MASTER
AND
COMMANDER


When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamored—until they learned that the band’s leader ruled with an iron fist.

By Peter Ward

The Atavist Magazine, No. 172


Peter Ward’s writing has appeared in GQ, The Atlantic, Wired, The Guardian, and other publications. He explored the privatization of space in his first book, The Consequential Frontier, and reported on billionaires and biohackers pursuing eternal life in his second, The Price of Immortality. He lives in the United Kingdom.

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Marta Campabadal Graus
Illustrator: Patrik Svensson

Published in February 2026.

1.

Come all you young sailormen, listen to me
I’ll sing you a song of the fish in the sea, and it’s
Windy weather, boys, stormy weather, boys
When the wind blows we’re all together, boys
—“Fish in the Sea,” Scottish fisherman’s shanty

As dawn broke on a crisp morning in May 2021, two large passenger vans pulled into the cobbled square of Caerwys, a town in North Wales. The vehicles parked outside Hereford House, a grand Victorian-era building, and a mass of figures emerged sleepily, lugging suitcases and mountains of musical equipment. They were bearded and bedraggled, outsiders in Caerwys, which has fewer than a thousand inhabitants, most of them elderly. Caerwys, like many small towns in the United Kingdom, is the kind of place where curtains twitch, gossip thrives, and news travels abnormally fast. Residents near Hereford House who spied the visitors that morning may have wondered what their arrival portended for the town.

By the afternoon, an answer was pouring into the square: the sounds of whistles and bagpipes, drums and fiddles, lively disruptions to the town’s usual peace. The visitors were lodging at Hereford House and also using its ground floor as a practice space. They were musicians in a band called the Old Time Sailors, from Argentina, and they were embarking on their first UK tour.

Erica Burney lived just off the town square. A singer who performed locally, she also ran a catering business out of On the Corner Café, a Caerwys eatery. Soon after the band arrived, Burney ran into Russ Williams, the landlord of Hereford House. He told her a terrible tale: The band had endured a nightmare journey from South America to Europe. Pandemic restrictions had forced them to detour to Turkey and then Albania, and they’d arrived months later than planned. In addition to the gigs they’d missed from the delay, their tour faced continuing restrictions on indoor gatherings, causing pubs to close and forcing live entertainment outdoors. Williams asked: Could Burney help them? Drum up some goodwill and publicity?

He introduced her to the band’s leader, Nicolás Andrés Guzmán. Tall and powerfully built, with jet-black hair, a voluminous beard, and a slickly styled mustache, Guzmán oversaw a crew of seventeen musicians. To them he was the Captain. During the band’s performances he played the accordion. When Burney expressed sympathy for the problems the band had encountered, Guzmán replied, in near perfect English, that he had instructed lawyers to investigate. That struck Burney as odd. “You’re not fucking U2,” she recalled thinking.

On June 1, Burney met the full band at Hereford House. They wore their performance attire: a white cotton work shirt layered with a vest and a jacket, tucked into either trousers or a kilt, and accessorized with a leather belt, a neckerchief, and a jaunty cap. True to their name, they looked like sailors plucked from a nineteenth-century ship. They played music to match—sea shanties, mostly, dating back hundreds of years.

The band shuffled into place so Burney could take photos and film them playing, then she posted the content to the town’s Facebook page. “So, as some of you will have no doubt heard, we have a merry band of sailors in town!” she wrote. “Of all the places they could have chosen to stay, I hope we can make them glad they chose here.” 

It was strange, this motley group of musicians showing up in Caerwys, cosplaying as seafarers of yore. Strange, that is, if you weren’t on TikTok. The Old Time Sailors were riding the phenomenon known as ShantyTok, which exploded in early 2021, after a Scottish postal worker named Nathan Evans posted a video of himself belting out a traditional shanty and pounding a table in time with the music. The video went viral, and soon other TikTok users were harmonizing with Evans and posting their own shanty covers.

Shanties originated as work songs to accompany repetitive, laborious tasks such as raising sails and lowering anchors, and they’re earworms by design. They have audience-friendly, foot-tapping rhythms—what shall we do with a drunken sailor / early in the morning—and often feature call and response, where a chorus of singers answer a lead vocalist. Media coverage attributed the advent of ShantyTok to the pandemic. “They are unifying, survivalist songs,” one critic wrote, “designed to transform a huge group of people into one collective body.” Trapped at home, staring at their computers and phones, shanties offered people a common, joyful cause.

After a period of enforced isolation in Caerwys to ensure that none of them had COVID, the Old Time Sailors put on their first local show at a glamping venue called Penbedw Estate. They yelled, stomped their feet, and sang at the top of their lungs as roughly fifty people watched and some joined in. The Sailors’ energy was infectious, anarchic. On the town’s Facebook page, one enthusiastic commenter, a fan of shanties well before they took TikTok by storm, declared, “These guys have torn up the rule book!”

The band planned to stay in Caerwys for a few months, using it as a base of operations. Soon they were drinking maté in the square and joining jam sessions with a local band of ukulele players. Friendships formed. One of them was between Alex Sganga, the band’s lead violinist, and Roland Ward, the warden for St. Michael’s Church, an eighth-century stone building that dominates the Caerwys skyline. Ward is my father, and despite previously showing little enthusiasm for popular music beyond the Beach Boys, he regularly sent me photos and videos of the Sailors’ performances. Like others in the community, he quickly developed a passion for the band. “They captured the imagination of people,” he told me. “And the individual band members won them over. Instead of being intruders, they saw them as good musicians—sociable, friendly people.”

