The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (2024)

4.5 Stars. I was excited to read the Kindle edition of David Grann's The Wager. This is an astoundingly and painstakingly well-researched book of historical non-fiction. It is a story of the shipwrecked Wager, a tale of death, destruction, betrayal, and survival. Some of the events and names of characters involved were well-known in the 1700s but have been lost in history. David Grann has revived the incredible story with his meticulous research.

I read the ebook on my Kindle and found it difficult to put down. I wanted to know who would survive in such a storm-swept place and what the outcome would be. The central characters were well-drawn, and many others were named Grann’s The Killers of the August Moon, and the Lost City of Z had fewer characters to sort out, and they read more like fiction, but this story was more complex and far-reaching.

I had heard about press gangs who grabbed men off the streets, forcing them to work on the ships. These were often criminal elements and the scum of society. The author draws an incredible picture of invalid and injured veterans hauled out of hospital, some carried on stretchers onto the ships to perform naval duties.

I had not known that upper-class boys as young as 14 could join the Navy with the ambition of becoming future officers and gentlemen. John Byron is featured as an example. He attended a private school and was expected to be able to draw, fence, dance, know classics and mathematics and some Latin while learning about tasks onboard the ship. He is forgotten today despite a successful naval career, but he was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron.

The book is lavishly illustrated with excellent, helpful maps and 28 other well-chosen pictures. There are portraits of several of the main characters painted during their lifetimes, paintings of the Wager, etchings of the survivor's life on a desolate, remote island, photos of this place in the present and from 1742, pictures on how to amputate legs and arms. If you are reading an ebook, I recommend you switch to an iPad to enlarge the illustrations and view them in colour.

A squadron of ships, including the Wager, was launched in 1740 by Britain to establish British domination over Spain and control the sea and trade routes with the aim of empire building. A secret mission was the capture of Spanish gold and silver. Conditions onboard the outbound ships were horrific. They were filthy, with sickening odours, vermin and insect-infested and hunger. There were many deaths from scurvy, tetanus, and infections. Healthy food and sufficient water were lacking. Excessive numbers of the crew were too sick to work. After the shipwreck, it is no wonder that hopes of survival were grim. Those who remained alive descended into savagery, treachery, theft, anarchy, mutiny, murder, and even cannibalism.

Two hundred eighty-three days after the Wager was believed to have sunk in a raging storm off Patagonia with all aboard lost at sea, a small, roughly constructed boat made it over 3,000 miles to Brazil. It had started the journey with 81 men, but now only 30 sick, skeletonlike men were barely alive. Six months later, a smaller boat washed up in Chile with only three men, who were emaciated, covered with bugs, delirious, and near death. Members of both groups feared returning to England because they thought there could be sufficient charges to warrant death by hanging following an Admiralty trial. The newcomers blamed the first group of mutiny and abandoning crew members on shore to die from thirst, cold weather and starvation. There were countercharges of murder and treachery. The author describes the trial and leaves it to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

“They had been shipwrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. Most of the officers and crew had perished, but eighty-one survivors had set out in a makeshift boat lashed together partly from the wreckage of the Wager. Packed so tightly onboard that they could barely move, they traveled through menacing gales and tidal waves, through ice storms and earthquakes. More than fifty men died during the arduous journey, and by the time the few remnants reached Brazil three and a half months later, they had traversed nearly three thousand miles – one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded. They were hailed for their ingenuity and bravery. As the leader of the party noted, it was hard to believe that ‘human nature could possibly support the miseries that we have endured.’ Six months later, another boat washed ashore…”
-David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

David Grann’s The Wager is an entertaining entry in the robust subgenre of shipwreck literature. The boat in question – the titular HMS Wager – sported twenty-four guns and a crew of around 120 sailors and marines. In 1741, during the War of Jenkin’s Ear, it was part of a squadron led by Commodore George Anson, which was looking to make trouble for the Spanish on the Pacific coast of South America.

Unfortunately, due to poor seamanship – compounded by a crew laid low by scurvy – the Wager ran aground near the Patagonian coast, after getting separated from the rest of the squadron by bad weather.

The men made it to shore, where they built shelter and tried to rescue supplies from the ship. Despite their efforts, the famed discipline of the Royal Navy broke down. It did not take long before the situation made The Lord of the Flies look like a pleasant day at Sandals Jamaica.

Factions formed. A separate encampment sprung up. Food was pilfered. Orders were disobeyed. Some men did a lot of work; others did none at all. Captain David Cheap shot a man in the face without warning.

Running low on food, part of the crew mutinied, and set out in a boat, leaving the captain and two midshipmen behind, setting up parallel survival stories that would eventually – against all odds – intersect again.

The bare outlines above clearly show the vast potential of this material. It has the makings of a great story, and needs only a competent storyteller.

Thankfully, Grann is exactly that.

***

In his prior book – Killers of the Flower Moon – Grann was able to deliver a solid murder mystery that also doubled as a larger critique of the treatment the United States government meted out to the Osage tribe.

