquence. His guests had begun to compose their scrambled wits, and through the windows and port-holes they were able to talk things over with their friends who were hiding in the gun-room and between decks. From these sources it was learned that those unholy devils, the English prisoners, were not concerned in the hurricane of a rebellion, and that the prodigious affair was solely the work of the eleven rampant Indians. The admiral looked less disconsolate, and his officers breathed easier. It was resolved to storm the quarter-deck before the storm gathered more headway.
There were pistols in the great cabin, but neither powder nor ball, but a bucket was lowered to the gun-room on the deck below, and plenty of ammunition was fished up. Cautiously unbarring the cabin doors, they began to take pot-shots at the Indians, and were lucky enough to shoot Orellana through the head. When his followers saw him fall and discovered that he was dead, to a man these ten heroes leaped over the bulwark and perished in the sea. They knew how to finish in style, and the admiral was deprived of the pleasure of swinging them to a yard-arm to the flourish of trumpet and drum.
Midshipman Isaac Morris and his two shipmates of the Wager witnessed this splendid undertaking, or bits of it, as they paced to and fro under guard in the middle of the ship. It seemed as though they might be granted a quieter life by way of a change, but when the flag-ship reached Spain they were hustled ashore and put into a prison for a fortnight, where they were chained together like common criminals and fed on bread and water. After that they were marched off to an island by a file of musketeers, and held for fourteen weeks in a sort of penal colony among thieves and felons. The longest lane has a turning, and there came at length a royal order providing that the three Englishmen should be sent to Portugal. At Oporto the English consul gave them quarters and a little money, and the end of the story is thus described by Isaac Morris:
We embarked in the Charlotte, scow, on the 18th of April, 1746, and under convoy of the York and Folkstone men-of-war, arrived at London on the 5th of July following; three only of the eight men left on the coast of Patagonia, Samuel Cooper, John Andrews, and myself, being so happy as once more to see their native country.
The Wager had sailed on her fatal voyage on September 18, 1740, and had been lost in May of 1741. These three survivors had therefore spent more than five years in the endeavor to reach home. By devious ways three parties of the Wager’s people had finally extricated themselves from the toils of misfortune, Midshipman Byron and Captain Cheap, and a few of those who had lived through the cruise in the long-boat, and these three men who had been marooned. Left unfinished were those other tragic stories, shrouded behind the curtain of fate, the four marines and their farewell huzza, the crew of the barge who basely abandoned their companions, and the eleven people who requested to be set ashore in Patagonia sooner than endure the horrors of the long-boat. The wreck of the Wager is a yarn of many strands, an epic of salt water, and still memorable, although the ship was lost almost two hundred years ago.