But, one of the ships in the squadron lost its way just off the coast of Patagonia. That meant rounding Cape Horn, negotiating some of the world's most treacherous waters and winds. With their Empires at war, a British squadron of roughly 2,000 men set out to capture a Spanish galleon filled with treasure off the Philippines. Most powerfully, he unearths the deeper meaning of the events, showing that it was not only the Wager’s captain and crew who were on trial – it was the very idea of empire.All these names and symbols told a larger story. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as THE ENDURANCE, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. THE WAGER is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. The stakes were life-and-death-for whomever the court found guilty could hang. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. They were greeted as heroes.īut then…six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil.
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