Here, Grann clearly wants to do the same thing. To that end, he makes a couple not-entirely-convincing attempts to place the Wager’s ill-starred voyage into a larger context of imperialism. For the most part, though, he recognizes that – to use an infamous tautology – the tale contained in The Wager is what it is: a disaster at sea, no more, no less. It is not a world-historical event; it is not representative of anything. There is no deeper meaning to be derived, other than what can be learned about human nature under duress.

Leaving aside these halfhearted pretensions, The Wager is sturdily, pleasingly old-fashioned in its scope and execution. Grann starts with a prologue that essentially outlines what is to come, and then lets things unfold chronologically over five separate sections, that neatly divide the action. Just over 250 pages of text, this is a quick, efficient book that never lingers too long or strays too far.

***

As he has shown in the past, Grann has a good nose for underappreciated historical events. More than that, he understands that a nonfiction story is only as good as the available documentation. To bring the past to life, you need evidence, and that is not always present.

Thankfully, Grann not only chose to write about a relatively unknown disaster, but one in which the participants wrote a bunch of stuff down. This is important for two reasons.

First, it allows Grann to create memorable characterizations, especially the aforementioned Captain Cheap and his erratic decision-making; Gunner John Bulkley, the leader of the mutineers, who proved both a marvelous sailor and a solid literary craftsman; and Midshipman John Byron, the eventual grandfather of Lord Byron, who at the time was just starting a long, rather fruitful naval career.

Second, Grann is able to present a visceral sense of place, whether that is the canting deck of a warship, a distant, seemingly-uninhabited island, or an open boat on the vastness of the ocean.

***

Even a well-documented eighteenth century shipwreck necessarily suffers from some evidentiary gaps. This difficulty is heightened by the fact that two competing groups of men gave two extremely conflicting versions of what happened. For example, both Bulkley, who faced hanging as a mutineer, and Captain Cheap, who faced the end of his career, had ample incentive to place themselves in the best possible light. Grann is at his most masterful when presenting and weighing contradictory accounts while maintaining a seamless narrative.

Grann is also very judicious in his use of filler. While the central storyline is inherently fascinating, he adds to it with valuable side discussions on life in the Royal Navy, the effects of scurvy, and the indigenous people that the castaways met, and then thoroughly alienated. His digressions are so good that I didn’t even mind that The Wager kept going even after it reached its natural conclusion, since it involved a well-described naval battle in which Commodore Anson captured a Spanish treasure ship laden with pieces-of-eight.

***

Good stories are their own justification. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Grann wanted The Wager to say something big. Ultimately, though, it has to settle for saying something specific: that humans are complicated. Some are mostly good, some are mostly bad, but most are a combination of each, and it can be hard to know a person for certain until your ship has sunk, the food has run out, and thousands of miles of tumultuous seas stand between you and home.

"The Wager" by David Grann is an enthralling masterpiece that transported me to the treacherous world of shipwrecks, mutiny, and murder. The link to the audiobook can be found here The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. Grann's eloquent prose painted vivid imagery, allowing me to immerse myself in the harrowing journey of the characters.

The book is a testament to Grann's impeccable research and attention to detail. His ability to unearth historical records and piece together a gripping narrative is truly remarkable. I found myself captivated by the authenticity and depth of the story, as well as the insights into the challenges faced by the sailors.

One of the aspects that I appreciated most about the book was the seamless blend of suspense and historical context. Grann expertly balanced the tension and intrigue, while also providing a rich backdrop of maritime history. It was a delightful combination that kept me fully engaged and hungry for more.

Although there were moments when the pacing felt slightly uneven, it did not detract from the overall enjoyment I derived from the book. Grann's ability to transport me to another time and place, immersing me in the perils and triumphs of the characters, more than made up for any minor pacing issues.

"The Wager" is a gripping and thought-provoking read that left a lasting impression on me. It is a testament to the power of storytelling and the resilience of the human spirit.

David Grann has done an amazing job with the true story, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, which describes the 1741 journey of The Wager, a British warship. Over the following two years, it is an incredulous journey of survival, betrayal, mutiny, and murder.

I listened to it on audiobook and Dion Graham does an AMAZING job as narrator. I felt like I was right in the midst of the action. There are frequent references to the orlop deck, the lowest deck in a ship which is below the water line. My last name is Orlopp. Many seafaring stories, including the Titanic, mention the orlop deck.

The book references phrases that actually began with sailors. "Three sheets to the wind" refers to three cloth sails on a boat bobbing drunkenly on the sea. "Turn a blind eye" refers to the time a sailor put a telescope up to his blind eye.

This book is storytelling at its best! Highly recommend!

It is often said that real events are more fascinating than fiction, and the story of The Wager, an English ship which set off in pursuit of the Spanish 'prize of all oceans' in the early 1740s proves such a statement perfectly. Left in obscurity, the story of the Wager was unearthed by Mr Grann who wrote an unputdownable book about the courage, loyalties and mutiny. I followed the maps while listening to the audiobook and it added to the thrill. One of the main historic figures is Lord Byron's grand-father, who was barely a teenager while boarding The Wager and whose grandson referred to his ancestor's marine voyages and achievements. Incredible story! Now I am ready to relisten to it and already have it on hold again.
OverDrive, thank you!

