The Wager: a tale of shipwreck\, mutiny an d murder
\n"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z\, a mesmerizing story of shipwr eck\, survival\, and savagery\, culminating in a court martial that reveal s a shocking truth. On January 28\, 1742\, a ramshackle vessel of patched- together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thir ty emaciated men\, barely alive\, and they had an extraordinary tale to te ll. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager\, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled gal leon known as "the prize of all the oceans\," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men\, after being marooned for mon ths and facing starvation\, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more tha n a hundred days\, traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then ... six months later\, another\, even more dec repit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three c astaways\, and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first gro up responded with countercharges of their own\, of a tyrannical and murder ous captain and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the i sland the crew had fallen into anarchy\, with warring factions fighting fo r dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and mur der flew\, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was tel ling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death-for whomever the court foun d guilty could hang. The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the ex tremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Bria n\, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the cla ssics of survival writing such as The Endurance\, and his account of the c ourt martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann 's work\, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellboun d. Most powerfully\, he unearths the deeper meaning of the events\, showin g that it was not only the Wager's captain and crew who were on trial - it was the very idea of empire"--
\nThis group meets the 3rd Wednesday of every month. A limited number of books are available for participants each month at the Circulation Desk. View and pri nt the list of books for the year or find more groups and resources on the Book Discussion page.
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