Griffith sensed tension between the band members and Guzmán, and he noticed that the individual Sailors seemed to be scraping by. “They had nothing,” he said.

My dad invited Sganga to perform a solo concert of Irish and Argentinean folk music before his packed church, then organized another show for the whole band at Penbedw Estate. This time there were more than three hundred attendees, each of whom paid ten pounds (about $15) to be there. The profits would be used for building repairs at St. Michael’s.

My father was so enamored of the band that he persuaded a national TV station to send a camera crew and reporter to the Penbedw show. But as they set up their equipment for interviews, Guzmán was nowhere to be found. According to my dad, when he called the Captain on his cell phone, he was defensive, speaking as if the televised gig were being forced upon him. Guzmán finally showed up to be filmed, but he replied to questions hesitantly, like he didn’t speak English well.

Steve Griffith, a grizzled former detective enjoying a peaceful retirement in Caerwys, was one of the Sailors’ biggest fans and a member of the ukulele band that sometimes played with them. Like my dad, he helped them book shows. “As we got to know them a bit more, we were finding out that the majority of them were classically trained musicians,” Griffith said. “They were something else.” Yet Griffith also felt as if the musicians “were guarding something.” He sensed tension between the band members and Guzmán, and he noticed that the individual Sailors seemed to be scraping by. “They had nothing,” he said.

A few weeks into the Sailors’ stay in Caerwys, the UK’s pandemic restrictions eased, which allowed the band to book shows across the country. They were soon gone six nights a week, and sometimes played two shows a day. The shows were dynamic, sweaty affairs that left the musicians exhausted. From the windows of her home, Burney noticed that they almost always returned in the early-morning hours. The grueling schedule was made all the more so, according to several former band members, by Guzmán’s insistence that they practice for long hours when they were in Caerwys.

One evening that August, Burney visited Hereford House and sang with the band during a rehearsal. From across the room, she locked eyes with a man playing two small drums, named Jorge Fernández. (The Atavist is using a pseudonym for this individual out of concern for his safety.) When the rehearsal ended, Fernández grabbed his guitar and asked Burney if she would sing just for him. He strummed a Nat King Cole song, which she knew well: Smile, though your heart is aching / Smile, even though it’s breaking. Fernández told me he thought Burney was “a siren, the most beautiful girl in the village.”

Burney invited Fernández and his bandmate Claudio Toscanini over to her house. They drank, smoked weed, sang, and talked, until Fernández told Toscanini to make his excuses and leave. Toscanini returned a short time later bearing a message from Guzmán: Fernández was out too late and had to return to Hereford House. Burney thought the message was strange, but Fernández paid it no heed. “He told him to fuck off and we had a snog,” Burney said.

She later learned that Guzmán had strict rules for the band. Fernández had violated a nightly curfew, after which band members weren’t even supposed to leave their rooms at Hereford House to go to the toilet. There was also a prohibition on romantic attachments within the band while on tour. The latter was a rule that, according to multiple sources, Guzmán himself didn’t seem to follow. Eighteen-year-old Lola Weschler, a singer and bodhran player, was the band’s only female member and appeared to be Guzmán’s girlfriend—despite his introduction of another woman, who designed the band’s promotional materials, as his wife. Weschler’s father, Daniel, was also in the band and texted Guzmán one day when he was looking for his daughter. “Tell Lola to turn on her cell phone so I can call her,” he wrote in Spanish in a message that was later shared with me. Guzmán sent a string of short, angry replies. “Dani, I’m fucking,” he wrote. “Don’t call out of nowhere, dude. Don’t be annoying.” (When I reached out to Guzmán for an interview, he refused to speak with me, threatened legal action, and blocked my number. He later declined to answer detailed fact-checking questions on the record.)

Money was the biggest source of conflict between the Sailors and the Captain. When recruiting musicians in Argentina, Guzmán had allegedly promised them up to $600 per month for the UK tour, though band members told me that rates varied and Guzmán refused to draft official contracts. Most of the Sailors paid for their own transatlantic plane tickets, a big expenditure for gig musicians. They said they were told that they would eventually be reimbursed, but once the band was in Caerwys, Guzmán was slow to issue payments of any kind.

Guitarist Matías Vergara told me he threatened to quit after he learned that he would only get half the money he was promised when he joined the band in Buenos Aires. He and Guzmán argued about the payment until, according to Vergara, Guzmán kicked him out of the Sailors. Vergara stayed with Steve Griffith, with whom he’d become friendly, for a week before leaving the UK. “Mati was quite upset about it all,” Griffith said. “This guy was just driving them into the ground.”

Before Vergara flew home, he got a voice message from Guzmán, which was later shared with me. “If I see you in Caerwys, I will beat you to death,” Guzmán said. “I’m not exaggerating. Don’t get close to me, because I’ll murder you.”

As Guzmán was losing band members, he also gained a photographer. Lizzie Ferdinando was a mainstay of the British pirate community, a niche social circle of people who don eyepatches and tricorn hats and meet up to drink beer and listen to folk music. Think Renaissance fairs but for pirate fans. The biggest events draw thousands of revelers. In 2012, more than fourteen thousand people in the town of Hastings set the Guinness World Record for the largest single gathering of pirates.

Ferdinando saw the Old Time Sailors for the first time at a July 2021 gig, and she fell in love with the band. “They put on a really good show,” she said. She talked to Guzmán about becoming the band’s full-time photographer and was so enthralled that she offered to do so without pay. The Captain said she’d need to move to Caerwys, because the band couldn’t pick her up every time they had a show. In early fall, Ferdinando moved into Hereford House.

