Published: 2023
Read: September 2023
Rated: 5/5
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a
page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court
martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper
meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and
crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth
washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely
alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His
Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a
secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been
chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the
oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The
men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy
craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of
storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the
coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very
different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they
were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a
tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that
while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring
factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of
treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine
who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the
court found guilty could hang.
The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our
greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British
warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways'
desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The
Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow
thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative
hold the reader spellbound.