The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

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 show more 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 circumstances; 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 circumstances 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. show less

This is the absolutely remarkable tale of the HMS Wager, which left England in 1740 as part of a convoy meant to sail around the notoriously stormy Cape Horn to capture a treasure-laden Spanish galleon in the Pacific, but which shipwrecked instead. That was in part due to the harshness of the weather, and in part due to the inability to reliably calculate longitude at this time, instead relying on “dead reckoning,” one of the many fascinating factoids that sprinkle the text. There is a lot of nautical jargon here, but David Grann does a great job presenting it in a comprehensible manner, as well as giving the reader the larger context, sometimes going off on interesting tangents besides. Despite how long ago the events occurred, he show more did a great job of sifting through historical records, many of which survived, and presenting this not as dry history but lived by men who had personalities and flaws.

We get descriptions of the horrors of impressment, dooming innocent people to harrowing voyages that would last years if they survived, the claustrophobic, stench-filled life on board, scurvy turning flesh charcoal black, and the devastating weather around the Cape Horn – and that’s even before they’re shipwrecked and left on a desolate island off the coast of Chilean Patagonia, in desperate circumstances to say the least. The medicine of the day is unsurprisingly archaic, including a lack of understanding of the spread of typhus, lack of anesthesia, and medical textbooks that threw up their hands in saying plagues were “God’s way of cutting sinners from off the Earth.” For scurvy there was a vague sense that somehow the nature of being on land must be vital to man, and so on another voyage victims were buried up to their chins, and an officer recalled the bizarre sight of “twenty men’s heads stuck out of the ground.”

There are men lost at sea, flung into the ocean by terrible storms, men who die of typhus or starvation, and men who resort to murder or cannibalism. There is an attempt to preserve naval order but the eventual fracturing into splinter groups and mutiny on the part of gunner John Bulkeley, a natural leader, against David Cheap, the recently promoted captain. Lord Byron’s 17-year-old grandfather is here as well, and plays a central role. What’s mind-blowing is that three separate groups of men eventually made their way back to England in 1743, 1745, and 1746(!), after having been aided by encounters with Kawésqar and Chono natives, who played a considerable role in their survival. Aside from Bulkeley’s and Cheap’s groups, the third came from the portion of the men who were stranded in even more desolate places during the attempt to make it to Brazil in a longboat. Grann tells all of their stories, as well as the ultimate fate of the convoy’s lead ship, the Centurion, and its commander, David Anson, who would indeed capture the Spanish galleon, which despite being a lucrative haul, came nowhere close to covering the cost of the mission (to say nothing of the hundreds of lives lost).

It’s a stunning story brought to life again, taking us back to such a distant time, and yet also revealing aspects of human nature that are timeless. The color plates present in even the paperback version were a nice touch, and I look forward to seeing the film if indeed it’s being made by Scorsese and DiCaprio. show less

In 1740, "The Wager" was part of a squadron of six warships on a mission to sail around Cape Horn to the coast of Chile and cut off Spanish treasure galleons. Among the crew are Lieut. Cheap, Capt. Anson, Capt. Kidd (descendant), John Byron (Lord Byron's grandfather), marine Capt. Pemberton, midshipman Cozens, gunner Bulkeley and carpenter's mate Mitchell among others. Typhus plagues the ships and 160 of 2,000 die before they even reach Brazil. After the death of Kidd, Cheap is promoted to Capt. of the Wager. In Summer 1741, they headed into Cape Horn, not knowing that it was the most dangerous time to do so. "Below 40° latitude, there is no law, Below 50° there is no God" and so it went. Scurvy reduced the squadron to half its show more manpower, with ceaseless storms battering the rest. Then the Wager found itself utterly alone, wrecked on the shore of an unknown island. But the worst - starvation, murder and mutiny - was yet to come.

If you want dramatic, suspenseful, popular nonfiction that doesn't overstay it's welcome, look no further than "The Wager." I appreciated that Grann focused on only a few members of each faction, to give the reader a chance to "pick a side" or not, sympathize and be engaged. I felt for Byron the most, a disillusioned teenager sold on promises of glory. I appreciate Grann's choice to dedicate a chapter to each group of survivors once they got separated. It added some objective structure to all the chaos. Grann allows the court testimonies, the survivors' actions and journals speak for themselves; no creative liberties needed. Grann also takes a firm stance on behalf of the native Kawésqar encountered by the Englishmen. Local natives tried to help them but imperial prejudices overrode common sense. Definitely recommend it for anyone interested in maritime history, but also in true crime! show less

Author David Grann’s The Wager tells the sad tale of an ill-fated 18th century British naval expedition fueled by greed and misapplied ideals of honor and patriotism.