She soon became concerned with the way the band were living. They worked hard, ate little, barely slept, and seemed utterly depleted. Several members told her that Guzmán had yet to pay them the wages they were owed. She could quit and go home at any time, but for most of the Sailors that wasn’t so easy. Flights to Argentina were expensive. The musicians didn’t have savings they could tap into or families with the means to help them. They were effectively trapped in a foreign country and wholly dependent on a man who allegedly wouldn’t pay them. Ferdinando began to wonder if Guzmán might be in violation of UK labor laws. “I said, I’ve got to stick October out to get, if nothing else, just all the evidence of what’s going on,” she told me. October was the final month of the tour.

One day, as Marcelo Salusky was playing his double bass at a gig, he began to feel faint. Back in Caerwys, he stayed in bed for two days. When he showed no signs of improvement, he was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with COVID and a lung infection. He was given antibiotics and told to rest, but he was back on stage three days later. When Fernández came down with a fever and cough, which turned out to be symptoms of COVID, he wanted to stay at Burney’s to convalesce, but according to Fernández, Guzmán wouldn’t allow it. Fernández said the Captain yelled at him for getting sick.

On October 28, the band performed their last show of the tour. It was in Caerwys, at the town hall, an old brick building crammed between modest homes. The community turned out in force to bid farewell to their guests. The ukulele group performed, as did Burney, and videos posted to the town’s Facebook page toasted the Sailors’ talents. Many locals hoped they would return the following year for another tour.

Despite performing alongside the Sailors, Burney quietly seethed over the way Guzmán treated the band, and Fernández in particular. The couple agreed not to confront the Captain, preferring to keep matters friendly until Fernández had secured his salary, even though that went against Burney’s fiery instincts. “I sent Nicholas a lovely message at the end of the tour saying, ‘I admire what you’ve done, blah, blah, blah,’ because I wanted Jorge to get his fucking money,” Burney said. But according to Fernández, that never happened.

2.

Now the Captain’s a wicked man
He gets drunk whenever he can
And he don’t give a damn for grandpappy and me
He kicks us around
And he knocks us about
Well I feel so broke up, I want to go home
—“Sloop John B.,” Bahamian folk song

The exact origins of the Old Time Sailors are hard to pin down. Some people I spoke to said Guzmán started the group. Others said he took it over. Guzmán’s own history is also shrouded in mystery. According to differing accounts, he holds a degree in psychology, lived in the United States for years, married an actress, and once considered suicide before the sound of Irish folk music gave his life meaning. Several former band members feared repercussions for talking to me, believing Guzmán had political or underworld connections that could make their lives in Argentina difficult. I found no conclusive evidence of such ties and began to wonder if the tales originated with Guzmán himself.

What’s certain is that many of the early band members had a background in Celtic folk music, and they wanted to go on the UK tour because the money they were promised was good. Argentina has been in financial crisis for the better part of a decade. Between 2017 and 2020, the country’s GDP plummeted and inflation soared. Amid economic uncertainty made worse by the pandemic, Guzmán offered musicians a steady, well-paying gig—and in Europe, no less.

But three musicians from the 2021 tour went on to file lawsuits against Guzmán, alleging that he failed to pay them and exploited their labor. The plaintiffs were Marcelo Salusky, the bass player who got sick; Daniel Weschler, Lola’s father; and Alberto Lamberti, a mandolin player. In his lawsuit, Lamberti claimed that Guzmán owed him $2,800 in wages, or about 80 percent of Argentina’s average household income in 2021. Lamberti told me that the UK tour “destroyed” him. He spent six months performing, rehearsing, and abiding by bizarrely draconian rules—one being that the musicians should brush their teeth three times a day—and had virtually nothing to show for it. “I lost my faith in humanity,” Lamberti said.

“Mr. Guzmán, more than anything, rigorously commanded—and in writing—when and how to go to the bathroom, with whom they could speak and with whom they could not, what they could eat, what they could not,” Weschler’s lawsuit reads. “Moreover, he insulted the musicians, with denigrating statements and constant threats to the plaintiff at the slightest dissent.”

Fernández didn’t file a suit against Guzmán, but he told me that when he inquired about his back wages, Guzmán said his pay was being reduced because he’d contracted COVID. Then Guzmán allegedly said he wouldn’t pay Fernández in full unless he agreed to join the band on its next UK tour, which was slated to begin late in the spring of 2022. Fernández refused.

Ultimately, only four musicians—less than a quarter of the band—signed on again for the 2022 tour. The rest warned friends and colleagues about the Captain, but the pool of talented Argentine musicians in need of money was deep, and Guzmán had no trouble finding new recruits. Fifteen fresh faces joined the Sailors in preparation for their return to the UK. Lucas Ordóñez was one of them.

Ordóñez is a mandolin player, and he was twenty-nine when he saw an ad for musicians posted by the Sailors. He liked their music and was intrigued by the idea of traveling internationally. Guzmán warned him that the tour would be intense. He said Ordóñez would need to master more than a hundred songs in preparation. Ordóñez, a respected folk musician in Buenos Aires, relished the challenge. The pay enticed him even further. The financial arrangements varied, but most musicians were again offered $600 per month, plus food and accommodation. Like their predecessors, Ordóñez and his bandmates would need to pay for their flights. Guzmán allegedly described this as insurance against people abandoning the group when they arrived in the UK, and said that the musicians would eventually be reimbursed.

