Monday, April 17, 2023

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

 
First Line from the Prologue: The only impartial witness was the sun.
 
In January 1742, a dilapidated boat carrying thirty men who were barely alive washed ashore on the coast of Brazil. They were survivors of the shipwrecked HMS Wager, part of a flotilla of British ships sent to war on the Spanish. The Wager had wrecked on an island in Patagonia after an unsuccessful attempt to round Cape Horn. After being marooned for months with little shelter or food, these men managed to piece together a boat and set out on a 3,000-mile journey that took over one hundred days. They were hailed as heroes.

Six months later, an even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. The three castaways aboard this boat had a very different tale to tell: those thirty men in Brazil weren't heroes, they were mutineers.

When all the survivors returned to England, accusations flew thick and fast. The alleged mutineers told of a captain not fit for duty-- a captain who shot and killed a fellow crew member with no warning whatsoever. When the Admiralty convened a court-martial, there was a lot more that had to be settled than the mere loss of a ship, and whomever the court found guilty would hang.

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David Grann is one of my favorite authors, and his Killers of the Flower Moon is one of my all-time favorite non-fiction books. Since I have an interest in maritime history, I knew I had to read The Wager, which describes one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded.

Grann set the stage so well that readers feel as though they're on board ship with the officers and crew. This was the time of press gangs when the British Navy had so much trouble finding enough sailors to man their ships that they'd send groups of men to roam the streets outside pubs at night to kidnap men and force them aboard ships for duty that could last years. This meant that not all the men on the Wager wanted to be there. As the voyage progressed, scurvy set in, and as men began to die, the Wager found itself with a new captain named Cheap, a man who would be called "Jobsworth" by the British (as in it was more than Cheap's job was worth to go against his orders). Cheap's bungling and indecision were instrumental in the Wager's unsuccessful attempt to round Cape Horn, ending with the ship being wrecked and the survivors being castaways on a desolate island in Patagonia. This isn't the first book I've read about the land, the seas, and the weather of the Tierra del Fuego, but Grann wrote of it so well that I felt seasick, wet, and frozen solid as I turned the pages. The months the castaways spent on that island, trying to survive and trying to escape, were brutal.

Grann immersed me in these men's lives-- one of whom would be the grandfather of the poet, Lord Byron. (Yes, Byron's experiences were important in light of one of his descendants, but the crew member who had the most impact on me was the free Black man on the Wager, John Duck.) Grann also reminded me of the integral part sailors played in the history of our clothing and our language. However, the one thing that I enjoyed the most was how he exposed what was really going on and how the Wager's original assignment and the proceedings of the court martial at the end actually fit into the much larger world stage. 

Any reader with an interest in ships, the sea, human nature, and government machinations should read The Wager.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
eISBN: 9780385534277
Knopf Doubleday © 2023
eBook, 352 pages
 
Non-Fiction, Standalone
Rating: B+
Source: Net Galley

8 comments:

  1. I'm glad you enjoyed this one, Cathy. It sounds as though there are several layers to it - more than meets the eye. It reminds me of Jock Serong's Preservation, which is the fictional story of a real shipwreck off Tasmania at roughly the same time in history. Seventeen men survive, and start out on a trek north to Sydney. Only three survive...

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    1. Yes, David Grann is very talented where multi-layered narratives are involved. I understand why it can take him so long to write a book.

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  2. I just saw a segment about David Grann and this book on 60 Minutes; it was so fascinating. I loved his book The Lost City of Z, and can't wait to read some of his other books. :D

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  3. I've been waiting eagerly for this one - it's in the exceedingly rare category of books that I might actually buy for myself. So I'm delighted to see a good review from you for it :)

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    1. Knowing your own, similar, interests, I thought of you often as I read this book.

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  4. I've read the Hornblower books, and the series that the movie Master and Commander: Far Side of the World was based on, so your description quickly grabbed my interest. I'll have to look for this.

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    1. The author of the Hornblower novels used a lot of information from the HMS Wager incident in his writing, Pepper.

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