The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann (Doubleday, $30)

David Grann “has a rare gift for applying the rigors of narrative nonfiction to the stuff of legend,” said Chris Vognar in

The Boston Globe. His new book, a “propulsive, finely detailed seafaring saga,” details the illfated 1740 journey of HMS Wager, a British man-of-war that was part of a squadron dispatched to strike at Spain’s overseas empire by seizing a treasurefilled Spanish galleon in South American waters. The Wager instead shipwrecked on an island off Patagonia, and its crew descended into violence, cannibalism, and madness. Grann, the author of “thinking person’s adventures” such as The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon, has this time built a ripping yarn that simultaneously serves as an exposé of the follies of imperialism and “an acute study of group psychology.”

Grann’s account “draws from an unusually rich trove of firsthand documents—including logbooks, diaries, and court-martial testimony,” said Julia Flynn Siler in The Wall Street Journal. Stranger-than-fiction details include icy 100-foot waves, a captain’s dark deathbed prophecy, and a strenuous trek motivated by a perceived haunting. The tale remains riveting after the survivors return to England bearing conflicting stories while being court-martialed under threat of execution. The fate of the Wager crew later captivated philosophers and poets, and Grann uses the ship’s drift into myth to show how nations shape history’s telling.

“Why read this book, as opposed to the Wikipedia entry?” asked Mary Ann Gwinn in the Los Angeles Times. “Besides Grann’s narrative gifts, there’s the age-old reason—to find out how human beings behave under extremes without suffering them yourself.” Grann also “puts his story in context, showing what a naked grab for power the age of colonial expansion was,” and how every crew member was a pawn in that game. In the end, “the story of the Wager is, like antecedents from Homer’s Odyssey to Mutiny on the Bounty, a testament to the depths of human depravity and the heights of human endurance. You can’t ask for better than that.”