I'm gonna make this quick and easy: This is a wonderful, can't-put-it-down book. The GR description captures the broad outlines so I needn't bother with that. Just prepare to be completely swept away (sorry, couldn't help myself) by a true story about: 18th century naval battles, terrible storms with deadly waves and winds, shipwrecks, mutiny, murder, betrayals, disease, kidnapping, cannibalism, indigenous people who travel and hunt in canoes (!) in one of the most treacherous ocean passages in the world, and more. A lot more! Grann is a great storyteller. He's got a fantastic gift for timing and description, and the story of HMS Wager gives him an arena to put his gifts to glorious use. You read this and begin to get a true sense of daily life on a ship, how arduous it was, how crowded and dangerous it all was. You wonder, how did anyone survive these voyages? And then go back to sea? The men -- and boys -- could be gone for years at a time. All the details I read with minimal understanding in the novels of Patrick O'Brian now make sense. And no, you don't need to be familiar with O'Brian or like his books at all. Just think of the movie "Master and Commander" (I know, based on an O'Brian novel but you might have liked the film but not the book), Endurance, Robinson Crusoe, and Mutiny on the Bounty.

A great story of true adventure and history, of survival against the worst of odds, of human behavior under extreme duress... In short, I loved it.

My thanks to Doubleday Books and Edelweis+ for providing an advance digital copy in return for an honest review.)

The Wager is one of the most fascinating true stories you could ever wish to read. This ship was purchased from the East India Company in 1739 by the Royal Navy. In 1741 it formed part of a fleet charged with the mission to sale around the Southern tip of South America (YIKES!!!!) and hang out in the Pacific Ocean to menace the Spanish fleets of the day.

The fleet consisted of six warships (of which Wager was one of the small ones) and two transport vessels. Before leaving Portsmouth, the Navy were required to recruit enough people to make up 120 odd crew. This was a feat in itself, it proved so difficult (with people deserting) they had to employ disabled and injured crew from other ships just returned from previous voyages. Many were stretchered on board no less! Anyway, the Captain of Wager, died before reaching Cape Horn and Lieutenant David Cheap, a young, stern, keen officer, was appointed as acting captain. Captain Cheap was later to become a much maligned (perhaps unfairly) historical figure – all due to the events that were about to unfold.

OMG!!!

Upon passing through Cape Horn – which is known for the strongest of winds, massive waves, currents, and icebergs disaster struck. Wager had not travelled sufficiently far enough West before turning North (Captain Cheap was often blamed by his crew) and she struck ground within a group of remote and desolated island at the Western tip of Southern Chile and was shipwrecked.

Before the shipwreck of Wager, the sets this up beautifully by introducing us to the main players and detailing what life on a ship of that time was like. The politics, discipline, working the sails, duties, the food, the duties of the surgeon, all the dangers involved, the dreaded scurvy (oh dear!!) and lots more. By the time Wager reached the tip of South America, the crew were in no fit state to operate this ship – largely due to scurvy. The descriptions of the sufferers was horrible, even for someone who’s spent his life working with faeces, sputum, urine, and pus – I found it a bit much.

Once shipwrecked – there were instances of looting, fighting and conflict among groups, murder, mutiny even cannibalism was considered – imagine staring at your workmates with this in mind. The group split into groups, they tried to live off this barren land, and in effect they became walking skeletons, most died. I cannot describe that happens after the crew split into groups and decided on various courses of action to go home. You’ll have to read this to find out.

It is brilliantly written, it is the ultimate ripping yarn.

There is a lot to learn here, but at no stage did this book become an effort. It passed through me with ease. Highly recommended, you will not believe what happens.

5 Stars

Newsflash: I believe there's a movie either in production, or currently being made re theWager, starring Leo DiCaprio (as Cheap??) and directed by Martin Scorsese. Now wouldn't that be a treat?

Sad but true, doomed voyages are one of the best stories.

The Wager is a thrilling account of the British naval ship HMS Wager. In 1741, as part of Commodore George Anson's squadron, they set out to intercept Spanish galleons carrying treasure from South America.

With treacherous tides and storms through the passage between Cape Horn and Antarctica, the Wager ran aground on a desolated island. With little resources, the crew faces starvation and freezing temperatures. A very daunting survival story of both land and sea.

🎬🍿A movie by Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio? Count me in!

I knew nothing about the HMS Wager when I started this book. I purposely bought the ebook-not the audiobook. I had a hunch I might need to ‘read-the-words’ > rather than listen ….
It was a good choice.

This blisteringly tour de force …. unbelievably true …..seafaring non-fiction-adventurous tale reads like a fiction-thriller. It’s filled with non-stop spine-chilling-horrors upon horrors!
I swear— I was getting nauseous . . .
From:
Miserable meager meals—
Tormented by hunger—
Pure starvation—
Skin & Bones— (sh*t… BURNED skin and broken bones)….. > SICK….I tell ya — I was feeling SICK….

