The Wager: a tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder

I was listening to an abridged version of this book on BBC Radio 4 recently and then I stopped listening because I realised it would be better to read the book – and I’m glad I did. This is a book about a squadron of Royal Navy ships that were despatched to South America to harass Spanish shipping during the oft-forgotten War of Jenkins’s Ear in 1740 (when I was doing A Level History I was taught that it wasn’t his ear but one of the family jewels that was sliced off by a Spanish swordsman). Their commander, Commodore George Anson, has secret orders to sail round Cape Horn and across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippines to intercept and capture a Spanish galleon laden with tonnes of silver and gold extracted from Spain’s colonies in the region. The expedition is a fiasco. The squadron sets off from Portsmouth months later than planned. Many of the crewmen have been pressganged and are untrained. They have only got as far as Madeira when they learn that the Spanish already know about their secret mission and are hunting the Atlantic for them. By the time they get down to Cape Horn the squadron is in a mess due to storms, typhus, scurvy, and damage to the ships. A couple of ships disappear, hundreds of sailors die from disease or drowning or are incapacitated due to sickness. The Wager is the least seaworthy ship and is wrecked on a tiny island off the coast of Chile that later became known as Wager Island. What follows is a kind of Lord of the Flies for adults. I won’t spoil it by saying what happens. Obviously there are survivors – as the back cover announces – and that’s how we know what happened. Or rather, we have several conflicting accounts of what happened. I will say that the back cover blurb doesn’t tell the whole story. A third group of survivors eventually reach home some years later. Also the mission is not a complete disaster as some people emerge from the sea fog with untold riches. I haven’t read any of David Grann’s other books but I gather from the acknowledgements, the note on the sources, the end notes and the select bibliography that he is one of those journalists whose work is capable of verging on history. That means he engaged in extensive research of primary and secondary sources as well as picking the brains of several historians. He even spent three weeks on Wager Island to understand what the castaways went through. There are some jarring notes. Despite the extensive help from editors and historians, the author is not entirely familiar with naval terminology and – specifically – with terminology used on this side of the Atlantic. He often refers to an institution that doesn’t exist – the British Navy – rather than the Royal Navy. That grates, even for a staunch republican like me. Direct quotations from the survivors are converted into American spelling, which also grates, but it would be wrong of me to whinge too much. It’s a well-written book and a lot more than just a dramatic account of a ship wreck. The castaways are not just seamen, they are naval personnel and thus subject to the harsh discipline of the rope – used for flogging and hanging. They are also products of our class hierarchy and all the snobbery and nonsense that that involves. How some of them survived the ordeal is – pardon the cliché – nothing short of a miracle. I’ve seen some complaints about wokery from some reviewers. They seem to assume that 300 years ago there was a consensus about imperialism and slavery such that any right-thinking person at the time couldn’t possibly have conceived of any alternative. That is far from being the case. There were plenty of people questioning what Britain and other European nations were doing sailing the seven seas. Ironically, a lot of that questioning was coming from Tories, like the great Samuel Johnson, who was hardly woke by any standards. It was the Whigs – now the Liberal Democrats in Britain – who were the party of trade and empire, while Johnson and other conservatives with a small “c” were deeply uncomfortable about slavery and our treatment of indigenous peoples. The author gives a practical example of the self-damaging consequences of colonial attitudes. The castaways are shivering and starving to death on Wager Island. A bunch of locals arrive from nowhere. Over the centuries they have developed the skills needed to survive in this hostile environment. They show the castaways how to catch fish and paddle around the stormy seas in flimsy canoes that don’t break up and sink like the British ships and boats. In return some of the castaways try to harass the womenfolk and the locals paddle off. As a result dozens of men die who could possibly have survived if they had cooperated better with the locals. At a later date, several men are rescued by locals and taken hundreds of miles to safety. The author therefore makes a valid point when he complains that the survivors refer to these lifesavers as “savages”. There’s a lot of irony there, given the behaviour of some of the castaways. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys action and adventure, naval history, British history or to anyone who wants to know more about how human beings behave and survive in extreme circumstances.

Incredible story of endurance and human suffering. It was extremely well researched and became very immersive because the author wove into a story.

This was a gift so I haven't read it personally but the recipient said it was very good and really enjoyed it

We get to give 5 stars, but if I could give 6 or 7 or 8, I would. Absolutely sensational. This is the story of the Wager from the 1740's. A ship that was part of a British fleet rounding Cape Horn to plunder Spanish galleons only to shipwreck. Some survivors, after considerable ordeal, arrive in Brazil in a decrepit state and return to England only to claim their Captain was dead and they were sole survivors. Then 6 months later, an even more decrepit crew wash up in Chile, including the Captain of the Wager, and return to the UK. Accusations of murder, treachery and treason fly, so who's telling the truth. What action will the notoriously strict British Admiralty take? It's sort of non-fiction, with the blanks filled in by fiction. Most of the narrative is taken from actual ships ledgers and personal journals of those on the Wager. There are almost 50 pages of references and bibliography in a book of just over 300 pages. That in itself tells you the extraordinary research Grann undertook, equivalent to a significant academic science paper. I've recommended this book to many people as it was recommended to me. A superb book, you'll re-read many sections and chapters just to absorb the tale. Brilliant. I've read one or two of the "not so positive" reviews on amazon incidentally. They seem to be by fellow historians to Grann, saying that history shouldn't be judged by modern standards, etc. I'd ignore all these, this is a superb read, start to finish, and gives tremendous insight into the hardships of the time.

