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\nBook Summary:
\nFrom the #1 \;New York Times \;bestselling author of \;Kill ers of the Flower Moon\, a page-turning story of shipwreck\, survival\, an d savagery\, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the&nb sp\;Wager\, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial\, but the very idea of empire.
\nOn January 28\, 1742\, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coas t of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men\, barely alive\, and they ha d an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the \;Wager\, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a sec ret mission during an imperial war with Spain. 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 Pa tagonia. The men\, after being marooned for months and facing starvation\, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days\, traversi ng nearly 3\,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
\nBut then . . . six months later\, another\, even more decrepit cr aft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways \, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded wi th countercharges of their own\, of a tyrannical and murderous senior offi cer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island th e crew had fallen into anarchy\, with warring factions fighting for domini on over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew \, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilt y could hang.
\nThe Wager \;is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recr eation 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 acc ount of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As alwa ys with Grann's work\, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the rea der spellbound.
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