In March 2022, Ordóñez received his first $600 payment. It was a good wage for almost anyone in Argentina, and an excellent one for a musician. Then, just prior to departure, the band members were presented with a contract, which contained more than financial terms. It had a list of rules, and the consequences for breaking them were explained in full. After an initial warning, band members found to be violating the rules would be docked 5 percent of their total income for the tour. Further violations could incur a punishment of up to 50 percent and even expulsion from the group. One rule stated that the musicians could not “play in the village church,” referring to St. Michael’s, where Sganga had performed the previous year. Another directive had to do with Ferdinando, the British photographer, presumably as a result of her refusal to remove the watermark from the photos she’d taken on the 2021 tour because of Guzmán’s alleged treatment of the musicians. Band members were instructed not to “have any type of communication, whether in person, through networks, letters, email, telephone, and others, with Lizzie Ferdinando.” The same proscription applied to former members of the band.

According to the musicians I spoke to, they’d already bought their plane tickets by the time they received the contract, and felt they had little choice but to sign. Along with everything else in the document, they agreed to not “contradict the Captain in public” or “speak badly of ‘Old Time Sailors,’ or of any band member, including the Captain.”

Meanwhile, in Caerwys, locals were gearing up for the band’s arrival, but not in the joyful spirit of the sendoff from the previous fall. During the months the Sailors had been away, residents who were close to the musicians had told their neighbors about what they saw as Guzmán’s ill treatment of the band. Some people said that they’d boycott the Sailors’ shows. Steve Griffith went so far as to contact the UK Border Agency, hoping that the government would block the band’s entry into the country—he alleged that Guzmán had brought in the last bunch of musicians on tourist visas when they should have had work papers. “I got really disillusioned with the authorities here, because I phoned them—it wasn’t just once, I phoned them on a number of occasions,” Griffith recalled. He also suggested that Russ Williams cancel the band’s booking at Hereford House, but Williams said he hated the thought of breaking an agreement. And when Griffith asked former band members to make written statements about their experiences the previous year, hoping he might furnish them to UK authorities, they refused. “They were all too bloody scared of him,” Griffith said.

When the 2022 Sailors arrived in Caerwys, Griffith vowed to keep an eye out for evidence that Guzmán was exploiting the musicians. Erica Burney did the same. When she saw Lola Weschler, one of the few musicians from the previous tour to come back, she was immediately concerned. She was “painfully thin,” with “sunken eyes,” Burney said. “You know when you look at a girl if she’s miserable. And it was clear she was miserable.” Burney heard from a former band member that Weschler’s father, Daniel, feared for his daughter’s safety, because Lola was allegedly still in a relationship with Guzmán.

Burney took photos of the license plates on the band’s vans, hoping they might help law enforcement track the Sailors’ movements if Guzmán were ever investigated. While scoping out the vehicles, Burney was surprised to see a new addition to the band’s fleet: a large motor home. She later learned that it was apparently for Guzmán’s exclusive use, a place for him to sleep when the band traveled.

Unlike the first tour, the Sailors didn’t return to Caerwys each night after a gig. They often slept in their vans while parked at service stations, or in the open air on the side of the road. Some of them used sleeping bags and tents. Ordóñez was shocked by the conditions, which he said left the musicians exposed. “I remember hugging my mandolin while I slept,” he told me, “so that when I woke up in the morning, it would still be there.”

Before long, the Sailors decamped from Caerwys entirely, shifting their base of operations twenty miles west to Old Colwyn, where a friend of Guzmán’s lived. After the move, according to Ordóñez, the band’s situation deteriorated further. Their meals, which were prepared by a member of Guzmán’s inner circle in the band, had been meager to begin with. After the move, Ordóñez said, they were often served cold, and the portions shrank.

To make matters worse, the rules in the contract the musicians had signed stated that they could not “take food from the refrigerator outside of the assigned meal times.” As a result, the musicians were constantly hungry. Ordóñez told me that there were times he begged strangers for food. Several musicians fell ill from the exhausting performance schedule. Ordóñez recalled playing a show in Cardiff with a fever of 105 degrees. “It was as if they were testing how far we could go, constantly pushing the limits of the human body,” he said.

Ordóñez developed a reputation as a troublemaker, questioning Guzmán’s orders and raising concerns about the band’s living conditions. According to a lawsuit Ordóñez later filed in Argentina, when he sought payment after the first month of the tour, Guzmán attempted to hit him and yelled at him in front of his bandmates.

Then one night, Guzmán gathered the entire band in a circle for what Ordóñez called “a sailor’s tribunal.” According to band members who were present, it was essentially a shaming exercise dressed up as old-school maritime justice, hearkening back to a time when captains were judge and jury over the men under their command. Guzmán allegedly described Ordóñez’s infractions, and other accusers joined him. They were so-called “core members” of the Sailors, all close with the Captain, and they allegedly received special privileges and snitched on musicians who violated Guzmán’s rules. Now they pointed the finger at Ordóñez. “Psychologically, it was very troubling,” Ordóñez said. “They accused me of all sorts of things—of stealing food, of disrespecting others, of being violent.”

According to two other band members who were present that night, the core members also declared their devotion to Guzmán. One stood up and announced he would “suck Nick’s dick if he asked me to.” A silence fell over the group as the man sat back down.

Eventually, Guzmán issued a verdict: Ordóñez would no longer be informed of the band’s schedule. He would have to go where he was taken, no questions asked. From that point on, according to Ordóñez, he rarely knew where in the UK he was or where he was going next. He told me that even the drivers of the vans wouldn’t tell him. “I was kidnapped,” he said. Like the majority of the band, Ordóñez had a cell phone, but he couldn’t afford the UK’s data rates, and he was never able to connect to Wi-Fi long enough to learn where he was.