I read it all. Cover to cover. Just after I finished reading all of Patrick O’Brian’s tales. It’s got a lot of obvious similarities. I admired the excellent levels of detail bound up with a lively writing style. People don’t live lives like this anymore. That’s why their adventures are fascinating. The social context was very well knitted into the narrative. They were different times and they produced different types of men. What spoiled the book a little, was the flavour of politically correct criticism that slipped in as the book neared its conclusion

The Wager, by David Grann, is an enormous bestseller. But I’m not sure why. Mr Grann’s research into the expedition around Cape Horn in 1740 of the flotilla of Admiral Anson, and relating to the subsequent fate of HMS Wager, is exhaustive. It took him several years of extraordinary effort and scholarship. But the story that he has set down in this book comes across, frankly, as a bit flat and uninspired. It’s a sequence of facts and events – one damn thing after another. And the ending is a bit of a damp squib. The tale of HMS Wager can be summarised easily. The ship, a minor man-of-war, was one of five warships under the command of Admiral George Anson. The mission, starting in 1740, was to sail south, from England, via Madeira and several stopping-points in South America, around Cape Horn into the Pacific – there to find and confront the Spanish. The particular target was a Spanish galleon and treasure-ship known as the “prize of all the oceans”; this vessel was carrying the yearly return of silver and other valuables from Peru to Spain. Anson’s squadron attempted passage of Cape Horn in March 1741 and ran into a terrible sequence of storms. The squadron was torn apart and split up. The Wager was cast ashore on a storm-lashed bleak island – “Wager Island”, inevitably – on the Patagonian coast of south eastern Chile, on the Pacific side of South America, at latitude 47’30” south. There the remaining crew tried to survive in terrible conditions of cold, wet and starvation. Naval discipline was lost, with some of the crew, arguably, guilty of mutiny against the Captain of The Wager, David Cheap. A few months later, two separate expeditions set out from Wager Island with the object of escaping to Europe, one north, and one south through the Straits of Magellan. The latter succeeded, after terrible tribulations, in getting back to England, there to face court-martial. The case was not straightforward, and the Royal Navy found many of the questions it raised uncomfortable to deal with. Mr Grann’s book is quite short at only 250 pages. It’s well written and put together: one can easily see that it’s an assemblage and reconciliation of the testimonies of very many of the survivors of Anson’s expedition and of HMS Wager. But maybe this is why the book comes across not as a story but as a bunch of facts and incidents. Might it not have been better for David Grann to write it in a (lightly) fictionalised form? Then, he could have had more latitude, ascribed thoughts, feelings and words to the main players and, in short, have made a more gripping story of the thing. As one other Amazon reviewer has noted, a far, far better book than The Wager is to be found in This Thing of Darkness, by Harry Thompson, covering the South American voyages of Charles Darwin and Robert Fitzroy. It is both lightly fictionalised and (Thompson is a far better writer than Grann) succeeds in evoking the immensity, grandeur and turbulence of Patagonia in a way that David Grann just cannot reach. A few further gripes: David Grann is American and uses American English that, in my view, is incongruous in telling a story of the (British) Royal Navy in the 1740s. He also has a distinctly left-leaning American bias against imperialism and Empire – inevitably, the British forms of both. He is continuously critical of the British Empire but, one can argue, that entity barely existed in 1740. Many would say the Empire’s essential span was about 1850-1950. In its excoriation of all things imperial, The Wager reads very ‘woke’ in a manner that doesn’t suit the story being told. Finally, I’m a veteran of Patrick O’Brian (all 21 books of Aubrey/Maturin) and C.S. Forester (all 11 of Hornblower); David Grann’s book at times reads to me like introductory ‘Royal Navy 101’ told in a somewhat breathlessly enthusiastic American argot. The Wager is a good piece of research and reportage. It’s a great story, not very vibrantly or excitingly told. I didn’t learn much from it and would prefer if Mr Grann had, as I have suggested, fictionalised it a bit to be more gripping and to better hold the reader’s interest. Three and a half stars.

Excel.ent read.

This is a taut and fascinating account of an inglorious episode in England's naval history, when an ill-conceived adventure to Spain's colony in Chile came unstuck in the treacherous and unrelentingly stormy waters around Cape Horn. The consequences were disastrous yet somehow, with immense endurance and suffering, a number of those involved lived to tell the tale. Indeed telling the tale is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. It's quite remarkable that a number of detailed contemporaneous accounts have survived for nearly 300 years, testament both to the discipline of individual crew members (driven in part by their fear of the consequences of being blamed by naval authorities) and the meticulous nature of military record-keeping. Recording what exactly happened became critical as the fight for survival intensified. David Grann writes skilfully and needed to make fine judgements about the inevitably self-serving nature of conflicting individual journals and publications - but his task of creating a coherent narrative was undoubtedly made easier by the wealth of written material available for inspection.

Sehr gutes Buch, sehr spannend.

Impressionante as dificuldades dos primeiros grandes navegadores.

This is one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years. I recommend this book to everyone, almost preaching the gospel.

A very enjoyable read !

The Wager is an amazing story and anyone who has ever enjoyed going to sea or for that matter had anything to do with the ocean or sailing, should put this book on the top their ‘to read now’ list. The Wager was a ship that along with a few others, set out from England, to capture a rich Spanish galleon that was know to carry a vast amount of bullion worth millions. Things did not go as expected due to a variety of catastrophic evens such as hurricanes that dispersed the fleet and wrecked many of the ships but also disease that decimated the crews. A decision was made, unwisely as it turned out, to sail around the Horn and due to this ill-fated resolution, The Wager was shipwrecked on unfriendly shores, far from home or help of any kind. How some of these brave men and elite sailors (for such they were) survived, is beyond comprehension and the author, David Grann, has done justice to them all. The courage and perseverance of British seamen is underlined in this story and if you read nothing else in 2024, read this amazing book.