The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“As a tale gets passed from one person to another, it ripples out until it is as wide and mythic as the sea.” The annals of British naval history abound with great and small adventures alike. None, however, captivates like the extraordinary tale of the HMS Wager. And no one can better recount such a hair-raising series of events than David Grann. With "The Wager," Grann tops his previous works of narrative nonfiction with this harrowing story of inconceivable hardship and the machinations of desperate men. To be sure, no incident contained in this book is without ample evidence proving it occurred. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying set of survival conditions than those faced by Wager's crew, and capturing those conditions accurately based on aging historical records and biased published accounts was undoubtedly tricky. Yet, Grann does yeoman's work on this story of the ill-fated Wager, part of a British squadron ordered to sea in August 1740 against the Spanish in the apocryphal “War of Jenkins’ Ear." Commanding Wager and at the center of Grann's book is Captain David Cheap, a deeply flawed and complicated skipper. Like Grann's other books, "The Wager" nearly requires one to suspend disbelief. The author carefully and patiently reveals the story's events, shocking the reader in the process. Moreover, upon completing Grann's 257-page account of Wager's exploits and those of its sister ship, HMS Centurion, the reader better understands the ruthlessness and cunning demonstrated by the British Royal Navy as it navigated the high seas in quest of Empire. Indeed, British imperial ambitions are fully displayed in "The Wager." Based mainly on seamen’s logbooks and trial records, many of which are over 250 years old, Grann pieces together the seemingly doomed Wager’s calamities while providing ample historical context. The author, for example, details the multitudinous threats facing British ships as they pursued the Empire's aims in the mid-18th century. He also describes shipboard conditions on a British man-of-war sailing the world's oceans during this era. Wager meets its fate while searching for a Spanish galleon laden with treasure and attempting to negotiate the treacherous seas off Cape Horn at the tip of the South American continent. The crew, already decimated by storms, scurvy, and sundry other trials, finds its ship dashed on the rocks off the coast of Patagonia, Argentina. Marooned in May 1741 with little hope of rescue, the men struggle to survive on a scabrous spit of land subsequently named Wager Island. Malnourished and desperate, Wager’s surviving company suffers a complete breakdown in discipline and decorum. Having lost confidence in the ailing and unpredictable Cheap, still in command, the castaways defy British naval law and flout regulations. A fulminant Cheap, for his part, opposes the indiscipline and enforces his authority at the end of a pistol. A mutiny takes shape, and eventually, a breakaway faction, led by Gunner's Mate John Bulkeley, abandons Cheap and his loyalists, leaving them to fend for themselves on Wager Island. By this time, subsisting on the meagerest of diets harvested from terrain that barely sustains life while withstanding storm after storm, Cheap and crew somehow endure. Sailing a small transport boat reinforced with scrap lumber harvested from Wager and equipped with makeshift sails and rigging, Bulkeley and his charges successfully navigate the Strait of Magellan to Brazil. Meanwhile, Cheap and the Wager Island stragglers experience an equally implausible outcome. Sailing on an eighteen-foot yawl salvaged from the Wager, they set off to reach the Chilean coast. Surviving their respective ordeals, the two parties return to London, providing their lurid accounts of mutiny, betrayal, abandonment, and murder to an incredulous British Admiralty and fascinated public. They alternately face scorn and approbation and, eventually, court-martial. It is the Wager leadership’s trial for which Grann saves his best narration and jaw-dropping, surprise ending. "The Wager" asks which of the stories is harder to believe: the death-defying travails and travels of these indomitable seamen or the unanticipated result as the British Admiralty adjudicates their fate. Yet, Grann provides the reader with all the evidence necessary to confirm these events happened irrefutably. Relying on an abundance of journals, logs, diaries, and even letters, Grann demonstrates again his seemingly unquenchable thirst for the truth to inform his audience. His single-spaced bibliography alone exceeds 13 pages. Without question, "The Wager" is an astonishing naval story reminiscent of Charles Nordhoff’s and James Norman Hall’s “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Considering the inglorious actions of the Wager's crew, Grann's book is worth reading and rereading to comprehend the motives of desperate men. Experiencing the audacity and might of the 18th century British Royal Navy, particularly exemplified by Centurion as she squares off with the Spanish man-of-war Our Lady of Covadonga off the Philippines, provides immensely satisfying adventure reading. Grann's spellbinding account of the naval gunfight puts the reader in the crow's nest as though he is viewing the fight aboard the Centurion from the very mast top! "The Wager" offers an incredible piece of storytelling suitable for any devotee of narrative nonfiction or lover of naval lore. An extraordinary tale.