MOST of the seaman had eventually starved to death—

Haggard, ragged, staggered—deleted—exhaustion—filthy, colder-then-ice—
Crazy-rough seas—killer currents
Swamps—
Robberies—
Shootings—
Beatings—
Brutal winds—
Freezing temperatures—
Swarm of fleas—
Scurvy—
hurricanes—
Shipwreck—
Amputations—
Cannibalism—
Enemy’s gunports—
Death—
Daunting risks—
BRUTAL > shipwreck, survival on desolate islands—
Add:
Confusion of who to trust—
Rebellion—
The signs of disloyalty even among the officers.

There were a few faithful companions and fellow sufferers—
……Two standouts are Captain David Cheap and
John Byron: “Foul-Weather Jack” …. was only 16 years old at the start of the voyage.

“To Byron, the castaways were all like Robinson Crusoe, ingeniously eking out an existence. One day they discovered a new source of nourishment: a long, narrow form of seaweed, which they scraped from the rocks. When boiled in water for about two hours, it made what Bulkeley deemed ‘a good and wholesome food’. Other times Byron and his companions would mix the seaweed with flour and fry it with the tallow from candles; they called the crispy concoction ‘slaugh cakes’. Campbell noted, ‘I had the honour to sup’ with Cheap one night adding ‘We had a slaugh cake of his making, the best I ever eat on this island”.

“To collect drinking water, they caught rain with empty barrels. Some of the survivors cut strips of cloth savaged from the ‘Wager’ and stitched them into their loose garments. Fires burn constantly—not only for warmth and cooking, but also for the slim possibility that the smoke my be detected by a passing ship”.

“Each time the ‘Wager’ went over a wave, Bulkeley felt the ship hurtling on an avalanche of water, cascading into a chasm devoid of light. All he could discern behind him was a looming mountain of water; in front of him nothing but another terrifying mountain. The hull rocked from gunwale to gunwale, tipping so far over the sea yards sometimes dipped underwater as the top men aloft clung spiderlike to the web of ropes”.

David Grann gave us a remarkable book — a story of this 18th-century British warship that wrecked along the coast of Patagonia. The survivors sailed thousands of miles to safety and later faced charges of mutiny.
The descriptions were almost ‘too’ detailed …. as it was grueling to even imagine the intricate-nightmare-catastrophes we/I learned about.

I know there were no ‘hero’s’ per say….but young John Byron — who joined the Royal Navy at age 14 — stole my heart.
I loved doing further reading about him - his *family* - his kids - (two sons and seven daughters) — and grandkids -
Wow! I am truly moved. Sad to know he died at age 66

I also enjoyed reading more about David Cheap …..

And last ….Kudos to David Grann …. author of the brilliant “Killers of The Flower Moon”…
This book was harrowing — more ‘adventure’ than I usually read —and deeply affecting.

Lord of the Flies: Nonfiction Edition

Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive!

Stunning. Review will follow.

“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t - the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”

There are many true accounts of adventures or journeys going awry. Stranded on deserted islands, lost on frigid mountains, these survivors face harrowing conditions. Starvation, disease, and possible death can result. Occasionally, heroic acts of self-sacrifice and unparalleled leadership occur. David Grann’s book has it all. He does an impeccable job of weaving the known facts about the horrifying ordeal endured by the men of this 1742 British warship into a fast-paced thriller. For me, the most interesting and alarming part of the book was what happened after two small groups of survivors trickled back to England.

According to British Naval law of the time, a court-martial was required if a mutiny occurred. Also, a commanding officer could be severely punished if he (of course there were no females) was found guilty of unlawful behaviors. The two factions of returning sailors had differing accounts of both. But all men changed their tale during testimony, and the questions asked of those on trial were vague and not targeted at the possible crimes. Accurate accounts have not survived, but Grann believes the Admiralty needed to preserve the respect for its commanders, and the British Empire needed to keep its image of strength and supremacy. It always amazes me when I read how long governments have been manipulating or withholding the truth. Justice and honesty have long been touted but not upheld.

The Wager is yet another example of a nonfiction book that rivals any thriller for suspense and excitement. I chose to read this book because I thoroughly enjoyed Killers of the Flower Moon. I will definitely read any future books Grann writes.

Riveting. David Grann is one of the very best historians and storytellers around, and this tale of an eighteenth-century cataclysm at sea (and on land) is alive with heroes and villains, unbelievable competence and spectacular stupidity. Every time the world intervened and I had to put the book aside, it would be in my mind as I tried to imagine how the sailors and castaways were going to make it through yet one more day. I just loved it. You will, too.

The Wager is a capable if underwhelming narrative history, further let down by some clumsy and out-of-place editorialising. It's a shame because, over the years, David Grann has been one of my favourite non-fiction writers; his The Lost City of Z was well-researched and had the pace of a good novel, and his essay collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes found some truly weird and fascinating topics to cover, such as the Polish writer whose crime novel sounded suspiciously similar to an unsolved murder from a few years previously.

