 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: Second of two books with the same title.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann. David Grann's best-known book, Killers of the Flower Moon, was history that read like a thriller. This is history that reads like an adventure story. Grann reconstructs what happened from the journals, letters, and eventual testimony of the survivors. The accounts sometimes contradict each other, of course, and Grann gives what he believes to be the most plausible version of events. In 1740, five warships, including the Wager, departed England to capture a Spanish galleon bringing treasure back from South America. The mission was ill-fated from the start. While press gangs kidnapped any man they saw with tar on his hands, figuring he had sailing experience, they still didn't have enough crew. Elderly and disabled sailors were dragged out of nursing homes to fill up the numbers, and those men were the first to fall to scurvy and other illnesses along the way. Two ships had to turn back on stormy seas, one sank, and the Wager wrecked on a small island with little to eat besides wild celery. (Apparently even fish were scarce.) As months passed and hunger took its toll, infighting grew among the sailors - to the point where the increasingly erratic captain, David Cheap, shot an unarmed man. Eventually, a plan came together to build small boats with the remnants of the ship. But while almost all the men wanted to find a way back to England, Captain Cheap remained fixated on somehow completing their mission. When the survivors met up back in England, the court martial was a bit of an anticlimax. Grann gives a clear look at men in desperate circumstances, struggling against each other, an unforgiving sea, and their own psyches. The story raises questions about law and chaos: Navy law was the one thing providing order for the marooned men - but what happens when the person in charge of that order no longer has their trust?
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