"From the #1 New York Times bestselling au thor of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z\, a mesmerizing story of shipwreck\, survival\, and savagery\, culminating in a court mart ial that reveals a shocking truth On January 28\, 1742\, a ramshackle vess el of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. In side were thirty emaciated men\, barely alive\, and they had an extraordin ary tale to tell. 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 treas ure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans\," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men\, after being ma rooned for months and facing starvation\, built the flimsy craft and saile d for more than a hundred days\, traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked se as. They were greeted as heroes. But then ... six months later\, another\, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat containe d just three castaways\, and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own\, of a tyranni cal and murderous captain and his henchmen. It became clear that while str anded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy\, with warring factio ns fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of tre achery and murder flew\, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determi ne who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death-for whomever the court found guilty could hang. The Wager is a grand tale of human beha vior at the extremes 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'Brian\, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance\, and his ac count of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As alw ays with Grann's work\, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the re ader spellbound. Most powerfully\, he unearths the deeper meaning of the e vents\, showing that it was not only the Wager's captain and crew who were on trial - it was the very idea of empire."
\n&mdash\;From Catalog.
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