Book review: "The Wager"
I read it in 3 days, and you will too.
Authors like David Grann get people excited about reading, and he has produced yet another awesome page-turner with “The Wager.” His previous best seller, “Killers of The Flower Moon,” was bid at $5 million to be adapted into a feature film that will now debut this fall, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring DiCaprio and De Niro. “The Wager” is next in line, which will be Grann’s sixth adapted story to hit the big screen.
"The Wager," tells the absolutely brutal tale of British castaways set in the mid-18th century. Very little romance of the old colonial sea-faring world to be found here, folks.
Rather, it's an unwieldy open-water quest that becomes a saga of shipwreck, anarchy, betrayal, and murder - a fascinating blend of "Mutiny on the Bounty" meets "Lord of the Flies"—except every word of it really happened. Grann had to painstakingly comb through hundreds of historical journals and personal accounts in order to piece them together into a cogent storyline.
As you progress through the book, you will say to yourself - “this can’t possibly get any worse,” - and then it does, again and again! It’s unbelievable that these men, under those conditions, kept journals at all, but they did, and here we are today with their story.
We meet the cast of sailors and their officers in the early 1740s, during the “War of Jenkins’ Ear,” so named because it arose from the allegation a Spanish sailor cut off a British sailor’s ear. That’s all it took for these two to get going!
Really it was a continuing clash of empires, as Britain and Spain were competing to grab as much of the New World as they could. In 1740, His Majesty’s Ship The Wager set sail across the Atlantic, along with a small squadron of man-of-war ships, on a hastily planned mission to intercept a Spanish Galleon filled with treasure off the Chilean coast.
The ships and their crews endured many hardships as they rounded Cape Horn, otherwise known as “Terrible,” “Dead Men’s Road,” and “Blind Horn’s Hate,” where the strongest currents in the world converge upon each other.
To make matters worse, that was also where scurvy and typhus set in, decimating over half the crew. At this early point in the story, Grann begins to relate the physical and psychological toll of the voyage through passages quoted from the sailor’s journals, as well as weaving in references from other authors of historic nautical adventures like Herman Melville and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The Wager originally aimed for Robinson Crusoe Island in the Pacific but shipwrecked instead on a remote island off Patagonia, today known as “Wager Island.”
And there, the real struggle for survival begins. The two most central figures are Captain David Cheap and the ship’s gunner, John Bulkeley. One an aristocratic officer, the other a natural leader amongst the men.
They clash in a deadly contest to win the loyalty of the remaining 145 survivors and somehow scrape together a way to return to England. If they do happen to make it back, will they be celebrated for their valor or hanged as treasonous mutineers?
From Matthew Teague (The Guardian) -
“We make our stories, until they make us. So many of Grann’s predecessors wrote of colonial adventures in a way that glorified violence, exploitation and enslavement. But recognizing the power of story, Grann seeks to burnish nothing, instead presenting the truth. He fixes his spyglass on the ravages of empire, of racism, of bureaucratic indifference and raw greed. In doing so, he frees himself to acknowledge the valor, the curiosity and the sheer adventure of the age.”
Thank you for reading!
References -
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Grann, D.)
This sounds like an interesting read. Thanks for the review!