The Wager was an English ship that set sail from England in 1740 during an imperial war with Spain. It was the mid-1700s, and navigational tools were primitive. Diseases among the seafarers spread rapidly, and I was incredulous, realizing how little they knew about curbing nutritional deficiencies such as scurvy. It seems absurd that in addition to not knowing about the necessity for vitamin C, insufficient levels of niacin were causing psychosis and night blindness resulting from lack of Vitamin A. After shipwrecking on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia, the story is as much about human nature as it is about surviving on an island and attaining its mission against the Spanish. It is fascinating to read about how they discovered new food sources and what they chose to learn and ignore from natives whose cultures had thrived in the areas where the Englishmen became castaways. If they were going to continue to survive and continue their naval mission, they had to build new boats without the technology available in their homeland, and there were myriad disagreements about how to proceed and also about which path to follow when it was time to embark on the dangerous waters again. Disharmony leads some groups to set sail in opposite directions eventually. When the survivors arrived back in England, the accounts of what happened were not in sync. The characters who are historical figures demonstrate the gamut of human emotions and an evolution of social mores. Without describing each character, I’ll point out that we meet a dominating captain with poor leadership traits. And, of course, we meet argumentative underlings who have smug independence. Then, we see ferocious workers and others with inherent leadership skills and charisma. All of the men are familiar with British naval order and ranking conventions. Yet, more hierarchies develop as the men struggle to survive and create social order. As the subtitle suggests, the fight for survival leads to becoming mutinous and murderous. Grann describes the basic human drives and terrors with admirable writing skills. Writing, in the eighteenth century, was an honorable thing to do. The men onboard the Wager kept written logs—some were required, and others were kept to document some of the mutinous decisions. David Grann had copious notes and records to use when piecing this story together. Rousseau and Voltaire cited the Wager’s expedition reports, as did Charles Darwin and Herman Melville. The seafaring journalists quote the Bible, poets, and famous writers. It is incredible how learned they were. Grann uses his well-honed investigative and research skills to weave a beautiful story of what reportedly happened and the eloquent analysis by those who experienced it. Grann’s ability to combine first-person accounts of the expedition with his summation of the events provides fabulous text about the seafarers and their exploits. Each creative, descriptive section title structures the book and shapes the voyage with metaphoric summaries: The Wooden World, Into the Storm, Castaways, Deliverance, and Judgment are the main sections, and Gran used these to develop the book so that it reads like a novel and keeps the reader riveted. I highly recommend this narrative to everyone, even those who prefer fiction to nonfiction.

The Wager by David Grann is an absolute triumph of narrative nonfiction. From the opening chapters, I was pulled into a harrowing world of shipwreck, survival, and the unbreakable (and sometimes breakable) human spirit. Grann’s descriptive techniques are masterful—he doesn’t just tell the story, he immerses you in it. I felt as though I was there with the castaways: shivering in the cold, starving on the desolate shores, and clinging to every thread of hope alongside them. What truly amazed me was the grit, determination, and heroic resilience of these seamen. Their story is almost unbelievable—how they endured such extreme hardship in that era is beyond comprehension. Grann captures the essence of man’s struggle with life and death in a way that is both heartbreaking and inspiring. Equally impressive is the ease with which Grann guides the reader through this intense historical journey. Despite the depth and complexity of the story, the book is remarkably well-written and incredibly easy to read. I finished it in just a couple of sittings—it’s a quick but powerful read that stays with you long after the final page. The Wager is the perfect summer read: thrilling, thoughtful, beautifully told, and impossible to put down. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

A mix between Homers Odyssey and Golding's Lord of the Flies. Nonfiction This was an incredible read. Once again showing that reality, true stories, can often be more intriguing than anything imagined. The Wager, a man of war, part of a British squadron left port on August 23rd, 1740, with 250 souls on board. The mission: to evade Pizarro's fleet, sail around Cape Horn & attack a Spanish galleon that they knew was sailing from the Americas. My telling the story of this ship, its crew & adventures, would feel like I was giving spoilers. It is that intriguing. So, I will try to limit my comments to what is revealed on the flaps of the dust cover, & in the beginning of the book. The story revolves around the Wagers Captain, David Cheap, John Bulkeley, the ships gunner, and John King the Wagers boatswain. (Of course there are others.) By the time they reach the horn the crew of 250 men is reduced to less than 200. They lose site of the other ships, in stormy seas, as they round the tip of South America. Battered by waves against breakers, the Wager gets hung up, & begins to sink. 145 men were ferried to a desolated island of one of the most hostile environments on earth. There the crew eventually split into factions. (This is where Lord of the Flies kicks in) The crew of the wager is stuck on an island, that has no real means of sustenance, for 6-8 months. A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny & Murder, not to mention survival. 35 of the men survived, & able to return to England, through 3 different routes. (One was a group of 30.) None of them were rescued by another ship. The POV of the different groups (Especially the faction leaders) from different sources, journals & court martial documents is interesting. Very well researched. It is an historical work that reads like a novel. The maps of the journeys, pictures, paintings & engravings, shared in the work are a great addition.

