The Struggle to Become a Captain

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The British Navy brought George Anson 500 men from a pensioners home, a home for elderly or injured veterans. Many of them couldn't board the ships by themselves and had to be carried on with stretchers. Some press gangs would even wait in boats to capture sailors returning home on merchant ships. By the time the expedition departed, sailors were getting sick. It was typhus, or as they called it, ships fever.

There’s an old sailors’ saying about the ocean at the southernmost part of the world — “below 40 degrees latitude, there is no law; below 50 degrees, there is no God.”

David Grann brings us the story of what happened when five British warships set off on a secret mission to steal a ship filled with treasure. They’d have to sail around the very bottom of South America — at 56 degrees south.

David Grann’s book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

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Artwork by Julienne Alexander.

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