David Grann - The Wager: A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder

In May 1741 The Wager, a 28 gun Royal Navy ship on a voyage to harass Spanish treasure ships off the western coast of South America, ran aground on a then, nearly unknown, island. This barren mountainous place was home to some 150 castaways for months. David Grann's account of the voyage, the deprivations of the crew, the bullying of their officers and the appalling conditions on the island is based on a closed reading of all the contemporary accounts. On the island, the survivors gradually split into two groups - one, around Captain Cheap and the other the mutinous majority crew. 

Despite the shipwreck, sickness, intense hunger and a severe shortage of any supplies Cheap harboured fantastical dreams of continuing the mission and bringing home glory to "King and country". The rest of the crew recognised that this was not just a fantasy, it would get them all killed, and so they wanted to go home. They did so by seizing control of a boat, supplies and heading back into the Straits of Magellan and home via Spanish controlled ports on the east coast. Some of them took longer. Many died. It was a brave and remarkable journey.

Cheap too eventually made it back, though with far fewer survivors, including the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. For both groups of sailors the voyages to escape their shipwreck were as bad, if not worse, as the initial voyage itself.

Grann's account underlines the horror of life at sea in the 18th century. This was a violent "wooden world", one where officers had power over life and death, and where hunger, sickness and the horrors of life in a tiny wooden ship in high seas were ever present. In places the Grann's descriptions are almost unbelievable - how anyone could imagine a trip around Cape Horn could leave a small flotilla in a condition to wage war is mind boggling. Nonetheless the Admiralty seemed to think it was possible. But if your crew is sick of typhus, underpaid and terrified then you gets what you pay for (the cook was in their 80s!)

But what really makes Grann's book is his insights into the wider seafaring world. The horror of the castaway life on what became known as Wager Island, is linked to the wider horror of the transatlantic slave trade, colonisation and imperialist ambition. This raid took place during the jingoistic "War of Jenkin's ear". A conflict that should never have happened. It was a war all about British sea power, and those who died on, and off, the Wager were sacrificed to this ambition. Grann notes wider implications - the racist attitudes to indigenous people that drove their saviours away, and the horror that a black British seaman was kidnapped into slavery while on his way home. He even finishes with a second mutiny of enslaved people who were on the ship to Europe carrying some of Wager's survivors.

All in all this is a great read which has surprising depths and is strikingly anti-imperialist. I thought David Grann's earlier book Killers of the Flower Moon about the treatment of Native Americans was fantastic. This is not quite on the same par as that, but is a very good read.

Related Reviews

Grann - Killers of the Flower Moon
Rodger - The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1642 - 1815
Bullocke - Sailors' Rebellion