'The Wager': Disaster ahoy

David Grann loots an 18th-century shipwreck for every bit of narrative treasure.

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Recently, in an online work chat about books, I made a deal with a colleague: I’d give her a book she wanted to read in exchange for a loan of one of her books. She asked if I might be interested in David Grann’s “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.” I knew hardly anything about the book, but I really liked Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.” The next time my colleague and I saw each other in person, we made the trade.

I liked “The Wager,” too. Grann did his homework and then some, looting every bit of the shipwreck for narrative treasure. I also think the book could have been a Smithsonian magazine article. But there’s no question it is one dramatic adventure.

To sum up the story: The 250 men and boys of HMS Wager set out in 1740, amid a war with Spain, as part of a small fleet on a secret mission to seize a Spanish galleon filled with treasure. The crew toils through the treacherous seas around Cape Horn, gets separated from the other ships, is stranded at a deserted island off the coast of Patagonia and devolves into violent chaos for months before the last ragtag survivors finally gird up their loins to attempt self-rescue.

Thirty of them make it to Brazil nearly a year after leaving England, and three more get to Chile six months after that. They’re the final representatives of two factions that split the crew during their time away from civilization. Accusations of mutiny and murder fly, prompting a court-martial that becomes the media circus of its day.

Remarkably, a number of documents from the Wager’s ill-fated journey survived the infighting and the elements. And several crew members — including a young midshipman named John Byron who became the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron — published their accounts of the voyage, giving Grann plenty of material to work with.

The first part of the book provides a fascinating introduction to the characters and workings of the “wooden world” of an 18th-century Navy ship. The middle portion, devoted to the crew’s stint on the island, occasionally felt as if it was being told in real time, it’s that immersive. In the final section, Grann covers the men’s return to England and the publicity and trial that followed. The whole affair eventually led to Navy reforms that included dismantling “the kind of hazy command structure that had contributed to the disorder on Wager Island.”

Eventually, the Wager slipped into the mists of history. But its tale of human nature and endurance is worthy of retelling.