Ordóñez knew he needed someone with the means and the know-how, someone who spoke fluent English, to extricate him from the Sailors. He managed to reach out to former band members in Argentina, who in turn got in touch with Lizzie Ferdinando. She offered to help. The Hastings Pirate Festival was coming up, and the Sailors were scheduled to perform there. Ferdinando planned to locate Ordóñez at the festival and offer her aid.

The Hastings festival is a raucous scene. In addition to drunken merriment, people perform elaborate reenactments of sea battles, with cutlass-carrying pirates firing cannons from replicas of seventeenth-century ships. Attendees tend to dress as swashbucklers in the vein of Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, or as characters from the popular Starz show Black Sails. Ferdinando went another route, one that would fully conceal her identity.

Ordóñez was standing in a plaza where the band had just played when a woman approached him. She was wearing a furry, snub-nosed mask resembling a pug, along with a black pirate hat. “I’m Lizzie,” she said. “I’m here to help you.” Ordóñez had never met Ferdinando, and before he could learn who she was, several other band members walked over. So did Guzmán. Ferdinando wasn’t sure whether he recognized her; if he did, he didn’t let on. She made a quick exit, because she didn’t want Ordóñez to get in trouble for speaking to her.

Other people tried to assist the musicians. In Caerwys, residents were still concerned about the former tenants of Hereford House. Armed with photos of license plates, testimonies from former band members, and even a screenshot of Guzmán’s passport she’d managed to obtain, Burney called a national hotline for suspected cases of modern slavery. The hotline was an outgrowth of the Modern Slavery Act of 2015, heralded as one of the most progressive laws of its kind in Europe. Few reports, however, result in convictions—only around 2 percent. Alleged victims are often wary of testifying. But victims were exactly what the woman who answered the hotline told Burney she needed. For the state to investigate Guzmán, it required testimony. Band members would have to come forward. Burney explained why this would be difficult if not impossible for the musicians. The woman told her there was little she could do. To Burney, it felt like “no one wanted to help.”

Ferdinando had also called the modern slavery hotline, shortly after the 2021 tour ended, on behalf of the musicians in the band. She said the authorities’ response had been similarly underwhelming. The calls may have piqued law enforcement’s interest, however. According to Ordóñez and other musicians, as the 2022 tour continued, police stopped the band’s vehicles on several occasions and asked whether the musicians considered themselves victims of exploitation. No one stepped forward—several band members told me they were afraid of Guzmán, afraid of being deported, afraid of never getting paid.

When Ordóñez and another musician finally decided to cut their losses and abandon the band after a gig, they had their own run-in with law enforcement in the town of Shrewsbury, where they were detained on suspicion of immigration violations. Ordóñez tried to explain what was happening inside the band but suspects the police had trouble understanding his English. He also wondered whether Guzmán had something to do with his detention. Perhaps the Captain wanted revenge for Ordóñez’s early departure from the band.

After they were released from custody, Ordóñez and his bandmate decided to do odd jobs until they earned enough money to go home. They weren’t the only ones to escape: Around the same time, Lola Weschler fled the band. According to several ex-members of the Sailors, Guzmán could be aggressive toward Weschler, screaming at her until she cried. The people who helped her get out asked that I not reveal any details about how they did it, out of concern for their and especially Weschler’s safety. “There were good moments that had nice colors and bad moments that felt like hell,” Weschler wrote me of her time in the Sailors. “I felt broken inside.”

Once he was back in Argentina, Ordóñez filed his lawsuit against Guzmán, accusing him of withholding payment and demanding compensation for physical and psychological harm. He also began referring to the Sailors as a cult. “People developed a kind of devotion toward [Guzmán], like he was an ideal to be worshipped,” he said. “He manipulated people until they were entirely dependent on him, and it became increasingly dangerous.”

The Sailors lived on, and the same pattern repeated itself. When the 2022 tour ended, Guzmán recruited new musicians in Argentina to return to the UK the following spring. This time the band stayed in a shed-like structure without a bathroom in Devon. A video shared on Facebook by one of the musicians shows thin mattresses laid on a concrete floor. The caption describes how “the rats came to visit us at night,” and asserts that the band members were only given a plate of noodles to eat each day. According to musicians I interviewed, they received a third of the wages Guzmán had offered them. But as the band suffered behind the scenes, their music was more popular than ever. The Sailors’ packed schedule that year included several sets at the popular Glastonbury Festival.

When the tour wrapped, Guzmán was already looking ahead to 2024. By then Burney had realized that she’d have to bide her time if she wanted to see justice. The Captain “had to get so arrogant,” she said, “that he was going to make a stupid mistake.”

3.

I hate to sail on this rotten tub
Leave her Johnny, leave her
No grog allowed and rotten grub
And it’s time for us to leave her
Leave her Johnny, leave her
Oh leave her Johnny, leave her
For the voyage is long and the winds don’t blow
And it’s time for us to leave her
—“Leave Her Johnny,” a traditional sea shanty

Amy Harrison was a 26-year-old actress struggling to find work in London when she saw an Instagram post announcing that the Old Time Sailors were looking for singers for their 2024 UK tour. She figured she’d audition; she had nothing to lose. “I’ve been rejected from all these other things, so let’s just get rejected from a shanty band as well and then we’ll have a funny story to tell,” Harrison told me.

