Book Report: The Wager

19. David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder (2023) (11/7/26)

After the fluff of The Portable Veblen, I needed something a bit grittier. Well, The Wager delivers—and how. It is, as its subtitle explains, about shipwreck, and yes mutiny, and there's at least one central murder, though over the two-year course of the main tale hundreds of men die, the victims of both a harsh environment—the far southern reaches of South America—and hubris, or would that be desperation? 

The bare bones outline: on August 23, 1740, a flotilla of British ships departs Plymouth, its goal to intercept Spanish treasure ships off the coast of Patagonia. The context here is the humorously named War of Jenkins' Ear, after a sailor who allegedly lost his ear to a Spanish attacker, thus spiraling the two nations into war. Six months later, the company arrive at Tierra del Fuego, a site of violent winds and seas. Several of the ships struggle on through; a couple turn back. One ship falls behind: the man-of-war HMS Wager. On May 14, 1741, the Wager approaches too close to shore and breaks up on the rocks of a desolate island at 47°40′ S. There are some 145 survivors, including Captain David Cheap and gunner John Bulkley, "the one an aristocratic officer, the other an intuitive leader," as the Guardian review puts it. (It is because of that review that I picked up this, for me, unlikely book.)

The meticulously researched account details the many months these castaways spent on the island: how they grappled with illness (scurvy and typhoid), how they scavenged for food and constructed shelters, how they split into rival bands—until finally, in October, one group, led by Bulkley, decided to take two of the remaining boats and head south and east, through the Drake Passage; and then, the next March, with the help of native navigators, the remaining few (after one failed attempt) found their way to an inhabited island, and ultimately north to Valparaíso. 

Both groups made it home. With stories to tell. And not only theirs, but Grann injects other storytellers as well: Herman Melville (who in 1840–43 sailed as a hand on a whaling ship from Connecticut to French Polynesia) and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (based on the true story—one well known to the crew of the Wager—of marooned privateer Alexander Selkirk in 1704–9) are invoked, along with the poet Lord Byron (whose grandfather was a sixteen-year-old midshipman on the Wager) and Coleridge with his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The Guardian again: "Grann’s book is not about romance but truth. . . . It’s a story about the stories we tell ourselves—that empires and nations tell themselves—and how they shape us. His literary references suddenly come into focus and lift the book to become something greater than an adventure tale."

What's especially interesting, in the end, is the larger context: the sheer difficulty of circumnavigating Cape Horn (this was before longitude was tamed), the awfulness that was scurvy (“As the scourge invaded the sailors’ faces, some of them began to resemble the monsters of their imaginations. Their bloodshot eyes bulged. Their teeth fell out, as did their hair. . . . The cartilage that glued together their bodies seemed to be loosening"), the glorification of violence and colonialism, the workings of "honor" balanced against the desire to survive, the sheer loss of life (of the some 1,900 crew who started the round-the-world voyage that the Wager was part of, only about 200 made it home). All "for God and country." It makes you think twice about present-day belligerence and what is demanded of ordinary citizens. 

Grann, a journalist, also wrote The Lost City of Z (which I happen to own), about a 1925 quest for a "lost" settlement deep in the Amazon, and Killers of the Flower Moon, about the murder of sixty (or many more) Osage Indians in Oklahoma in the 1910s–1930s, subsequently made into a movie by Martin Scorsese. I can see more Grann in my future.