The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Random House Large Print)

I absolutely loved The Wager. As my headline suggests, I consider this to be a BigDog book. What constitutes a "BigDog" book? It has to be the right combination of Information, Amusement and Never Being Able to Put it Down. David Grann did all three at a very high level. I think I love this guy, David Grann. He must have worked so damn hard on this book. The amount of scribbles and scrabbles he was probably trying to decipher from these dumb 250 year old ship logs! It must have been so tedious.

But Grann did it. He went to work and researched the tits out of this story. And sure, there are certainly holes he must have approached in the story and realized that he would have to creatively fill those in. That, in my opinion, is to be expected. Not only did Grann fill those holes, he did it expertly and seamlessly. Do YOU know why we have the phrase "3 Sheets To the Wind" as a euphemism for being drunk? Well, throughout this history of the British man-o-wars, David Grann teaches you that there's more to being a shipman than knowing a few knots & phrases. It takes guts and sometimes, even honor.

I won't spoil the story for you here. I believe the Amazon description above gives you even too much information and "spoils" as the kids say. Speaking of kids, my 14 year old son was watching me devour this book. He was the only one in my family willing to listen to the new things I'd learned about man-o-wars or ancient tribes while we all gathered at the dinner table. "Did you know that the British Navy could just roll up on homies who had abandoned their ships and pretended to be dead so they didn't have to go back to sea? They called these guys 'Press Gangs.'" Only my 14 year old would chirp up and say something positive like, "That's awesome, dad!" Or "Do you think you could be a seaman, dad?" What a nice boy.

One day while I was cranking through the part of the book near the end that is sort of the political intrigue portion, my son said "David Grann."

"What?" I asked.

"David Grann. The author." My son was staring at the book jacket cover. "I bet he's a real G."

I motioned for the kid to come over and when he sat next to me I said, "A G? You better believe Grann is a G because he did all this freakin' research to make this book come to life. If that's not bein' a G, then I don't know what else is. Plus, take a look at this picture of him inside the book jacket!"

He leaned in and looked at this picture of the most G-lookin dude of all time. David Grann, standing there with a polo shirt and jacket on top. Not really smiling, not really frowning. Just a look of a confident son of a bitch. My son was right: Grann is a real G. We looked at the picture and then my son read the little bio below, which is just his bonafides in the literary sense. We would have preferred David give us a little bit more personal stuff. For example, his favorite pizza topping would be a good choice to include. What about HIS favorite books instead of a list of books he wrote? I get it... his publisher only wants to pimp his books instead of other authors'. Still, give me a little flavor with Grann.

Under his bio, there is his social media and website listed. Only his Twitter and Facebook handle. No instagram. I found that strange. You'd think there'd be a Wager Instagram handle at least! When I finished the book, I wanted to shout it out on my Instagram Story and let everyone know that David Grann is a G and he wrote a BigDog book. To my surprise, I found that Grann DID have an instagram page! I was shocked. Did one of his kids shame him into doing this? His publisher maybe? Regardless, my dude only has like 8 or 9 posts! And it's just pictures of the hardcopy of The Wager stacked on top of each other. I tagged this sad Instagram account to my hype Story about the book anyway. I thought it couldn't do harm.

I recommend this book mightily if you couldn't tell.

“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.

Let me begin with the answer to a direct question: is this book better than KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON? Yes, and by a wide margin. This is a historical tale that draws on the powers of fictional narrative. First and foremost, the story must be true. Hence, the success of the story rises or falls on the quality of the historical incidents themselves, because the resulting story will directly affect the elements of the narrative that are essentially novelistic: characters, themes, setting and plot. The story of the Wager satisfies each of those elements. In other words, David Grann chose wisely. And such choices are always guesses, to some degree. Once the commitment is made to sift through mountains of documents and other evidentiary material, the die has been cast: the resulting story could be a crashing bore; key questions might never yield satisfactory answers; plot lines could end in blind alleys; themes could prove to be maudlin commonplaces, and so on. Not in this case. We have an array of fascinating characters, a great adventure story, a novelistic plot, a riveting setting and a sobering set of lessons learned.

Basically we are in the War of Jenkins’ Ear; a set of British ships under the great seaman George Anson is dispatched to intercept and capture a Spanish galleon loaded with treasure. The voyage involves the negotiation of the treacherous winds and waters around Cape Horn. One ship—The Wager—is crushed against the rocks and the men must attempt to survive hunger, disease, and, as we say, insuperable odds, to somehow return to England and stand trial for their actions in Patagonia.

I purchased the book as a backup for other books in my reviewing queue that were about to ship. After being disappointed by KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, but seeing the hype for THE WAGER, I decided to read it until more interesting books arrived. However, once I started to read it I simply could not stop. Only one small quibble: the book ends with what the author (SPOILER alert) considers a reflection on the evils of empire. In other words, a dash of seasoning from the Woke shaker. Ultimately, the story is relevant for our own times and our own preoccupation with colonizers/colonized/oppressors/oppressed, etc. It is worthwhile to point out that every thinking writer in the 18th century (especially the putatively most ‘conservative’ ones, Johnson and Burke) were opposed to the aspirations of empire, particularly as they involved self-interested motives. The book is being described as Master and Commander meets Lord of the Flies. Fair enough, but the brief, third act brings everything down to the seedy world of politics. The book does not end on some high, moral, virtue-signaling ground, but in the world that is simply all too familiar. Bishop Sheen said he gave up on politics after Pontius Pilate. Amen. That does not undercut the impact of the story. It simply reinforces the usefulness of James Ellroy’s category of ‘tragic realism’ and, in this case, the manner in which politics can dilute actions of heavily-compromised courage and determination and render them (publicly) mundane.

A very interesting historical narrative, about one of two pronged pirate attacks from England against Spain during the War of Jenkins Ear. One was the disastrous attack against Cartagena de Indias, where the English pirate fleet was repelled by the troops commanded by Blas de Lezo. The Wager narrative tells about another expedition that crossing into the Pacific through Cape Horn was to attack Spain in Western America and Philippines. Many of the participants die horribly during the trip, even before reaching the tip of South America. One of the ships, the Wager sinks in what is now southern Chile. The few survivors struggle mightily, die, and eventually a handful make their way back to England. Spain remained a master of the Caribbean and Pacific. Author doesn't miss a chance to lie about Spain and its supposed cruelties.

The Wager, as the subtitle suggests, is a tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and murder. It is a masterfully woven presentation of the ill-fated English campaign that set sail in 1740 during the English-Spanish conflict, the wreck of one of the English ships on the campaign: the Wager, the years-long efforts of a small group of its seamen to survive against all odds, and the court marshal that followed their surprising arrival back home.

The Wager is not the type of book I'd normally choose to read, but after it won the Goodreads Awards, Best History and Biography in 2023, as well as the Libby Book Awards - Best Adult Nonfiction in 2024, and was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, TIME, Smithsonian, NPR, Vulture, and Kirkus Reviews, I had to see what all the fuss was about.

For a work of non-fiction, the story was a masterfully written tale woven together through extensive research of journals, books, logs, and more. The book read more like a work of fiction than non-fiction, introducing the reader to the seamen, and then pulling the reader into the ill-fated venture and the struggle of these men to hold on to life, at great physical, mental, and emotional cost.

All in all, I found The Wager to be a worthwhile read, even if it will likely not find its place a the top of my favorite books of the the year list.

As a side note: One thing that really struck me when reading was just how many of our modern day colloquialisms come from "sea-speak." Sayings such as under the weather, toe the line, and pipe down all had their start on a ship!