David Grann’s THE WAGER is a gripping work of narrative nonfiction that drew me in from the very first line. The depth of research behind this book is impressive, yet Grann integrates it so naturally that it never weighs the story down. He does a remarkable job of balancing the harrowing story itself with the broader historical context, giving us a vivid sense of the world these sailors came from. The frequent inclusion of direct quotes from journals and testimonies makes it especially powerful, giving us a direct connection to the men who endured these torturous events. The book does shift gears a bit near the end, and while that change of focus didn’t hold me quite as tightly as the earlier narrative, it added an important layer to the bigger picture. Even so, this is narrative nonfiction at its finest: immersive, thought‑provoking, and hard to put down.

Grann’s Gift as a Story-Teller on Full Display In the first half of the 18th century, Britain already had the most powerful navy in the world. But financing that navy was a huge burden on the Crown and England had not yet achieved the wealth that the industrial revolution and its own colonization efforts would later bring. The answer: intercept the gold and silver that Spanish ships were bringing home from its New World colonies. Author David Grann is able to tell not only this larger story but also to resurrect one of the most astonishing seafaring events of the time. A ship named “The Wager” was to be part of a British fleet that would intercept gold-laden Spanish vessels in what was officially-sanctioned piracy. As the book’s cover indicates, what then transpired was shipwreck, mutiny and murder. This is also the story of unexpected survival and efforts in an Admiralty court back in England to establish the truth of what happened. Life on board a ship at the time, so full of danger and disease that it was not unusual for as few as ten percent of the crew to survive a long voyage, meant that the Royal Navy had great difficulty manning its ships. Grann provides graphic descriptions of able-bodied and not-so-able-bodied men being kidnapped off the wharfs (“impressed”) to fill the complement of seamen just as a ship was about to sail. (Some years later the impressment of American seamen was a contributor to the War of 1812.) The hulls of wooden sailing ships had a very short life-span due to wood-eating worms, and were susceptible to leaks and other threats to seaworthiness. Scurvy could render entire crews incapable of functioning. Other communicable diseases could cause widespread death on board a crowded, ill-ventilated vessel. In the case of The Wager, the author was able to find a remarkable record of its 1740 voyage and of the events to come. This was in part due to the fact that on board as a junior officer was John Byron, a gentleman volunteer and a compulsive diarist. Incidentally, he was the grandfather of Lord Byron. Additionally, another major actor in the drama, John Bulkeley, had kept a voluminous diary which chronicled the events of the voyage. Buikeley held the position of Gunner, a crucial role in ship combat, and had many other responsibilities on board. He was an instinctive leader, physically imposing, who commanded respect. Finally, there was the record of the court-martial proceedings themselves, in which the main actors including David Cheap, the captain, provided their own version of events. Cheap was an ambitious, younger son of a Scottish Laird who, under the rules of primogeniture, did not inherit his father’s estate. He ran off to sea at 17 and set his sights on becoming a captain, which he realized when an opening occurred on The Wager. The Wager survived the perilous passage around the treacherous Cape Horn, only to run aground and break up on the rocks of an uninhabited island off Patagonia. There were no animals or other significant source of food on the island. The crew soon divided into two factions, one supporting Captain Cheap who wanted to build a vessel out of timbers salvaged from the shipwreck and continue up the Pacific coast of South America to engage Spanish ships. The other group was led by Buckeley, who wanted to build a vessel to return to England. The situation was so dire it would seem impossible that either group would survive. Improbably a few men did make their way back to England to be hailed as heroes. That is, until a second group, including Captain Cheap, also arrived. This forms the final chapter of the story of The Wager and the launch of an inquiry to establish the truth. Faced by death by hanging if they were found guilty of mutiny or of discipline if they failed their duty, each survivor told his story. “Members of the Admiralty found themselves confounded by competing versions of events,” the author tells us. The result was unexpected, but only if one fails to consider that the leaders of an institution, in this case the Royal Navy, have as their first priority the preservation of that institution and the protection of its reputation. This is a wonderfully-written book and Grann is a masterful story teller.

The author doesn’t write over-dramatically because he doesn’t need to. He presents the material clearly and gets out of the way, the horror of the story speaks for itself. A fantastic page-turner.

