đ When Perseverance Gets People Pointlessly Killed
On Naval Press Gangs, HMS Wager, and Knowing When to Quit
Naval press gangs during the War of Jenkinsâ Ear make most modern-day conscription efforts look positively benign.
The first time I ever read about naval press gangs was in L.E. Modesittâs Imager Portfolio series. I forget which book it was, but the protagonist is a guard captain and mage who has to make sure things stay under control while the press gangs work their way through his district. Their arrival and procession through town (especially the poor part of town heâs responsible for) is historically met with community outrage, violence, and outright riots, but the tough-and-fair policeman-mage is able to enforce discipline. The conscriptions are viewed as a sort of unfortunate necessity, where only shiftless young men are taken, those without an apprenticeship or other vocation.
In Modesittâs world, press gangs are run by violent men not particularly interested in coddling civilian sensibilities, but theyâre neither wanton nor cruel. The marines (Iâm pretty sure itâs marines â but if I go look it up, Iâll never finish this article) take men who arenât contributing to society. They follow rules. Thereâs order and justice, even in coercion. The mage ensures discipline without brutality. Community outrage is acknowledged but managed. Itâs conscription with a human face.
I am not sure I would have believed you if you had told me a few days ago that the reality of press gangs in the era of The Wager made Modesittâs version look like polite invitations to a debutanteâs ball.
But yesterday I finally started reading âa1â best book of 2023: The Wager (affiliate link), written by David Grann. My husband had a coworker who raved about it so much he passed it over to me. Since then Iâve spoken to at least four people who read it and loved it.
Itâs not really a book about press gangs; itâs a book about one of the longest castaway voyages in history. Itâs about conflicting stories, the search for truth, the origins of philosophical takes on the state of nature. It also presents a rather interesting microcosm of class conflict.
But I canât stop thinking about the press gangs, so here we are.
Why Press Gangs?
The War of Jenkinsâ Ear was fought between Britain and Spain. The name comes from an incident in which Captain Robert Jenkins, a British merchant captain, supposedly had his ear cut off by Spanish coast guards. This sparked public outrage and became the pretext for the war. The Wagerâs mission was to steal a bunch of Spanish gold from a treasure ship, which is the sort of thing one normally associates with privateers but was in fact meant to be done wearing the royal colors.
The whole mission was spotty from the start. Wager herself was originally a trading vessel; the Navy bought her and had her outfitted as a sixth-rate frigate. Given that Great Britain had no military conscription and the Navy had used up all its volunteers, this strikes me as an enormous waste of money. But the Navy was determined, and so the Admiralty dispatched armed gangs to press âseafaring menâ into service. Local authorities were ordered to âseize all straggling seamen, watermen, bargemen, fishermen and lightermen.â
Grann writes about how merchant sailors came into port after months at sea. They were basically kidnapped before they even had a chance to see their families. Imagine sailing home after a year away, spotting the familiar coastline, thinking about your wife and children waiting at the dock. Then a Navy press gang â which had men watching the horizon for your ship to come in â drags you onto a warship bound for South America. You wouldnât get to hug your mom or kiss your wife or even collect your pay. You wouldnât even get to tell your family you were still alive.
In Modesittâs version, only shiftless young men without prospects are taken. In reality, fathers returning to their families were kidnapped at the dock. The shiftless young men had already volunteered. The sea was where shiftless young men usually ran off to!
Who Got Taken?
Wagerâs future Captain â ironically named Cheap â believed that a good sailor must possess âhonour, courage, [and] steadiness.â Meanwhile, an admiral described one bunch of press-ganged recruits as being âfull of the pox, itch, lame, Kingâs 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 birds, and the very filth of London.â He concluded, âIn 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 donât know how to describe it.â
But it got worse.
The manpower situation got so bad that the Admiralty ordered old, sick men turned out of their retirement homes to serve. To at least partly address the shortage of men, the government sent to the Wagerâs squadron five hundred invalid soldiers from the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, a pensionerâs home established in the seventeenth century for veterans who had become âold, lame, or infirmâ in service of the Crown.
Many were in their sixties and seventies. 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. Some literally couldnât walk. The shipsâ complements were riddled with disease â they overflowed the local hospitals and ended up sleeping three to a cot in nearby taverns.
After the squadron leader dismissed some of the most infirm men, his superiors ordered them back onboard.
In Modesittâs fantasy world, conscription targeted young men capable of service. During the War of Jenkinsâ Ear, elderly men who literally could not even walk were forced into doomed voyages halfway around the world.
Who Forced This?
