Rating 4⭐s
You can buy The Wager....Here You can find out more about David Grann...Here
On 28th January 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 chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. 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 is a fascinating book on many levels. In general it gives a captivating look in into the perils of the 18th Century British Fleet. In particular it focuses on HMS Wager a small ship, that is part of a larger squadron charged with hunting down a Spanish Galleon laden with Gold heading from South America back to Spain.
This has the feel of novel that cunningly disguises itself as non fiction, documentary history and it really is the best of both worlds. Its a very clever mix if you can pull it of and Grann can. I have read some adventure novels where the author has tried to shoehorn too much research in. The result is the narrative is busting at the seems. The author has just altered the receptacle for his research and called non fiction and it fits well.
The first thing that hits is that the body count is bloody horrific.... The crew are not fit to be called a crew. They are old, drunks, the infirm and the press-ganged. You may think the Spanish are the main enemy and they may kill a few of our heroes. Alas disease and storms are the real killers and they kill something like 90% of the squadron. Its downright barbaric. Nobody today would even entertain going to see in those circumstances. So hats off to our suicide mission loving ancestors.
All this before the ship wrecks on what is now Argentina and what is left of the crew descend into starvation and chaos. Its like Lord of the Flies for adults. They break into disparate groups. Murder occurs, the captain is ignored and rule of law breaks down. Eventually two groups make it back to GB and then the propaganda battle starts. Both sides captain and mutineers spin their tales to the admiralty and a deadly game of guess whose truth.
I read this on kindle and the story surprisingly ended at 63% of the book. However as an added bonus from there on there were numerous photos and research documents.
Really is a fascinating tale,
As Samuel Johnson once observed, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”
Byron confronted an inescapable truth of the wooden world: each man’s life depended on the performance of the others. They were akin to the cells in a human body; a single malignant one could destroy them all.
According to tradition, a body to be buried at sea was wrapped in a hammock, along with at least one cannonball. (When the hammock was sewn together, the final thread was often stitched through the victim’s nose, to ensure that he was dead.)
“Below forty degrees latitude, there is no law,” a sailors’ adage went. “Below fifty degrees, there is no God.”
They knocked down cabin partitions, to make more room for the gun crews; dumped overboard any livestock that was in the way; and tossed any unnecessary timber that might shatter under fire and rain down lethal splinters. Sand was sprinkled on the decks to make them less slippery. Men working the cannons were given rammers and sponges and priming irons and horns and wads and—in case of fire—tubs of water. Down in the magazine room, the gunner and his mates distributed gunpowder to the powder monkeys, who then ran them up the ladders and through the ship, making sure not to trip and cause an explosion before the battle had begun. Lanterns were extinguished, and so was the galley stove. In the bowels of the orlop deck, George Allen, who had begun the voyage as a twenty-five-year-old surgeon’s mate and through attrition became the chief surgeon, prepared with his loblolly boys for the expected casualties—building an operating table from sea chests, organizing bone saws and bandages, and laying on the floor a sail canvas that would prevent his men from slipping on blood.
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David Grann is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.His newest book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, will be published in April of 2023. With the twists and turns of a thriller, it tells the true saga of a company of British naval officers and crew that became stranded on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia and descended into murderous anarchy. The book explores the nature of survival, duty, and leadership, and it examines how both people and nations tell—and manipulate—history.
Grann is also the author of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which documented one of the most sinister crimes and racial injustices in American history. Described in the New York Times as a “riveting” work that will “sear your soul,” it was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best true crime book. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and named one of the best books of the year by the Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Time, and other publications. Amazon selected it as the single best book of the year.
The book has been adapted into a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, and Jesse Plemons, which will be released in the coming months. For middle schoolers, Grann has also released Killers of the Flower Moon: A Young Reader’s Edition, which the School Library Journal called as “imperative and enthralling as its parent text.”
Grann’s first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was #1 New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, it was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications. The book, which the Washington Post called a “thrill ride from start to finish,” was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by James Gray and starring Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland.
One of Grann’s New Yorker stories, The White Darkness, was later expanded into a book. Mixing text and photography, it documented the modern explorer Henry Worsley’s quest to follow in the footsteps of his hero, Ernest Shackleton, and traverse Antarctica alone. The story is currently being adapted into a series for Apple starring Tom Hiddleston.
Many of Grann’s other New Yorker stories were included in his collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which was named by Men’s Journal one of the best true crime books ever written. The stories focus on everything from the mysterious death of the world’s greatest Sherlock Holmes expert to a Polish writer who might have left clues to a real murder in his postmodern novel. Another piece, “Trial by Fire,” exposed how junk science led to the execution of a likely innocent man in Texas. The story received a George Polk award and was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his opinion regarding the death penalty. Several of the stories in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes have also served as source material for feature films, including “The Old Man and the Gun” with Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek, and “Trial by Fire” with Jack O’Connell and Laura Dern.
Over the years, Grann’s stories have appeared in The Best American Crime Writing; The Best American Sports Writing; and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His stories have also been published in the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Wall Street Journal.
In addition to writing, Grann is a frequent speaker who has given talks about everything from Killers of the Flower Moon and the importance of historical memory to the dangers of complicity in unjust systems, and from the art of writing and detection to the leadership methods of explorers, such as Ernest Shackleton.
Grann holds master’s degrees in international relations (from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) and creative writing (from Boston University). After graduating from Connecticut College, in 1989, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and did research in Mexico, where he began his career in journalism. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.
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