The premise of David Grann’s newest history, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, is simple: Months after a ship was lost at sea, a boat of bedraggled survivors makes it back to civilization with a harrowing tale of near-starvation and hard decisions; months after that, another group of even more bedraggled survivors washes up with a story quite different from the one on record. The saga that comes before the ending of conflicting accounts is far more dramatic and desperate than your average blockbuster.
During a contrived conflict between British and Spanish forces, a fleet sets sail from England with the mission to sail around Cape Horn and attack the Spanish about midway up the coast of Chile. Seems straightforward enough, except for how notoriously treacherous Cape Horn is, and the fleet happens to get there at the exact worst time of year. Two ships in the fleet turn back rather than risk getting dashed on the rocks, while the rest press on.
That includes the Wager, a repurposed merchant ship whose captain had just been elevated to the position midway through the journey. Perhaps through inexperience, perhaps through overzealousness to his orders, or perhaps through plain and simple bad luck—or some combination of all three—Captain Cheap presses on despite the choppy seas, bad weather, scurvy, and inexact eighteenth-century navigation. Whatever the cause, the Wager ends up crushed between two rocks and the crew scrambles to a nearby island. But the island isn’t the refuge they’d been hoping for; it’s cold, virtually devoid of animal life, and choked with inedible thickets. Aside from the odd seabird and some shellfish washed ashore, the only thing the island offers to eat is seaweed scraped from rocks and a little wild celery (which, to be fair, does solve the scurvy thing).
Being stranded and starving breaks down the careful structure of naval hierarchy, and even before the first campfire has been built the survivors have already started splintering into different groups. As days turn into weeks turn into months, the disciplined bunch of sailors and soldiers turns into a real-life Lord of the Flies, complete with murder and a creeping sense of madness.
In fairness, at this point, I’d read a takeout menu if David Grann wrote it. But his writing, and research, continue to be rich and compelling. In the case of the marooned sailors, he drew most from three journals that survived the ordeal that killed hundreds, primary sources that he filled out with research including going through more primary documents and taking a frigid trip to the island. The end product kept me up for a few nights as I tried to get through just one more chapter. The end does come a bit abruptly, which I suspect is the result of those primary sources going quiet real quick when it became obvious a court marshal would also be very curious about what happened on the island, which is the only flaw worth mentioning in an otherwise gripping work.
Grann’s previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon, shed light on a particularly insidious brand of racism and greed that left a trail of blood across the Osage nation a century ago. The events of The Wager are both more and less localized than that. Grann does, however, periodically point out how the attitudes that drove many of the sailors’ choices and attitudes were informed by imperialism, such as the conflict that led to the war in the first place. He also grapples with the multiple versions of the story that entered public record. They say history is written by the victor, but in The Wager, the story that sticks is the one told first—or by the one wielding the most power.
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