The story of the Wager, a ship that was part of a British armada sent to locate the Spanish during the 1740s. The ships sailed around the southern end of South American, and some turned back, but the Wager was wrecked. With the crew suffering from scurvy, they spent 5 months on a desolate island visited only once by some native people from the mainland. Finally, a large part of the crew took the largest of the ship's boats and headed back north to England, leaving the captain and some officers behind. Was it a mutiny? Was there murder? When several groups arrived home, there was a court martial proceeding and then the story just disappeared. ( )

I've read a lot of books like this and had high hopes, it is David Grann. It's certainly not bad, but Grann is best when he has a strong central character, this is more of a Towering Inferno with lots of parallel disasters diluting the narrative. Furthermore, he sticks to the history close enough, and that history is incomplete, so there are gaps. Also while he makes a big deal about how the stories conflicted, he doesn't present conflicting stories, or explain the different version of events. The ending is anti-climatic. Some of this is not the fault of Grann but the material he had to work with. ( )

Thrilling - so well described that you feel yourself on the Wager on the storm-tossed seas of Cape Horn and Patagonia! I will happily read ANY future book by David Grann; the last two have been so interesting and thorough. ( )

Well Mr. Grann has done it again. I thought Killers of the Flower Moon was an incredible non-fiction account and here again The Wager matches that high standard of a well researched masterpiece.
I like this description from the Washington post:
"Reading it is like living one of those anxiety nightmares in which you’re just trying to get to that job interview, but you’re lost and your teeth are falling out and, wait, when your car dies you realize you’re naked, and then you’re attacked by flesh-eating zombies."
Grann begins the book by giving the facts of the fateful voyage of the Wager, part of a five ship Armada whose mission was to attack the Spanish galleon and bring back the treasure to England. "It was January 1740, and the British Empire was racing to mobilize for war against its imperial rival Spain." He then begins the story will the collection of the crew, the "pressing" of any able bodied former seamen who might have tar on their fingers. Even a retirement home for old sailors is raided to find the men needed. I was amazed how many of these men could not swim. So right away you forget that you know the facts of the story and begin a tale of survival like few others. The depictions of scarlet fever, scurvy and starvation will stick with me for a while. The five parts of the story: The Wooden World, Into the Storm, Castaways, Deliverance, and Judgment describe the arc of the story but the details of what these men experienced and how they survived make for excellent reading, think the opposite of Gillian's Island.
Highly recommend.
Lines:

“Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world.”

Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.

(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)

According to tradition, a body to be buried at sea was wrapped in a hammock, along with at least one cannonball. (When the hammock was sewn together, the final thread was often stitched through the victim’s nose, to ensure that he was dead.)

By portraying the natives as both magnificent and less than human, Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.

The cure—that unforbidden fruit which decades later would be furnished to all British seamen, giving them the nickname Limeys—had been right within their grasp.

they could be court-martialed by a panel of Cheap’s fellow officers and condemned to take a walk up Ladder Lane and down Hemp Street.

Ferreting out and documenting all the incontrovertible facts of what had happened on the island—the marauding, the stealing, the whippings, the murders—would have undercut the central claim on which the British Empire tried to justify its rule of other peoples: namely, that its imperial forces, its civilization, were inherently superior. That its officers were gentlemen, not brutes.

Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out. ( )

I pre-ordered this book months ago, solely on the fact that I loved Killers of the Flower Moon. Although I liked this book, it was not as enthralling and captivating as I had expected it to be. To me, it seemed rushed. It came across that there really wasn't much of a compelling story to fill an entire book. I think this would have worked better as long-form magazine or newspaper piece. Yes, they were shipwrecked, many died, there was a "mutiny," then they split into to factions, and tried to sail back home (they made it). Captain Cheap left Wager Island, made a few attempts to get back, and then is never heard from again. About 40 pages later, he simply pops up on land. That sort of describes how the story rushes through the sailor's experience. Except for a few sections, I did not get a real sense of what these people went through. In short, I could get a better understanding with doing my own online research. I did like it. But I was disappointed. ( )