#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning tale of shipwreck, survival and savagery, culminating in a military trial that reveals a truth shocking. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events in The Wager, revealing not only the captain and crew on trial but also the very idea of empire.
Best book of the year: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, TIME, Smithsonian, NPR, Vulture, Kirkus Reviews
“Lovely...Reads like a thriller, enthusiastically tackling a multi-layered story – and imperialism. —Time
“A wonderful achievement in narrative nonfiction. » —The Wall Street Journal
On January 28, 1742, a dilapidated ship made of patchwork wood and fabric ran aground on the Brazilian coast. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary story to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Wager, a British ship that left England in 1740 on a secret mission during the Imperial War with Spain.While The Wager was pursuing a Spanish galleon filled with treasure known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it was shipwrecked on a deserted island off the coast Patagonia. The men, after months of abandonment and facing starvation, built this flimsy boat and sailed for more than a hundred days, crossing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-ravaged waters. They were welcomed as heroes.
But then.... six months later, another even older boat arrived on the Chilean coast. This boat was adrift carrying only three people and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes: they were rebels. The first group responded with counter-accusations of their own, against a tyrannical and murderous superior officer and his henchmen.Apparently, once stranded on the island, the crew has descended into chaos, with conflicting factions vying for dominance of the barren wilderness. As accusations of treason and murder mounted, the Admiralty convened a military tribunal to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life or death: anyone found guilty could be hanged.
The Wager is a wonderful story of extreme human behavior told by one of our greatest non-fiction authors. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian. His portrait of the plight of the castaways stands alongside survival classics like The Endurance, and his account of the royal court makes sense of the term. from a horror movie by Scott Turow.As always in Grann's work, the story's unexpected details keep the reader in suspense.