However, I have also experienced some disquiet off the back of more recent releases. The White Darkness was too slim to be worth its price; an interesting essay padded out with photographs and white space to give it the RRP of a full book. Furthermore, it was too non-critical of its topic. The Old Man and the Gun was a naked cash-grab, pulling a few essays from the earlier The Devil and Sherlock Holmes and slapping a new title on it. Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann's best-known book (and soon to be a Scorsese film), had a thrilling true story behind it – Indians on a reservation strike oil and become wealthy beyond their dreams, before being bumped off by grasping white 'saviours' – but was less taut in its narrative than I expected from the writer of The Lost City of Z. It also allowed Grann a few whispers of the sort of ahistorical sanctimony that has sadly become all too common in mainstream releases.

It is the latter quirk which stands out most clumsily in The Wager, Grann's newest release which tells the true story of an 18th-century sea voyage and storm-stayed shipwreck which sees its marooned castaways devolve into mutiny before a desperate escape. I know it has become a bit cringeworthy nowadays to criticise a book for being 'woke', and is something I try to avoid when possible. Such politically-correct affectations from a writer – usually privileged, humourless, upper-middle-class types who don't know how easy they have it – draw a sigh from me and perhaps a shake of the head, rather than cause me to froth at the mouth and declaim the collapse of civilisation, as seems to be the case among many perpetually-online types. That said, when Grann takes his story – a true story of human endurance and endeavour, of unimaginable hardship and desperation and terror, as well as feats of ingenuity and navigational skill – and warps it into an ungracious, moralising critique of imperialism, it compels me to put my boots on, and remark upon it at length.

Pearls are clutched when contemporary sources refer to indigenous people as 'savages' (pg. 123), as this betrays "their inherent racism" (pg. 223), and the idea that the British saw themselves as bringing civilisation to such noble, resourceful cultures – look, Grann says, they can build canoes and know where to find food! – is "condescending" (pg. 126). The slave trade is shoehorned in, despite the story of the ill-fated HMS Wager having nothing to do with it. Grann's raison d'être for his book is that the HMS Wager's voyage was evidence of imperial hubris and deservedly got its comeuppance; that the castaways' discipline unravelled over many months of unspeakable hardship shows that the purported superiority of their Empire was hollow; that some of the starved men were so desperate they resorted to cannibalism proves it was they who were the real 'savages' (pg. 242).

It's astonishingly tactless and mean-spirited to use this true story of human misery and endurance to make such a distasteful political point – imperialism being a paper tiger in 2023 – and particularly on such thin evidence. The descent into uncivilised chaos is, despite Grann's editorialising, shown to be rather tame given the circ*mstances; among the 100+ who survive the shipwreck, only a few resort to cannibalism (and evidence of this is even thinner). The mutineers even draft up legal documents to document and legitimise each of their (often very rational) decisions! The starved, shipwrecked men make their return trip through some of the most challenging waters in the world in less time than Magellan did (pg. 194), after months of woe and without much in the way of navigational aid, in a makeshift boat salvaged from scraps – but Grann is not impressed. For him, they committed the sin of not reflecting upon the fact they were "the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions… But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure… a system many of them rarely question" (pg. 248).

This is a disgraceful passage of writing. It would be ahistorical in any book – to criticise the unfortunate castaways for imperialism is to criticise them for being born in the 18th century, rather than having the decency and foresight to be born into Grann's New York social circle in 2023 – but to condemn survivors in this way, after chronicling their hardships and mischance… to what purpose? It is as absurd as to write a book on the survivors of a plane crash, and condemn them for contributing to climate change. Grann ends the book by writing in his Acknowledgments page that "writing a book can sometimes feel like navigating a ship on a long, stormy voyage" (pg. 261). After maligning the feats and hardships of the Wager's castaways for his shallow point-scoring, such tone-deaf lack of grace at the end is astounding. It seems to me that the self-satisfied system to which Grann commits himself with such 'unthinking complicity' often has less to recommend it than the one the men of the Wager struggled under.

However, while the above is the book's most offensive flaw, it is not its most fatal. However distasteful it is when presented, Grann's heroic and timely fight against racism in 1741 does not dominate the book on a page-by-page basis. Rather, it is that the flaws in previous Grann books, that I alluded to in the second paragraph of my review, all find further evidence in The Wager. The loosening of Grann's narrative skill, already in evidence in Killers of the Flower Moon, becomes completely slack in The Wager. The book moves lubberly from point to point, and while it has its achievements – Grann does well to explain the perils and circ*mstances of the sea to readers who may not understand them, and draws well the dispositions of the various castaway factions – it's a far cry from the zip of The Lost City of Z.

And while the padding isn't as brazen as in The White Darkness, it's clear there's much of the story that Grann does not know about. And I don't mean his wrongheadedness on making racism the central crime, but the general structure on which we, the reader, are sold. The story purports to reveal the mystery of which of the competing factions of shipwrecked men were telling the truth – for those found to be in the wrong at court-martial will surely hang – but this is an anti-climax. The trial is no such thing; the mysteries mostly over pinning down who said what and when and why, which is a pretty mundane historical enterprise. Grann lamely says that it is "impossible to know for sure what transpired behind the scenes" (pg. 241), but nor does he make any attempt to find out. Any authorial speculation is of the unresearched, "it's because they were imperialist racists" variety. All the mystery is sifted out in Grann's telling of the story – a telling which becomes just a routine sea tale, told better elsewhere and with less editorialising.