When she first spoke with Guzmán, on a video call, he gave her a familiar spiel: The band required hard work and played many gigs. Was she up for that? According to Harrison, the Captain also said she would have to travel to Argentina for rehearsals at her own expense, but that she would be reimbursed at the end of the tour. Harrison said that all sounded fine, sent along three recorded songs as her audition, and found herself on a plane to Buenos Aires in January 2024.

Diego Silvero was another recruit for the tour. The singer from Argentina had a wide range of interests—he sang opera as well as heavy metal—and taught music when he wasn’t performing. When he first met Guzmán, he was dazzled by talk of major festivals such as Glastonbury. “I was like, ‘That’s my dream, man,’ ” he said. Other new members included Franco Galante, a singer and musician with a boyish face, and Tana Abel, who quit his job as a systems engineer to play in the band. 

According to Silvero, Galante, Abel, and other musicians, rehearsals for the 2024 tour lasted up to ten hours each day. The band would practice without its leader for several hours, then Guzmán would arrive for the final stretch. He’d listen to a handful of songs and, as if channeling J. K. Simmons in the film Whiplash, pick a musician and accuse them of being out of tune, off-tempo, lazy, or stupid. Allegedly he sometimes used homophobic or racist insults. Silvero said he was a frequent target of Guzmán’s attacks. The Captain told him he was too fat to stand at the front of the stage and disparaged his musical talent.

Harrison couldn’t understand what Guzmán said in the rehearsals—she didn’t speak Spanish—but she found herself frustrated nonetheless. The harmonies she was supposed to sing were written for a soprano, and she was an alto. Her dyslexia made it hard for her to pick up all the lyrics. And according to Harrison, Guzmán said strange things to her. “I’m going to make you cry,” he told her once, adding that he wouldn’t try to sleep with her because he no longer dated European women. Harrison wasn’t happy, but it would be embarrassing to return home without the job she’d flown to Argentina for, so she knuckled down and kept rehearsing.

Prior to the band’s departure for the UK in April, Guzmán organized the musicians into small groups. Each was allegedly told to take a different flight and book accommodations that could be canceled without paying a fee. According to multiple musicians I spoke to, everyone had return tickets dated three weeks after their arrival, which they planned to change once they were in the UK. Guzmán allegedly instructed the band members to tell border officials they were on vacation and visiting friends. Abel was shocked. “What the fuck is going on here?” he remembered thinking. “I never knew that I was going to work illegally.”

Once the band was in the country, they made their way to that year’s lodgings: three large stationary RVs set up near a barn outside the town of Tavistock. The bathrooms and showers were in what looked like a converted cargo container. Lights strung outside gave the place a bohemian feel. But the shine wore off quickly. “The place wasn’t OK for living,” Abel told me. “It was full of rats. Diseases, obviously. And next to the barn, there was the place where the cows are stored. There was cow shit everywhere.” 

The Captain had his own camper van that he shared with his new girlfriend, a musician whom he reportedly showered with expensive gifts, and whose harp, which was used in only a few of the band’s songs, took up precious cargo space when the Sailors traveled to gigs. The other members were assigned to the RVs—as many as nine in each. In one, Galante slept on the sofa, while Harrison had her own small room.

The new recruits experienced what musicians from previous years had reported: deprivations, bullying, exhaustion. Around a month and a half into the tour, according to Galante, the Captain learned about a flippant comment Galante had made about his girlfriend’s harp—Galante had said it cost more than his salary. The next day, Guzmán sent a long message to the band’s WhatsApp group chat, saying that he didn’t need to justify how he spent his money to “Little Franco.” An argument ensued at the camp. According to several musicians, Abel sided with Galante and told Guzmán he was mistreating the band. In response, several of the Captain’s allies berated Abel and accused him of being ungrateful.

The musicians turned on one another, reporting trivial offenses like, say, not washing their dishes, speaking ill of another band member, or arriving late to rehearsal.

The next day, Abel, Galante, and Silvero, who’d supported his bandmates in the argument, were summoned one by one for a meeting with Guzmán. They were allegedly told that if they wanted to stay in the band, they would need to type out an apology, send it to one of the band’s core members for approval, and then post it to WhatsApp. Faced with the prospect of never getting paid, and of being stranded in the UK, they all complied. 

Galante’s difficulties weren’t over. He and Harrison had grown close. Despite Guzmán’s ban on dating within the band, on a rare night off from performing, after watching a movie together, “stuff happened” with Harrison, Galante told me. Guzmán soon became suspicious of their relationship, so he moved Galante to a different RV and allegedly told Harrison he’d kick Galante out of the group if they continued talking. Undeterred, Galante would squeeze through a small window into Harrison’s room in the RV so they could spend the night together. After another band member spotted Galante at Harrison’s window and told Guzmán, the Captain questioned Harrison. She said Galante was just bringing her candy.

In July, Guzmán wrote Harrison an email asking her to apologize for staying in London after a show to see friends. An exchange ensued, which quickly turned to the topic of Harrison’s relationship with Galante. Harrison said she had feelings for Galante but stopped short of admitting they were dating. Hoping to deflect suspicion, she apologized. “I’m so sorry for this, as I got carried away with my emotions, and I was selfish and not thinking of the band,” she wrote. “I really want to make it right.” Guzmán rejected her apology, claiming it wasn’t specific enough. “Feelings don’t develop unless one develops them,” he wrote. “You make it seem as an act of god when it wasn’t ever that. Flirting comes before feelings. Basic biology.” He signed the email “Cap’n Nick.”

