At last, the men broke into part of the hold, extracting 10 barrels of flour, a cask of peas, several casks of beef and pork, a container of oatmeal, and more casks of brandy and wine.

Hours of labor often turned up little of value. The seeping water pooled around them as they burrowed through layers of debris, like shipworms eating through a hull. They tried to bore deeper into the hull, into the flooded chambers. Cheap knew that the castaways had to salvage as much as possible before the wreck submerged entirely. “By the Captain’s orders we were every day working on the wreck, except when the weather would not permit us,” Midshipman Campbell wrote. Ĭheap soon dispatched more parties to help with the excavation. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. To prevent them from falling into a Hobbesian state with “every man against every man,” Cheap believed the castaways needed binding rules and rigid structures-and their commander.

And he began to forge a plan to carve out an outpost in this wilderness, planting the seed of the British Empire. He hated consulting with other officers, and there was no time to waste. Captain Cheap, ill and hobbling, had to cope with his own torments.

The castaways on Wager Island, already depleted from the voyage, were receiving far less caloric intake than those in the experiment did, and they were under far greater distress: Nothing about their environment was controlled. A report summarizing the results of the study noted that the volunteers were shocked at “how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be.”

Another subject shouted, “I’m going to kill myself,” then turned on one of the scientists and said, “I’m going to kill you.” This person also fantasized about cannibalism and had to be removed from the experiment. “How many people have I hurt with my indifference, my grouchiness, my overbearing perversion for food?” one subject wrote. Many of the volunteers had hoped that self-abnegation would lead them, like monks, to a deeper spirituality, but instead they began conniving, stealing food, and coming to blows. The men lost their strength and stamina-each shedding roughly a quarter of his body weight-and they became irritable, depressed, and unable to concentrate. During a six-month period, 36 male volunteers-all were single, fit pacifists who had shown an ability to get along with others-had their calorie intake cut in half. In 1945, in one of the most comprehensive modern studies of human deprivation, known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, scientists assessed the effects of hunger on a group of individuals. Cheap knew that unity was paramount to their survival, intuiting a principle that science would later demonstrate.

The Wager by David Grann