“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 grand tale of human hubris, adventure, and the terrible cost of human life in a time when life and death hung in a desperate straits.
It’s clear that some things never change when it comes to the idea of a manifest destiny. It’s 1740, and England is trying to establish British domination over Spain and thus control the sea and trade routes with the aim of empire building. Unfortunately, due to poor seamanship (despite “the central claim on which the British Empire tried to justify its rule of other peoples: that its imperial forces, its civilization, were inherently superior”), they had no issue with using press gangs –people who grabbed men off the streets and forced them to work on their ships. The problem was, beyond most crews being laid low by scurvy, a lot were often criminal elements and the scum of society, as well as invalids and injured veterans who were hauled out of hospital, carried out on stretchers and onto the ships to perform naval duties. After getting separated from the rest of the squadron by bad weather (which almost another character here), The Wager runs aground near the Patagonian coast, after getting separated from the rest of the squadron. So one calamity after another strike them, which leaves them stranded in one of the most treacherous spots in the world.
Grann's recreation with the highly detailed notes and diaries left by the men show a dark and hidden world of life on a British warship (which writer Patrick O'Brian used for his novels in 20th Century). David Cheap, captain of The Wager, comes off a lot like Alec Guinness Colonel Nicholson in Bridge Over the River Kwai (who becomes obsessed with keeping up the British Army’s superiority despite being a POW), but while I can understand keeping things inline, he eventually crosses that line.
As with his previous books, Grann's talent shines in a work filled with incredible twists, and strong narrative that will captivate the reader.
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