Harrison considered leaving, but the Sailors were scheduled to open for a popular English band the following week, and her parents and a family friend were planning to be there. What’s more, she told me, “I still thought it was important for my career.” Harrison stayed on and broke things off with Galante.

Around the same time, Guzmán introduced the musicians to what he called the “distinctions” system. It was, musicians told me, a way of alternately rewarding and punishing their behavior. The Captain even created fake bank notes featuring a cartoon image of his own face, stamped with the phrase “In Poseidon We Trust.” The money, he allegedly told the band, could be earned by good behavior or by reporting fellow Sailors who broke his rules. The fake currency could be exchanged at the end of the tour for real money, or spent on beers and snacks at gigs. 

By then, most of the band members were broke and desperate to eat something other than guiso, an Argentinean stew made by the vat that was allegedly the Sailors’ only meal most days—that is, when it didn’t spoil in the heat during van rides. The musicians turned on one another, reporting trivial offenses like, say, not washing their dishes, speaking ill of another band member, or arriving late to rehearsal. A culture of paranoia developed. “You didn’t know who you could trust at that point,” Harrison told me. “You were looking around to see if somebody was trying to take a photo or a video of you. You didn’t know what, but at any point you could be doing something wrong and you could be penalized for it.”

In the second week of August, Galante was riding home from a gig with the band’s sound and lighting team when Emanuel Vázquez started talking to a fellow technician about standing up to Guzmán. Galante chimed in. “You need to be a warrior, otherwise dragons will eat you,” he said. Vázquez joked that if Guzmán didn’t pay him there would be consequences. The bandmates laughed.

Within minutes, Vázquez and Galante were notified that they’d been removed from the band’s group chat. Vázquez was then promptly abandoned at a service station, where he messaged Galante to tell him that a core member of the band had recorded their conversation and sent it to Guzmán. Vázquez had been fired.

When Harrison found out, she frantically contacted friends and family, hoping to find a place where Vázquez could stay. “I just couldn’t believe what was happening,” she said. She felt like she was in “the middle of hell.”

Galante wasn’t left on the roadside, but the next morning Guzmán summoned him to a meeting. According to Galante, core members stood around him in a circle as the Captain told him he was being let go. He was taken to a train station with his suitcase, where he messaged Harrison and asked if he could stay with her parents. He had no money, so it was either that or live on the street until he figured out how to earn enough to return to Argentina.

Harrison called her parents, leaving a tearful voicemail. They agreed to help but also told her they were worried about her. They could tell how anxious she was. “Once Franco got kicked out, I think he was my safety—what kept me going in the band,” Harrison told me. “I was scared of what would happen.” She worried Guzmán might become violent toward her.

The next day, she went to see the Captain in his motor home. She had already decided to quit, but she wanted to record their conversation as evidence of how he treated musicians. She later shared the recording with me. Over forty minutes, Guzmán criticized various band members, including Abel, Galante, and Silvero. “Those people,” he said, “they’ve never achieved nothing in life.” At one point, he picked up a copy of the contract that band members had signed. “This is a legal fucking document, with this shit I win a fucking suit,” he said. “Franco signed it, and here it says he can’t fuck you.”

Finally, Harrison informed the Captain that she wanted to quit. Guzmán told Harrison she was missing out on a huge career opportunity by leaving the band. “You literally fell in love with the wrong person,” he told her. “Someday, admit it to yourself, dude. You took away something from yourself, something that was going to be big. This thing is going to grow regardless. It’s going to go far. And you’re missing it because you wanted to shag someone.” Before ending the conversation, he hugged her. “You will always mean a lot to me,” he said. “I’m sorry, I don’t cry, but I mean it. Look at my face, bitch, I mean it.” 

Harrison was dropped at a halfway point between the band’s base near Tavistock and her parents’ home; her father picked her up. She rested for two or three days, then set her mind to taking down Guzmán for good.

4.

It is time to go now
Haul away your anchor
Haul away your anchor
’Tis our sailing time
—“Padstow’s Farewell,” from Johnny Collins’s 1973 album The Traveller’s Rest

A week later, Harrison called the police. She told them about Guzmán’s verbal abuse, the grueling work hours, the lack of pay, and the poor accommodations. Because she was an alleged victim, her report carried more weight than Burney’s and Ferdinando’s had when they called the modern slavery hotline. Soon Harrison met with two officers in person. She told them the whole story over several hours and shared evidence she’d gathered on tour, including audio files, images, and WhatsApp conversations.

Then she waited, expecting the police to take action any day. But nothing happened. The Sailors finished their latest tour and left the country. (The police would not confirm whether they acted on the information Harrison shared, citing an ongoing investigation.)

Harrison reached out to other former members of the band. Initially, nobody replied; they were concerned she might be a spy sent by Guzmán to weed out and harass so-called enemies of the band. Eventually, she connected with Ferdinando, who vouched for her with several former Sailors, as well as Burney. The three women began messaging one another in what they dubbed the Mutineers Support Group. They decided they weren’t going to wait for law enforcement to do something about the Captain.

At the start of 2025, as venues around the UK announced summer concerts featuring the Old Time Sailors, the Mutineers began their campaign. They started with anonymous comments on social media, populating Facebook posts and Reddit threads about the band with horror stories about the previous UK tours. “Those who have seen them must see how they all get too skinny as the tour goes on,” reads one anonymous post on Reddit. (Harrison would not confirm whether it was written by the Mutineers.) It continues: “They are worked to the bone, with reports of them being told to perform even if they were injured, or ill.” Another comment, seemingly from a former band member, reads: “I’ve never felt so violated and exploited in a work environment.”