It's a great shame, because although the story of the HMS Wager is not the fascinating mystery that Grann and his marketers have claimed, there were interesting angles that the author, had he the inclination to recognise them, could have found. One of the most interesting perspectives in the book comes when a young blue-blooded castaway, Byron (whose grandson would find fame as the poet Lord Byron), sneaks away from the mass of castaways who, under the command of a common gunner, Bulkeley, have decided to make that Magellan-like escape on their makeshift boat. Byron returns to the marooned, deposed captain on the barren, shelterless island, and Bulkeley, in his journal, comments that "the Honourable Mr. Byron could not quite accommodate himself to 'lie forward with the men'" in their cramped boat (pg. 176).

While also not being the full story, this angle of class and hierarchy would have been much more appropriate to the story of The Wager, though naturally less appealing to the American Grann and his modern audience. All the talk of the slave trade and colonialism could instead have gone to discussion of the press-gang, a form of forced servitude which shows that Grann's white racist imperialists were hardly unthinking and complicit in the system that Grann, in his beatitude, is unwilling to forgive them for. Towards the end of the book, Grann again admonishes how these "people tailor their stories to serve their interests – revising, erasing, embroidering – [as] do nations" (pg. 251). For Grann to recognise this and yet contribute his own self-serving, editorialised version is a poor show.

David Grann books are not to be taken lightly.

Consider "Killers of the Flower Moon" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) which I also reviewed.

What I love about this author, is that even though this is non-fiction, it feels like you are reading a fiction adventure story.

And...as a side note, you can also look forward to the movie. (In the distant future.)

Director Martin Scorsese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, have already signed on to adapt this one. (They have already finished filming Killers of the Flower Moon.)

This is an epic true story as told by a master storyteller.

In 1740, with Britain at war with Spain, the decrepit old Wager ship - rat-infested, timbers rotting - sailed from England as part of a small Royal Navy squadron in search of a treasure-laden Spanish galleon. At 4:30 one morning off the coast of Patagonia, during a torrential downpour the Wager hit a rock. It began to sink. Only a few survived to shore and apparent safety for the next five months. What happened on that island and the escape that ensued gives us the story.

This story provides twists, and turns worthy of a well-plotted thriller.

Think Mutiny on the Bounty. Only real.

The Wager is:

Well-documented. Well-researched. Extremely well-written.

The author's depth of perception informs every page.

In one word this book is: Brilliant.

In 1740, the Wager set off on a journey around the world with a secret mission to capture Spanish silver and gold. Two years later, a leaking longboat lands in Brazil full of desperate men. But these are not the only survivors of the Wager, and both captain and crew end up on trial as England attempts to determine the truth.

I love a good survival story, but for some reason shipwrecks have always left me underwhelmed. Maybe it’s because I don’t like the beach. But I have enjoyed David Grann’s work in the past, and I had never heard of the story of the Wager, so I was excited for this book.

Grann vividly recreate the “wooden world” of an English naval ship, introducing us to the many people who lived and worked aboard the Wager vividly. He does a good job of grounding us in the place and time of the setting, with an especial focus on how people of different socioeconomic classes and races were regarded, and how they fit into society. The leading figures are compelling ones, serving to anchor an otherwise often chaotic story.

This book deals with the idea of narratives, and who controls the truth of any particular incident and how it is seen. As such, I appreciated how Grann made sure to tell us as many sides of the story as can be sourced almost three centuries later. He relies on the plethora of accounts from survivors among other sources, but takes pains to read between the lines to fairly present parties whose voices are not recorded, for example the “nomads of the sea,” the Kawésqar people, who tried to help the shipwrecked sailors.

However, I found that the pacing and the detail of the narrative varied throughout the book. While the first half of the book was very in-depth, events after the castaways begin to make their ways off the island are written in an occasionally vague manner, as though the author had expended the majority of his effort too early. It’s not an uninteresting second half, by any means, but rather a let-down after the interest of the first.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.

One of the finest works of nonfiction I've ever read. Entirely fascinating.

In 1740 the British warship the Wager was on a mission to capture a treasure-filled Spanish ship. Instead, the Wager wound up shipwrecked, and its crew very rapidly lost all pretense of civility, loyalty, honor and human decency. Most members of the crew died. The survivors eventually made their way back to London, wrote books about their ordeal and were the subject of charges and countercharges, including mutiny and murder.

I was not as enthralled by this book as I was by “Killers of the Flower Moon”. Despite the fact that there were several contemporaneous accounts of the voyage, we never find out what really happened. I didn’t have a rooting interest in the “bad guys” to get punished like I did in Flower Moon, where there were obvious people to hate. There were too many characters to keep track of when listening to the audiobook. It might be easier to follow them in print (I also missed the maps and illustrations). The survival aspects of the story also did not grab me like the story of the men on the Endurance. (I read and recommend “Endurance” by Alfred Lansing).