Sane leadership would have aborted or at least delayed the mission â not least of which because the mission was not exactly necessary to deal with an existential threat. Remember: their mission was to capture a Spanish treasure ship.
Think about that for a moment. The Navy couldnât crew its ships. It had to kidnap sailors from incoming merchant vessels and press invalid pensioners into service. Men who could barely walk were being sent on a years-long voyage around Cape Horn, one of the most dangerous passages in the world. And for what? Not to defend England from invasion. Not to protect trade routes vital to the nationâs survival. To steal Spanish gold in loose retaliation for a (bunch of, if weâre being fair) British merchant(s) getting punished after (allegedly, I suppose) smuggling contraband in the West Indies.
I say loose because near as I can tell the primary reason for the war was domestic politics; a decisive factor in the path to war was the campaign by the Tory opposition to remove the Whig government.
Who Suffered?
After it finally â after many painful months in dry-dock â shipped out, Wager wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. When the survivors finally made it back to England â in two separate ships, crewed by bitterly opposed competing factions â they told stories of filth, starvation and freezing temperatures. At one point, the sailors built an outpost and tried to re-create naval order. But as their situation deteriorated, these guys descended into a Hobbesian state of depravity. There were warring factions and marauders and abandonments and murders. A few of the men turned to cannibalism.
Itâs ironic that Hobbes died decades before the wreck of the Wager, because this voyage inspired some of the greatest thinkers and writers of the following centuries. Reports of the expedition circulated widely and fed Enlightenment debates; writers such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu engaged with related themes of nature, society, and governance. Charles Darwin and two of the great novelists of the sea, Herman Melville and Patrick OâBrian, were influenced as well.
But as far as Iâm concerned, HMS Wagerâs story is less about âthe natural state of manâ and is fundamentally about a failure of leadership. And I donât blame the captains2, either â while Captain Cheap was transferred aboard under difficult circumstances, and his deep unpopularity with the crew was probably unavoidable, some of that could have been avoided with saner rules about how the chain of command worked when a ship sank.
The Admiralty knew the mission was understaffed. They knew the crew was made up of invalids, criminals, and kidnapped sailors. They knew men couldnât walk. They knew the ships were riddled with disease. They knew all of this, and they sent them anyway.
When the squadron leader tried to dismiss the most infirm men, his superiors ordered them back onboard. I can only assume that high-level leadership confused stubbornness with manly resolve, and men â good and bad, but certainly deserving better from their government â paid with their lives.
Good leadership requires knowing when to quit. A leader who canât change course, who canât admit a mistake, who confuses pivot with failure, isnât strong. Theyâre dangerous.
The Admiralty could have delayed the mission. They could have waited for proper crews. They could have scaled back the objectives to match available resources. They could have acknowledged that sending invalid pensioners on a multi-year voyage to steal Spanish gold was neither necessary nor wise. Instead, they pressed forward, and the result was a completely predictable catastrophe.
When the Captain found out that the Spanish knew about their objective and were actively hunting the squadron even before they left the European coast, somebody could have aborted the (doomed) mission. But in this culture, quitting was considered cowardice â and indeed, the one officer who does beg leave to go home due to illness was later condemned as a coward for retreating in the face of battle when made Captain of another ship.
I get why militaries of this era had this sort of dogged determination deep in their marrow; it takes rigid discipline and insane bravery to march into massed rifle fire.
But nobody let the ill commoners go home. And when they finally made it home after an insanely harrowing voyage, the Admiralty put them on trial. I havenât gotten to the part where I find out who got hanged, but I assume it wasnât the Lords who ordered them so foolishly west.
Who Can Learn From This?
These days most of the public debate is about whether to go to college or into a trade. Thereâs discourse about whether regular sex with your spouse is oppressive. We debate which workplace dynamics constitute dignity-destroying propositions. Meanwhile the men of the Wager faced kidnapping, beatings, disease, starvation, and near-certain death on a mission that should never have launched.
The lesson? Sometimes perseverance gets people killed.
We venerate perseverance. We celebrate grit. We tell stories about people who refused to give up, who pushed through adversity, who kept going when everyone else quit. And there are good reasons for this! Sometimes those stories end in triumph. Some guys who pushed the odds beyond all reason advanced humanity beyond measure. David Senraâs conversations with the greatest living founders is full of inspirational stories along those lines.
But sometimes âperseveranceâ stories end in horror.
In Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke wrote about the psychological barriers that make people persist even when they should stop. The sunk cost fallacy, the social pressure, the hit to our pride. But the decision to walk away is often the wisest choice we can make; certainly Iâve never regretted a breakup, only how long the decision took me to make.
