
“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.