After their vessel is shipwrecked off the desolate southern coast of Chilean Patagonia, the men of the HMS Wager suffer unimaginable deprivations brought about by brutal weather, insufficient food, and the raging sea. Despite these hardships, the ship’s monomaniacal captain insists that his men press on with their mission to attack and plunder Spanish galleons. The chain of command breaks down and mutiny is the inevitable result.

Some readers have characterized this book as "entertaining," but I found this true story packed with death and despair. At several points I show more had to stop reading. The sailors’ ingenuity is astounding, but often it isn’t enough. The narrative also brings to mind all those souls who perished under similar circumstances but whose stories were not recorded.

This well-researched book is recommended if you are in the mood for a sorrowful account of doomed expedition. show less

Terrific, certainly an easier read than the Bounty but just as compelling. Anytime I read shipwreck stories, it makes me eternally grateful to be on land in my cozy condo with wi-fi and food and warmth. The trials these men went through are absolutely staggering; they were made of much sterner stuff than I.

Grann does a terrific job providing historical context as well as primary sources to spin a terrific tale of greed, imperialism and survival. The book grew more shocking as the pages went through - how some sailors managed to get home, and then even more showed up years later is nothing less than a miracle when so many of their comrades died from disease, starvation or violence.

What floored me even more is there was barely a trial show more and the Admiralty at the time just wanted it to go away. I can't help but think how lucky some of the men were, relatively, compared to those on the Bounty. A fascinating bit of history. show less

(48) This was entertaining - similar in quality to his other books that I have read; 'The Lost City of Z," and "Killers of the Flower Moon." This is novelistic journalism I guess. Recounting a tale as best as possible from primary sources and other accounts in an attempt at objectivity, yet with a sense of story-telling. His non-fiction books read like adventure novels and/or true crime and certainly suck the reader in. This is an 18th century account of a British Naval expedition to South America in search of Spanish gold during one of the many ridiculous Wars between England and Spain for Empire supremacy. One of the Man O' War's 'The Wager' is shipwrecked trying to get around the infamous Cape Horn and there is a gripping tale that show more follows of survival, mutiny, illness, starvation, and the conflicting stories that get told after a sort of homecoming. One of the officers on board is John Byron - the grandfather of the British author and poet Lord Byron, so this is interesting,

I definitely enjoyed reading this, but in the end, it is missing just a bit of gravitas. I remember being just riveted by the story of Shackleton's Endeavor, and books about John Franklin's lost polar expedition. And even the more recent Philbrick's 'In the Heart of the Sea' about the whale ship 'Essex' and Jung's 'Perfect Storm' I liked a bit better than this. This did not generate in me the same degree of emotion or horror as those books. Though I cannot put my finger quite on why. I can't really define any concrete weaknesses of this book. Perhaps I have read too many stories of shipwrecks and doomed expeditions such that it just didn't standout. I was more interested in the Patagonia native tribes and would have enjoyed more of an exploration of their way of lives and interactions with the Spanish and others.

So quite good and entertaining - but with no larger message than the instinct for survival is fierce; one would even eat seal skin shoes or your pet dog's paws. show less

England and Spain have never been best friends, to put it nicely. Occasionally they've broken out into actual war. This book centers around a time of such conflict, when in the 1740s England decided to commission a fleet led by a Commander Anson to go after Spanish galleons and loot them for their gold.

It was a disaster. By the time they actually set sail, they were headed for the worst weather of the year around the Cape Horn. There were already problems before they got there, including scurvy, but by the time they got to the bottom of South America, the fleet had broken up and one of the ships, The Wager, ran aground. Mayhem and mutiny ensued, along with starvation and murder.

I don't know why I love these nautical disaster books so show more much. I'm a total landlubber. I can't even swim. I didn't even see the ocean until I was an adult. But for whatever reason, I love reading these books. This one definitely did not disappoint. It was full of drama and emotion, and the best part was that it was all true and taken from the accounts written by the actual survivors. If you like tales of shipwreck or disaster, add this one to your list. I raced through it and I'm so glad I did.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free copy of this book. This did not affect my review. show less