The narrator of the audiobook was Dion Graham. He is usually excellent, but in this case I thought he overacted. The author obviously did a lot of research, and I did learn things about the British navy. Ultimately, however, I was a little disappointed by this book. 3.5 stars

This true story of bravery, perseverance, survival and an unavoidable act of mutiny under terrible conditions, is about HMS Wager which on her expedition to the Pacific in 1740 was shipwrecked on the coast of Chile.
Fun fact: Lord Byron’s grandfather was a midshipman on the ship.

The gorgeous cover art is a painting of the Wager ship as it braves the daunting grip of nature around Cape Horn. It doesn't win the battle and is torn to pieces wedged between two massive walls of rock. This is a riveting account of the men who didn't go down with the ship.

What I found very horrifying was Gran's descriptions of the life of a sailor. Teaming with lice and rats, ships were truly abominable. Scurvy was rampant, as was Typhus, neither decease was understood at the time of the story in the 1740s. Many sailors were forced into service, kidnapped off the street, and in this case, elderly sailors in a maritime hospital were actually carried aboard to fill out the rolls. It's no wonder that two thirds of them did not make it. Only a small portion were wounded or killed in battle, the rest died of disease.

Roughly two hundred and eighty days after The Wager shipwrecked, Grann pens the tale of.what happened and why. Using a narrative voice he used vivid descriptions about life at sea, a hard and dangerous life,often made more so by lack of men due to illness. The rough waters around Cape Horn created a life and death situation.Well researched Grann used a journal kept.by one of the men, as well as 18th century ship.logs, textbooks and lastly the court proceedings, themselves.

A drama of survival and betrayal and all of it, true. So few men returned and long after the ship.was deemed lost, and each had their own story to tell. Or rather their own interpretation. I found myself riveted to this book and found that I was reluctant to decide who was right or wrong. They all suffered terribly and were in a situation with few choices

Grann has become another non fiction author to which I look forward. His subjects are interestingly told in a story like manner. This audio was well done in a very dramatic, though I sometimes thought maybe a touch too dramatic, but a style that befitted the book.

David Grann has a knack for finding neglected stories, researching them deeply, and then turning them into immensely readable books:The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, and now this tale.

And what a tale it is! During the War of Jenkins’ Ear between England and Spain (you all remember that one, right?), a small fleet of British warships set out in search of a legendary Spanish ship known to travel to and from the New World with cargoes of gold and silver. Their route would take them around Cape Horn, arguably the most treacherous passage on the high seas. During this Atlantic-to-Pacific ordeal, which lasted months, all of the ships were separated.

Grann’s story focuses on The Wager, a converted merchant ship that ultimately made the turn to the Pacific but then foundered on rocks surrounding an island off the coast of Chile. Several sets of castaways from The Wager eventually made it back to England, producing differing written versions of what ensued before and after the shipwreck.

These documents allowed Grann to introduce three characters vividly: the Wager’s captain, the gunner, and a teenage midshipman named Byron (grandfather to the poet); and to sketch in more lightly many other individuals. He ably uses his three principals to describe the character of a British naval ship of the time, and distills from the multiple recountings a reasonably clear picture of events.

The Admiralty, back in England, undertook much the same task regarding the events, but with a very different motivation, one that at first seems surprising but ultimately makes a great deal of sense, from their perspective.

It is not, I hope, divulging too much to comment on two issues that dramatically reduced the number of healthy men on the ships even before they reached the Cape: typhus and scurvy. The causes of both these diseases were unknown at the time but their effects were horrific, both for their victims and the ability of the remaining crews to persevere in the face of so many challenges.

The nature of the story, Grann’s narrative skills, and the work of the narrator, Dion Graham, swept me along. Not a single dull sequence, but nothing overwrought either. Highly recommended for those interested in naval history - or adventure.

THIS WAS SO GOOD

One British captain recommended that a young officer in training bring onboard a small library with the classics by Virgil and Ovid and poems by Swift and Milton. “It is a mistaken notion that any blockhead will make a seaman,” the captain explained. “I don’t know one situation in life that requires so accomplished an education as the sea officer….He should be a man of letters and languages, a mathematician, and an accomplished gentleman.”

Fueled by printing presses and growing literacy, and by a fascination with realms previously unknown to Europeans, there was an insatiable demand for the kind of yarns that seamen had long spun on the forecastle.

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"Because the far-southern seas are the only waters that flow uninterrupted around the globe, they gather enormous power, with waves building over as much as thirteen thousand miles, accumulating strength as they roll through one ocean after another. When they arrive, at last, at Cape Horn, they are squeezed into a narrowing corridor between the southernmost American headlands and the northernmost part of the Antarctic Peninsula. This funnel, known as the Drake Passage, makes the torrent even more pulverizing.

The currents are not only the longest-running on earth but also the strongest, transporting more than four billion cubic feet of water per second, more than six hundred times the discharge of the Amazon River. And then there are the winds. Consistently whipping eastward from the Pacific, where no lands obstruct them, they frequently accelerate to hurricane force, and can reach two hundred miles per hour."

“Cape Horn rollers” can dwarf a ninety-foot mast. Floating on some of these waves are lethal bergs cleaved from pack ice. And the collision of cold fronts from the Antarctic and warm fronts from near the equator produce an endless cycle of rain and fog, sleet and snow, thunder and lightning."