The trick, of course, lies in knowing when to give up.
As Allie Volpe pointed out in her excellent article about The Art of Quitting, some ventures canât be quit lightly. Caregiving and parenting come with responsibilities that transcend our personal cost-benefit analysis. Quitting a job without alternatives when others depend on you is not always a good idea. But recognizing these constraints is different from letting them paralyze us in situations where walking away is the smart move.
Quitting can be an opportunity to reclaim time and rethink what no longer serves you, if youâve given it a fair shot. Anne-Laure Le Cunffâs framing of performing Tiny Experiments has made that easier for me. Itâs okay to close a business, even if others would consider it a massive failure; my brother did it several times before he died, and in the end the bankruptcies were the right choice for him.
Itâs okay to leave a career path that looked promising on paper but makes you miserable in practice. Itâs okay that I quit teaching when I no longer believed my superiors were allowing me to serve the needs of the children, even though those same superiors tried very hard to twist the knife of guilt to keep me to stay.
Oh, of course the counterpoint matters too. Donât leave a promising company too soon, itâll stunt your trajectory. Donât leave your husband the first time things get hard (especially not if youâre a year to either side of giving birth; the hormones are whack but not to be trusted!). Give things a fair shot. But thereâs a world of difference between âthings are hard but weâre making progressâ and âweâre sailing to our deaths on a mission that never made sense.â
The Wagerâs crew faced impossible odds from the start. Veteran sailors were so ill they couldnât walk⌠and a huge chunk of the other sailors werenât even old veterans, they were landlubber prison dregs. The Wager wasnât even a proper warship, it was a converted merchantman. Tons of warning signs were there. But leadership pushed forward anyway, and the result was murder, cannibalism, and catastrophe.
What Do We Owe Each Other?
Iâve spent the last day thinking about those recently-docked merchant sailors, dragged into military service before they laid eyes on their families. Old men who should have been comfortably put out to pasture, lifted onto ships on stretchers, knowing they were being sent pointlessly to die. I think about the young midshipman John Byron (who would go on to become the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron), watching all of this unfold. I hope that Modesittâs vision of military conscription is the more accurate one, and fear it is not.
What does it mean to lead responsibly? At minimum, it means not sending people on missions doomed from the start. It means knowing when to quit, and when not to push people past their breaking point.
The Wagerâs story is an important reminder that when an objective is so unattainable it tempts us into extreme measures â like press-ganging bedridden men into service! â we should stop and reflect. Whether itâs in 18th-century naval expeditions or 21st-century workplace cultures that grind people down, there are times when something is better named foolery than Protestant work ethic, determination, or good ole-fashioned gumption.
Further Reading
If youâd like to see the first draft of this article, here it is in all its handwritten glory.
Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans by Brian Fagan (affiliate link) remains my favorite naval history book, because I am actually an ancient history nerd, not an Age of Sail nerd like most of my friends.
If you hate books but love interviews, NPR did a pretty good one with David Grann and it covers a lot of the same historic content about the Wager. Thereâs audio and a transcript, and a wonderfully descriptive title: âThe Wagerâ chronicles shipwreck, mutiny and murder at the tip of South America
Seriously, this is how Amazon lists it: âA Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, TIME, Smithsonian, NPR, Vulture, Kirkus Reviews.â Remember when words like âaâ and âtheâ had meaning? Sigh.
The Wikipedia article mangles it a bit, I think. From what I understand, Captain Dandy Kidd was the Wagerâs original Captain. He got promoted to the bigger Pearl when Captain Norris begged leave to go back to England instead of making the voyage. George Murray took over for him. Then, when Kidd died during the voyage, Murray was promoted to the Pearl, leaving the Wager to now-Captain David Cheap, who had never been in charge of a man-of-war and indeed started the voyage as a lieutenant.
Also - my key question about all of this would be, were The Wager's (and its squadron more generally) conditions that different/exceptional than the typical British Navy seafaring adventure of the time?
It kind of seems like my takeaway from the book was "Not really, that's just sort of how it was back then" but yours seems to be "Yes, absolutely, this PARTICULAR venture was exceptionally ill-fated and thus should have been postponed or cancelled."
Put differently, the question would be - if the British Navy had adopted a policy of "We will only approve relatively safe missions wherein manpower is available, widespread disease is unlikely, etc." would they have approved any missions at all?
the United States went to war with England over "pressing" The British Nave was capturing US Navy and Merchant Vessels, and forcing the US Sailors into their Navy. It was a common thing for them.