The Wager; A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

The latest epic, novelistic piece of history writing from Killers of the Flower Moon author David Grann, The Wager follows the eponymous British naval vessel on its ill-fated mission to raid Spanish colonial possessions in South America as part of the now largely forgotten War of the Austrian Succession. Sailing from England in 1740 with the intention of rounding Cape Horne and intercepting Spanish trade in the Pacific, it would be over two years before survivors began to trickle back to Europe, having come through storms, scurvy, starvation, shipwreck, and mutiny on their epic and singularly disastrous voyage. As various bedraggled crewmembers limped back to London over the proceeding months, the story of their misadventure (and critically the question of who was responsible for its failure) would become bitterly contested, leading to multiple published accounts, court martials and libel cases, leaving modern scholars with a wealth of valuable if contradictory evidence. Out of this tangled mess Grann has weaved a lucid and highly compelling narrative, propulsive enough to be accessible to the average reader while still containing enough minutiae on sails and rigging to please the most hardcore Patrick O’Brian afficionados.

Much like O’Brian, Grann has a knack for communicating the nightmarish details of life on an 18th century vessel, from the vitamin-free rations to the almost unimaginably cramped sleeping arrangements, and of course the ever-present spectre of disease. Of all the terrible maladies one might contract at sea, this book has certainly convinced me that none were to be feared more than scurvy, an affliction that left few ships untouched and brought with it an impressively diverse array of horrifying and painful symptoms. Ironically it was also among the most easily preventable, and with advances in medical science only a few decades later would be completely eradicated. Readers should be warned that the author does not shy away from the gory details of this and other naval afflictions, and these sections in particular are not for the feint-hearted (or weak-stomached).

Perhaps the most commendable aspect of Grann’s work is that amidst all the detail about ship-craft and extreme survival he never loses sight of the bigger picture, which is to say that he places the story of the Wager in its full context of European colonialism and imperialism. While lesser writers often succumb to the glamour of age-of-sail adventuring and paint their protagonists as noble, stiff-upper-lipped gentlemen on missions of innocent derring-do, Grann is scrupulous in reminding his readers that the men of the Wager served and died in the service of Britain’s mission to conquer, enslave, exploit and eradicate indigenous people’s across the world, that they went through all these terrible trials for no greater purpose than to further extend London’s domination of the globe, a dark irony that draws comparisons with Ulysses S. Grant’s famous description of the Confederacy as perhaps ‘the worst cause for which brave men ever fought’.