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(spoiler alert)

The Wager, having improbably survived this far, offered one final gift to its inhabitants. “Providentially we stuck fast between two great rocks,” John Byron noted. Sandwiched, the Wager did not sink completely—at least not yet. And as Byron climbed to a high point on the vessel’s ruins, the sky cleared enough for him to see beyond the breakers. There, shrouded in mist, was an island.

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Nomads of the Sea

"Kawésqar (Ka-WES-kar), which means “people who wear skins.” Along with several other indigenous groups, the Kawésqar had settled in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego thousands of years earlier. (Archeological evidence indicates that the first humans in the region arrived about twelve thousand years ago, toward the end of the Ice Age.) The Kawésqar had a population of a few thousand, and their territory spanned hundreds of miles along the coastline of southern Chile, stretching from the Golfo de Penas down to the Strait of Magellan. They generally traveled in small, familial groups. Given the impassable terrain, they spent much of their time in canoes and survived almost exclusively off marine resources.

Over the centuries, they had adapted to the harsh environment. They knew virtually every indentation of the coastline, carrying mental maps of the labyrinthine channels and coves and fiords. They knew the storm-protected shelters; the crystal mountain streams suitable for drinking; the reefs laden with edible sea urchins and snails and blue mussels; the inlets where fish gathered in schools; and the best spots, depending on the season and the weather conditions, for hunting seals and otters and sea lions and cormorants and flightless steam ducks. The Kawésqar could identify, from circling vultures or the fetid scent, the location of a beached or wounded whale, which provided endless bounty: flesh to eat, blubber for extracting oil, and ribs and tendons for building canoes.

It was rare for the Kawésqar to stay in one place for more than a few days, as they were careful not to exhaust an area’s food resources. And they were skilled navigators, especially the women, who typically steered and paddled the canoes."

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Once the ships crashed and fell apart, the dark side started to come out for some of the crew. [No surprise given that many were pirates and scalawags to begin with]. The Kawésqar provided food and other resources to the sailors, but the bad ones drove them away.

Steinbeck seemed to nail it....

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

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All in all, I did not find this book that compelling. The author makes sure that all details are included, everything is buttoned down, but the style is rather flat. It lacked momentum.

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Not my favorite by this author. It started out very promising. Here is a standout quote from the prologue:

"We all impose some coherence, some meaning on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories allowing us to live with what we have done, or haven't done. But these men believed their very lives depended on the stories they told. If they failed to provide a convincing tale they could be secured to a ship's yardarm and hanged."

However, I just couldn't connect with the story. The writing is great, and the research no doubt was thorough, but I couldn't follow all the back and forth with the characters. We (hubby and I) listened to this while on the road for several hours at a time, so we had stretches of time to listen and develop interest, it just didn't happen for me.

Note: I truly enjoyed, Killers of the Flower Moon by this author and would read other titles by him.

The Wager by David Grann. I started a couple months ago and quit within the first chapter. I was advised to stick it out for the first 100 pages. So very glad I did. The books is about the 1741 voyage of the ship The Wager. It took place over the span of two years. NF story about men starving (what did they eat). Men being caught stealing whiskey and food (what happened to them). The author described what happened while at sea, after the ship wrecked. Vivid details of the hardships and what it was like to survive and the drastic measures taken.

First-rate historical narrative nonfiction! I felt like I was on the set of Master and Commander although I reckon Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany smelled a bit nicer than the blokes on The Wager.

It's hard to wrap the head around what these sailors endured, even before hoisting anchor. I had never given much thought to the term 'press gangs,' and was horrified to learn that it was the virtual enslavement of men and boys by the British Navy to serve on ships that were short of troops. The elderly, sick and disabled were yanked from convalescent homes, men were kidnapped off the streets in broad daylight, all to spend years at sea in rat and lice infested vessels, many never to return.

And so it was with The Wager and its sister ships who made up an ill-fated 18th century fleet with a mission to chase Spanish galleons around South America and into Pacific waters. David Grann recounts the sailing and shipwrecks and survival with gripping detail, taking the reader into the heart of storms, the ghastly ravages of starvation and disease . He brings to life multiple historical characters and it is their fates and the aftermath of their survival and return to England that propel this breathtaking plot.

The book is thick with sources at the end, so the actual narrative is concise and moves briskly. Fascinating, enthralling and highly recommended.

3.5 Stars

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder was such an interesting and well researched account of shipwreck, survival, and savagery.

This is my third book by this author, and I find his attention to detail is excellent.

January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. On board was 30 barely alive men who had a remarkable survival story to tell. Survivors of the British ship the Wager, which had sailed from England two years previously on a secret mission and had been wrecked on a desolate island of the coast of Patagonia. Their story of survival is fascinating and shocking.

I really enjoyed this story, it’s so well written and engaging. A great insight to the Royal Navy in the 1700s. I probably would have rated this 4 stars but I felt the author was a little too preachy and judging the past on 21 century values.

An interesting and engaging tale for readers who enjoy Shipwreck stories from the past.