The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
Original price was: $30.00.$16.05Current price is: $16.05.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the 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.
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, TIME, Smithsonian, NPR, Vulture, Kirkus Reviews
“Riveting…Reads like a thriller, tackling a multilayered history—and imperialism—with gusto.” —Time
“A tour de force of narrative nonfiction.” —The Wall Street Journal
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.
From the Publisher
Publisher : Doubleday; First Edition (April 18, 2023)
Language : English
Hardcover : 352 pages
ISBN-10 : 0385534264
ISBN-13 : 978-0385534260
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 6.4 x 1.3 x 9.5 inches
7 reviews for The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.
Related Products
Original price was: $30.00.$16.05Current price is: $16.05.
Charles Salmans –
Grann’s Gift as a Story-Teller on Full Display
Grann’s Gift as a Story-Teller on Full DisplayIn the first half of the 18th century, Britain already had the most powerful navy in the world. But financing that navy was a huge burden on the Crown and England had not yet achieved the wealth that the industrial revolution and its own colonization efforts would later bring. The answer: intercept the gold and silver that Spanish ships were bringing home from its New World colonies.Author David Grann is able to tell not only this larger story but also to resurrect one of the most astonishing seafaring events of the time. A ship named “The Wager” was to be part of a British fleet that would intercept gold-laden Spanish vessels in what was officially-sanctioned piracy. As the book’s cover indicates, what then transpired was shipwreck, mutiny and murder. This is also the story of unexpected survival and efforts in an Admiralty court back in England to establish the truth of what happened.Life on board a ship at the time, so full of danger and disease that it was not unusual for as few as ten percent of the crew to survive a long voyage, meant that the Royal Navy had great difficulty manning its ships. Grann provides graphic descriptions of able-bodied and not-so-able-bodied men being kidnapped off the wharfs (“impressed”) to fill the complement of seamen just as a ship was about to sail. (Some years later the impressment of American seamen was a contributor to the War of 1812.)The hulls of wooden sailing ships had a very short life-span due to wood-eating worms, and were susceptible to leaks and other threats to seaworthiness. Scurvy could render entire crews incapable of functioning. Other communicable diseases could cause widespread death on board a crowded, ill-ventilated vessel.In the case of The Wager, the author was able to find a remarkable record of its 1740 voyage and of the events to come. This was in part due to the fact that on board as a junior officer was John Byron, a gentleman volunteer and a compulsive diarist. Incidentally, he was the grandfather of Lord Byron.Additionally, another major actor in the drama, John Bulkeley, had kept a voluminous diary which chronicled the events of the voyage. Buikeley held the position of Gunner, a crucial role in ship combat, and had many other responsibilities on board. He was an instinctive leader, physically imposing, who commanded respect.Finally, there was the record of the court-martial proceedings themselves, in which the main actors including David Cheap, the captain, provided their own version of events. Cheap was an ambitious, younger son of a Scottish Laird who, under the rules of primogeniture, did not inherit his father’s estate. He ran off to sea at 17 and set his sights on becoming a captain, which he realized when an opening occurred on The Wager.The Wager survived the perilous passage around the treacherous Cape Horn, only to run aground and break up on the rocks of an uninhabited island off Patagonia. There were no animals or other significant source of food on the island. The crew soon divided into two factions, one supporting Captain Cheap who wanted to build a vessel out of timbers salvaged from the shipwreck and continue up the Pacific coast of South America to engage Spanish ships. The other group was led by Buckeley, who wanted to build a vessel to return to England. The situation was so dire it would seem impossible that either group would survive.Improbably a few men did make their way back to England to be hailed as heroes. That is, until a second group, including Captain Cheap, also arrived. This forms the final chapter of the story of The Wager and the launch of an inquiry to establish the truth.Faced by death by hanging if they were found guilty of mutiny or of discipline if they failed their duty, each survivor told his story. “Members of the Admiralty found themselves confounded by competing versions of events,” the author tells us. The result was unexpected, but only if one fails to consider that the leaders of an institution, in this case the Royal Navy, have as their first priority the preservation of that institution and the protection of its reputation.This is a wonderfully-written book and Grann is a masterful story teller.
LindaL –
Thrilling account of a real voyage that reads like a novel
The Wager was an English ship that set sail from England in 1740 during an imperial war with Spain. It was the mid-1700s, and navigational tools were primitive. Diseases among the seafarers spread rapidly, and I was incredulous, realizing how little they knew about curbing nutritional deficiencies such as scurvy. It seems absurd that in addition to not knowing about the necessity for vitamin C, insufficient levels of niacin were causing psychosis and night blindness resulting from lack of Vitamin A. After shipwrecking on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia, the story is as much about human nature as it is about surviving on an island and attaining its mission against the Spanish. It is fascinating to read about how they discovered new food sources and what they chose to learn and ignore from natives whose cultures had thrived in the areas where the Englishmen became castaways. If they were going to continue to survive and continue their naval mission, they had to build new boats without the technology available in their homeland, and there were myriad disagreements about how to proceed and also about which path to follow when it was time to embark on the dangerous waters again. Disharmony leads some groups to set sail in opposite directions eventually. When the survivors arrived back in England, the accounts of what happened were not in sync.The characters who are historical figures demonstrate the gamut of human emotions and an evolution of social mores. Without describing each character, I’ll point out that we meet a dominating captain with poor leadership traits. And, of course, we meet argumentative underlings who have smug independence. Then, we see ferocious workers and others with inherent leadership skills and charisma. All of the men are familiar with British naval order and ranking conventions. Yet, more hierarchies develop as the men struggle to survive and create social order. As the subtitle suggests, the fight for survival leads to becoming mutinous and murderous. Grann describes the basic human drives and terrors with admirable writing skills.Writing, in the eighteenth century, was an honorable thing to do. The men onboard the Wager kept written logs—some were required, and others were kept to document some of the mutinous decisions. David Grann had copious notes and records to use when piecing this story together. Rousseau and Voltaire cited the Wager’s expedition reports, as did Charles Darwin and Herman Melville. The seafaring journalists quote the Bible, poets, and famous writers. It is incredible how learned they were. Grann uses his well-honed investigative and research skills to weave a beautiful story of what reportedly happened and the eloquent analysis by those who experienced it. Grann’s ability to combine first-person accounts of the expedition with his summation of the events provides fabulous text about the seafarers and their exploits. Each creative, descriptive section title structures the book and shapes the voyage with metaphoric summaries: The Wooden World, Into the Storm, Castaways, Deliverance, and Judgment are the main sections, and Gran used these to develop the book so that it reads like a novel and keeps the reader riveted. I highly recommend this narrative to everyone, even those who prefer fiction to nonfiction.
Herbert Abude Scheidl –
Impressionante sob diversos aspectos, desde a audácia dos homens daqueles tempos até o limites em que as pessoas são capazes de viver e suportar.
saga –
Nothing not to like! Fast-moving for an historical story, well written, and hard to put down. Didn’t give any print errors and the page weights are thick, work a great cover and art included.
T –
A very interesting and well-researched book.
Alban –
Roman prenant, intéressant. J’ai bien aimé.
w. de jong –
Als je van avontuurlijke zeereizen houdt is dit een aanrader, behoort in het genre tot de top. Het is af en toe bijna niet te geloven dat dit echt is gebeurd.