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.