The world of maritime and naval lore has been graced with prolific authors such as Joseph Conrad, Patrick O’Brien, Frederick Marryat, Nordhoff and Hall, Eric Newby and C.S. Forester. Unfortunately, for best-selling author David Grann in his recent book The Wager: a tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Adventure, which aspires to be another maritime classic, he flounders on the literary rocks of nautical history. A non-fiction book in a long series stretching back to 1743 of historical and semi-fictional accounts of HMS Wager, a 28-gun converted East Indiaman merchantman who sailed with a small British naval squadron commanded by the future legendary admiral George Anson on a secret mission during “War of Jenkins’ Ear” with Spain in 1742. It is a story rife with exploration, disaster, mutiny, and the limits of human endurance. Captained by Anson-protégé George Cheap in his first command, with 250 souls on board, Wager survives a harrowing transit around the treacherous Cape Horn, becomes separated from Anson’s fleet only to wreck off the desolate coast of modern-day Chile. Cheap, like William Bligh of HMA(rmed) V(essel) Bounty (erroneously referred to on p. 235 as HMS Bounty) 47 years later, exerts his Admiralty commission to build shelter, hunt for sustenance, fend off mutinous sailors, and organize plans for a return to civilization in territory controlled by a hostile Spain. Unfortunately, Grann turns this gripping tale into a summer beach read aimed for young students striving to complete their between-semester reading quotas. Despite the hype in the book jacket that The Wager lifts the author to the rank of Patrick O’Brien, late of the Jack Aubrey Napoleonic War naval series, Grann is but an unworthy usurper. Many critics and fans, in fact liken O’Brien as a modern-day Jane Austen. To appreciate the gap in erudition and writing style between Grann and The Wager with O’Brien’s classic works, one need only read the latter’s semi-fictional early novels The Golden Oceans and The Unknown Shore, which first chronicle Commodore Anson’s ill-fated voyage around the globe in 1740, followed by the account of Jack Byron (grandfather of the future poet Lord Byron) aboard the Wager. While Grann does a passible job of taking the reader through the ordeal of the Wager’s castaways and their return to civilization, he glaringly stumbles on nautical esoterica. He distracts readers early on, seemingly for his own edification, to parenthetically explain nautical terms. As examples, he often incorrectly refers to Marines on board Wager as “soldiers”: any Marine today would bristle at the moniker. On p. 38, Grann describes the so-called “lubber hole” on the ‘fighting top’ (platforms), usually 2 or 3 per the mast strictly for “cowards”: not a fair characterization, they were also employed to allow sailors to walk out on the yardarms to trim or take in sails, and to station armed Marines during ship-to-ship combat. Hardly cowards, they. Then this passage: “Unless Byron wanted to be ridiculed for the rest of the voyage …he had to go around the rim of the platform by holding onto cables [not an appropriate nautical descriptor] known as futtock shrouds. These cables were slanted [downward] on an angle, and as he shinnied along them his body would tilt farther and farther until his back was nearly parallel to the deck. Without panicking, he had to feel with his foot for a ratline [connecting to the bottom of the futtock shrouds] and pull himself onto the platform.” This passage ignores the practiced habit that a sailor climbing the ratlines towards the platform would usually ascend the windward side ratlines, so that with any force of wind, the ship would be heeled over enough to allow the sailor an easier climb up the short futtock shrouds. Then, Grann errs on p. 64 in describing ‘Latitude’ calculating by ascertaining the ship’s position only to the stars, when in fact it is also determined during daylight hours by “shooting” the angle of the sun to earth with an instrument known as a sextant. And then of course, few modern historians can resist the temptation of bashing England’s colonial past. Grann certainly cannot -- “London was the pulsing heart of an island empire built on the toll [should be 'toil'] of seaman and slavery and colonialism” (p. 228)-- notwithstanding the fact that imperial Spain was bent on conquering and plundering the Americas rather than building lasting, civilized settlements on the English model. And ignore that England was one of the first European powers to abolish slavery. Also, characterizing Anson's capture of the Spanish galleon as a piratical act of thievery, despite it occurring while England was at war with Spain. Finally, rather than periodically interrupting his narrative with sidebars explaining naval terminology, the author could have – as so many maritime authors have done - added a glossary of ship terminology. Again, this book appears unintentionally intended for readers with little or no knowledge of ships and the sea. In addition to The Unknown Shore, those seeking a richer tale of mutiny in the age of sail are advised to take in the Bounty Trilogy by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall- an absolute classic! For a shorter and equally absorbing read, pour yourself a glass of Maderia and get lost in the superb Hornblower and the Hotspur by C. S. Forester.