Next, the Mutineers approached the venues that had booked the band. They helped one another craft emails to inform management about the Captain’s alleged misdeeds. Ferdinando also explained that Guzmán was still using her photographs in promotional materials against her wishes. Around two-thirds of the venues canceled the shows, the Mutineers told me; the rest ignored the emails. 

The Sailors arrived for their latest tour in April 2025. Whether what happened next was connected to the Mutineers’ efforts isn’t clear. On May 19, band member Josías Danel Olivera was driving one of the Sailors’ vans down a residential street in Tavistock as eight fellow musicians slept off hangovers and exhaustion in the back. As Olivera approached a roundabout, so did a large semi. A loud crunch woke Olivera’s passengers. The truck had crushed the front section of the van.

Both parties pulled into a parking lot to survey the damage, and the semi driver called the police. The responding officers asked Olivera whom the van was registered to, whether it was a commercial or a family vehicle, and if it was insured. Olivera didn’t have answers. When they asked if he had a valid driver’s license, he said no.

Olivera and everyone else in the van were taken to a building to be interviewed. Two officers escorted Olivera down a flight of stairs to a room where a woman gestured to a seat opposite her and began asking questions. In broken English, Olivera explained that he was 28, and a self-taught musician from Argentina who played the keyboard for a folk band touring the UK. The official pushed a form across the table between them. It was a questionnaire designed to identify if he was a victim of modern slavery.

Most of the band members interviewed that day denied that they were being mistreated and were allowed to leave. But Olivera and guitarist Rodrigo Romero told the police everything: about the band’s brutal schedule, the lack of food and safe living quarters, the unpaid wages. Olivera said that he’d been made to sign three separate promissory notes, each for the equivalent of $5,000. If he left the band, he would owe the money to Guzmán.

The authorities determined there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the musicians were indeed victims of modern slavery. That meant the British government would provide Olivera and Romero with accommodations, protection, and other support while investigators assessed their case.

The police visited the band’s base of operations in Tavistock, where they identified eight more people they suspected of being victims of modern slavery. They arrested six men, some of whom were core members of the band, but Guzmán was nowhere to be found. Soon the story became national news. “Sea shanty band caught in slavery probe,” read a headline in the Daily Mail.

The Mutineers rejoiced. It seemed like only a matter of time before Guzmán would be apprehended. But he remained elusive. Rumors spread that he had left the country, possibly through Ireland. While he was in the wind, a statement was posted on the band’s social media accounts denying the allegations against the Captain and insisting that a disgruntled former member had fabricated them. “We are aware of a number of articles currently online and categorically state that none of what is being said is the actual truth,” the statement reads. “It is what might sadly get acknowledged these days as an online hate campaign.”

The six men arrested in Tavistock were released on bail, which was later canceled when authorities declined to file formal charges after twenty-eight days. Though the men remained under investigation, they were allowed to return to Argentina. (Police declined to elaborate on the case for this story, but they did recently inform me that they are now investigating another individual—a British woman in her forties.)

In January 2026, police told Harrison that the courts had begun proceedings against Guzmán, but because he was no longer in the UK, he couldn’t be served papers. His case would remain on ice unless he returned to the country. Guzmán still faces several legal complaints from former band members in Argentina, but labor disputes there move at a snail’s pace. As of this writing, none of them have been resolved.

The Captain’s adversaries are in a holding pattern. In August 2025, authorities contacted Olivera and told him he’d been confirmed as a victim of modern slavery. At the time he was stuck in the UK, without the money to book a flight home, staying in a government safe house. He has since returned home to Buenos Aires.

Galante also made it home, and he remains in a long-distance relationship with Harrison. As he boarded his flight to Buenos Aires, he found that, to his horror, one of Guzmán’s allies was seated next to him. Galante rolled up his shirt sleeves, flexed his shoulders menacingly, and said, “Isn’t life funny?” His former bandmate nervously insisted that he had nothing to do with Galante’s dismissal from the band. Galante grabbed his arm and told him to chill. After several awkward hours on a plane together, according to Galante, his former bandmate made a swift exit once they landed in Buenos Aires.

My father and Steve Griffith, the former cop in Caerwys who tried to have the Sailors stopped at the UK border, have made trips abroad to visit the musicians they befriended in 2021. “And many of them have returned to stay with us,” my dad told me. “Our great regret is that the fabulous potential of this band was never realized.”

Burney, Ferdinando, and Harrison continue to wage war on social media, where they face a devoted fan base who believe that the accusations against Guzmán are lies. At the very least, the women’s efforts may have helped ensure that the Old Time Sailors can’t return to the UK. Meanwhile, in Buenos Aries, when ex-Sailors learned that a local venue had booked the band, they rallied to get the gig canceled, inundating the venue’s Instagram account with complaints and making plans to protest if the show went on.

But there are other places to perform, other countries to tour. In November, several former band members sent me a screenshot of a job posting for a flutist or piccolo player. “Everything paid, with an additional monthly fee of US$1000, to be in FLORIDA, USA from January to September,” it reads. Around the same time, a video clip of a recent rehearsal posted on social media indicated that the Sailors had swapped the mandolin for the banjo, and that the band’s singers were incorporating an American twang into their vocals. Soon a venue in Boca Raton was advertising a gig scheduled for April 2026. “Ahoy there!” a posting on the venue’s Facebook page reads. “You are invited to board the Sailorette and join the plentiful crew, ‘The Old Time Sailors,’ for a night of footstomping, dancing and singing!”

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