With most dissenters gone, Captain Cheap allies with the last seceders, forming a party of nineteen that includes John Byron, Campbell, Marine Lieutenant Hamilton, and Surgeon Elliot. Cheap seems revitalized, overseeing repairs to the yawl and barge and salvaging casks of beef while waiting for a weather break. Superstitions simmer as men believe an unburied murdered seaman is haunting them.

When a brief clearing appears on December 15, the party crowds into the open boats and departs Wager Island, bound through the Gulf of Pain toward Chiloé. A sudden gale buries the hulls and forces them to throw nearly all remaining provisions overboard to avoid sinking. They shelter briefly in a cove, endure freezing exposure, then press on, living on seaweed. After about nine days and nearly a hundred miles, they celebrate a meager Christmas of “Adam’s wine” before confronting a cape guarded by three towering cliffs.

Cheap orders repeated attempts to round the cape; each time currents and seas—“the white of whites”—drive them back. They retreat to a bay to recover, shoot a seal for food, and Byron fashions skin shoes for his frostbitten feet. That night a storm overturns the anchored yawl; one man drowns while Byron keeps the barge’s bow to the seas until daylight.

Now eighteen strong with only the barge, they cannot all continue. Four marines—Smith, Hobbs, Hertford, and Crosslet—are left ashore with arms and a frying pan, cheering the departing boat. Six weeks after leaving Wager Island they attempt the cape a third time; exhausted, they nearly drift into the breakers before Cheap compels one last pull. The men abandon hopes of doubling the cape.

They return to the bay to retrieve the marines but find only a musket; the men have vanished. Naming it Marine Bay, the survivors decide to go back to Wager Island. After nearly two months gone, they arrive starving; Byron eats his rancid sealskins, and some whisper about drawing lots but stop short. Seeking to quiet the “haunting,” they climb Mount Misery, bury the murdered seaman, and huddle again at their desolate outpost.