Relentless survival story meets courtroom Drama in this thrilling tale of a life on the ocean waves
by David Grann
352pp, Simon & Schuster, £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £15.99
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In 1740, during the “War of Jenkins’ Ear” between England and Spain, Commodore George Anson set off at the command of a squadron of eight ships on a circumnavigation of the globe. Their aim was to capture treasureladen ships and disrupt Spanish trade in the Pacific.
What followed was a hellish voyage devastated by bad weather, accident, and scurvy – the mysterious “plague of the seas” caused by vitamin C deficiency. As the fleet neared Cape Horn at the foot of South America, one captain wrote in his log of conditions so unbearable “that words can not express the misery” as his men dropped around him and were devoured by rats.
But fate had worse in store. While traversing the notoriously dangerous Drake Passage, one of the smaller ships, a 28-gun frigate called HMS Wager, became separated from the rest. It was never seen again, but over the next few years starving stragglers would wash up in South American ports, each with their own terrible story of shipwreck and survival.
It is easy to be swept away by
David Grann’s tale of high-seas drama, but as with his previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), which chronicled a chain of murders in 1920s Oklahoma, the journalist is telling a story firmly anchored in real life. To reconstruct the events of the Wager’s wreckage, the stranding of its survivors on a desolate island and the subsequent mutiny, Grann combines a forensic eye with a storyteller’s enthusiasm.
He sets the scene on land as press-gangs scour English cities for the tell-tale signs of recalcitrant sailors: wide trousers or round hats; fingers smeared with tar. Anyone unlucky enough to be found is dragged into “small ships known as tenders, which resembled floating jails” that ferry
them to their larger vessels. It’s grim stuff, but true to the Navy’s practices in the period. There were volunteer sailors, too, but giving both sides of the story is an intelligent move that sets up the conflicts to come, drawing us into everyday life for the doomed vessel’s 250-strong crew.
At moments the story echoes Robinson Crusoe, though it is far less romantic. The dying castaways experience a miracle when the Kawésqar, a native people with experience in fishing and foraging, arrive and help to supply food.
It proves a brief reprieve. The sailors’ bad behaviour soon sends their saviours running, and the remainder gradually turn on one another.
Grann draws together historical fact and the contradictory firsthand accounts of the dozen or so sailors who made it home to England. Ship’s gunner John Bulkeley was the first. His stories of abuse and poor leadership quickly found their way into print for an insatiable British public, fuelling a scandal. But when Captain David Cheap, accompanied by young midshipman John Byron (grandfather of the poet), showed up six months later, they had a different tale to tell – one which, if proven true, could have led to Bulkeley’s execution.
Each of these figures has understandable motivations, and Grann skilfully moves the story between several genres – giving us a tense court-martial drama to finish an unrelenting survival thriller.
The rest of Anson’s squadron went on to capture a galleon, inspiring Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. Grann offers an entirely different kind of sea narrative, pushing ideals of camaraderie beyond breaking point. We are already on course for a film adaptation, with Martin Scorsese at the helm. But will it capture Grann’s lively prose? Those of us searching for a successor to Peter Weir’s excellent
should be ready to gamble on this one.