The Wager by David Grann on May 11, 2023
Genres: History / Military / Naval, Transportation / Ships & Shipbuilding / History
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
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This book was so well researched & written so smartly! It was based on a true event but read like fiction at times. If you’ve read Grann’s last book, Killers of the Flower Moon, you’ll know what your in for.
In 1740, The Wager was a ship that set out on a secret mission to chase a Spanish ship filled with treasure. The only one who knew about the mission was the captain so he was adamant to stay his course regardless of any weather or issues they came across, which were MANY! So many that The Wager ended up sinking!
Then….
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 … about 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.
This story grew more tense with each page. It started out with quite a bit of background and getting to know the characters. But about the halfway point, the tension ratchets up and the story moves quickly. Grann is a master at telling a nonfiction story and making me care. These characters suffered hunger, desperation, sickness, loneliness, and deprivation like no other. You could feel it. And the print copy has maps in the front and back covers along with pictures included in the middle. I do feel like this was a bit of a history lesson, but a VERY interesting one! Nonfiction isn’t my typical genre, but this was more like a fiction. If you liked Killers of the Flower Moon, you will like this.