When it all goes very wrong at sea

David Grann is the author of The Lost City of Z (see my review here) and Killers of the Flower Moon. He seems to specialise in telling the stories of events in history which are quirky or unusual and humanising the people involved in his narrative. In his latest book The Wager he succeeds by choosing a fascinating story and using the records that exist to make the people and the events feel very real to the reader.

In the mid-eighteenth century the Royal Navy sent ships to the Americas to capture the annual fleet that took treasure from South America to Spain. As England was at war with Spain at the time the ships were considered fair game. In 1742 one of those ships was The Wager but it foundered and wrecked its sailors onto a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The ship’s crew had not been a particularly cohesive unit but once ashore any unity disappeared and the result was mutiny, treachery and murder. In fact, the ship’s crew was suffering from scurvy and their captain was very new and wanted to make a name for himself.

This is a story of wild weather, poor decision making, stubborn leaders and a brutal fight for life. Food was short, the crew split into factions and they couldn’t agree about what to do. It’s certainly not a romanticised view of the sailor’s life and the author is clear about the conditions in which they lived on board ship as well as ashore. Many of the men who were stranded lived to return to England but even there they were still in peril because the Royal Navy punished mutineers by hanging.

This story was absolutely gripping and the author does a good job of trying to understand and share the motivations of the men involved and the pressures which led them to behave the way that they did..

Interestingly, the castaway in Diana Souhami’s book Selkirk’s Island was also part of a fleet trying to capture Spanish gold (see my review here). One of the sailors in this story was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron and his story and that of his unconventional family is told in The Fall of the House of Byron by Emily Brand (reviewed here). If you are interested in tales of sea faring and what can go wrong I also recommend Mutiny by Peter Fitzsimons (see my review here) a highly entertaining book about the famous events on The Bounty, Batavia’s Graveyard by Mike Dash which talks about the horrendous events following a shipwreck, and In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick which is about the sinking of a whaler and the fate of its crew.