Hey! Where'd he go?

If this were a song, that line might almost be the refrain. Because this is a story of continuous disappearances.

In the 1740s, when Britain was at war with Spain, George Anson was sent out with a small fleet to try to attack the Spanish in Latin America. Anson managed to capture a great Spanish treasure ship and make a complete circumnavigation of the globe -- but only one of his ships made it around the world with him, and the vast majority of his men died, usually of privation and disease. From a humanitarian standpoint, Anson's Voyage was a tragedy and a disaster, even if it made the survivors rich.

At least, it made the survivors who managed to stick with Anson rich. But others of his men were lost along the way. And, of them all, none had a harder time than those on the Wager, one of Anson's smaller ships, whose story is the subject of this book. After a difficult passage through Cape Horn, they were wrecked on a desolate shore in what is now Chile. (That was the first of several times they would lose sight of many of their comrades, as the other ships either continued with Anson or headed back to England.) After the wreck, the Wager's survivors had to decide what to do. The Wager's captain, David Cheap (the third captain she had had in a year; in the ordinary course of things, he was too junior to have commanded such a large ship) wanted to try to pursue Anson, who was long gone; the men wanted to head for home as best they could.

Cheap's behavior in this period was obsessive -- he even killed a sailor -- and the result was that the men turned against him and left him with a small party of supporters as the majority tried to make their way home under junior officers. This is known as the Wager Mutiny (so, e.g., the Wikipedia article on the subject), although no charges of mutiny were ever leveled. This book tells the stories of the various survivors of the mutiny as they made their way home -- Cheap, in Spanish custody; the mutineers, in their rebuilt longboat Speedwell, slowly losing men to starvation or just stranding them on assorted coast; a few reaching home by other means, and many of them dying. Hardly a chapter goes by without someone disappearing.

And the problem is, you'll probably be unable to remember who those lost men are. The real problem with this book is that it is full of names (Cheap, the captain; Byron, the charming midshipman; and Bulkeley, the rebellious gunner, being the most prominent), some of whom are very important -- but few of them feel like real people, and they don't linger in our minds as personalities. Nor is it easy to remember who they all are, because they have so little individuality. Their feelings and opinions don't come home to us very well -- and, by the end, they're scattered all over the globe, and the chronological pegs weren't enough to really give me the feeling of that the relationships between the parties was. This makes it hard for me to really know what to make of Pack's conclusions. He seems to say that, yes, it was mutiny, and he allows that it was necessary, but still, the men shouldn't have done it. Which makes very little sense. In the absence of a clear overall theme, this becomes little more than a catalog of tragedies -- sad, obviously, but with very little in the way of a lesson. I am forced to say that if you want to understand this sad event, you'd do better to read the relevant chapter of Glyn Williams's The Prize of All the Oceans: Anson's Voyage Around the World (which covers the entire expedition), or just the Wikipedia article on the Wager Mutiny. Neither tells the story in as much detail, but they make it much easier to understand. And they aren't written by naval officers -- Pack, a Royal Navy captain, takes a little too much of that attitude into this book. His stomach for retelling horrors was stronger than mine. His attitude may have been stronger and more troubling still. ( )