I always enjoy reading Grann's books and his lengthy investigative articles in the New Yorker, and The Wager is no exception. It is impossible to imagine how men sailed the seas in the mid-1700s, how this group of men survived. Touching on the colonialism of England, and also Spain, and the general nature of colonialism, this is an exciting sea-faring yarn where you come to know these characters mostly otherwise lost to history. I wouldn't have said I'm interested in sea-faring books and ocean travels, but this made me a convert.

Thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday for the ARC.

First of all, this cover is just gorgeous! Doesn't it just beg to be picked up?
Second of all, the story! Jaw drop! I mean, it's better than a fictionalized story!
Third of all, the research! Wowza!

1740's and the Wager (a British vessel) along with 4 other ships are on their way to attempt to capture Spanish treasure-filled galleon that was shipwrecked off of Patagonia. The going got VERY rough in the Drake Passage and in their attempt to round Cape Horn. To a point that all hell broke loose and ships abandoned one another and ultimately the Wager crashed aground. This is the first 40% of the book....the rest gets worse for the shipmen...

Barely made survivors attempt to survive off a desolate land and years later two different groups finally arrive in haggard form, one group in Argentina and one group in Chile. They eventually make their way back to England and mutiny is declared. It goes to a court marshal....and you gotta read this to know the end (or google it).

Fascinating story of survival! Good storytelling, but I do have to say it was a little slow going in the beginning with the collecting of crew members with details about their background. It also got slightly long winded with all of the sailing talk ( I mean they were on the ocean a long time).

It's amazing all of the history that was recorded centuries ago where Grann clearly did his research in writing this book. Well put together in a readable format.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday for the advance e-copy of this book.

This is how non-fiction can gain new readership! Thoroughly researched historical details are made riveting by Grann's way of weaving a near-fictional tale of loyalty and sabotage. I will be recommending it to both non-fiction and fiction readers alike!

File this one under truth that is stranger than fiction! This story gripped me from the very beginning. Even the background information the author provided was fascinating. Although the title alone gives away what's in store for the crew of The Wager, I gasped out loud at several points in the story and occasionally had to stare out into space to process the craziness I’d just read on the page. Reading this book is like watching a documentary or listening to a podcast about a true crime or cult… it’s just too bizarre to be real, but it is, so you keep sticking around for more!

On the surface, this is a pretty straightforward story, but Grann presents the characters and their actions in a way that allows the reader to come to their own conclusions. There were definitely some characters that I hated and one or two that I loved, but most fell on a continuum for me, knowing that I could not even imagine what they were going through. It’s easy to sit high and mighty on my morals while reading this book on the sofa with a glass of wine - but what happens when the trappings of society are stripped away and the ultimate goal is survival?

This book is so well-researched, but it doesn’t bog down the narrative in any way, at least until the courthouse drama plays out. That was the least entertaining portion of the book for me, although I was very invested to see how the fates of these men played out in light of their actions once seen through the lens of traditional civilization.

I flew through this book in just a couple of days! It’s non-fiction but reads like a thrilling adventure begging to be made into a movie. I absolutely recommend it and will be thinking about this one for a long time to come.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday for the Advanced Readers' Copy in exchange for an honest review!

I suppose I should not be surprised by how good The Wager by David Grann was when I read it as an ARC offered by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I am an avid reader of non-fictions and histories and this book piqued all of my interests and then some. I felt as though this read like a fantastic high seas drama with all the back-stabbing and conflict one could want from even a fiction narrative and yet Grann dedicated years to researching this story and putting together the pieces in such a way the reader could make their own determination on who was in the right and wrong with regard to the mutiny and murder. I appreciate how Grann is able to demonstrate how civility and humanity can break down when survival is at stake. When the castaways on Wager island would do anything to survive and make it one more day, how can one man’s ego make the decisions on behalf of the whole? Truly a remarkable work which is well worth the read. Even if you don’t often read non-fiction, I think you’ll find this high-seas adventure a tale worth your time.

A Books Are Magical podcast episode featuring this novel will be released on April 18, 2023.

What a wild ride! David Grann has once again taken non-fiction and turned into into a compelling read that feels like a fictional tale - you'll find yourself wondering how a group of men could possibly survive so many awful things, one after the other. The Wager is compelling, though like many non-fiction stories with several central characters, it can be difficult to keep track of everyone. The story is all the more impressive for the fact that so much source material from conflicting narratives had to be woven together into one cohesive tale.

Great for anyone who enjoys learning more about history, non-fiction that reads like fiction, or if you're just looking for a little gratitude in your life that you aren't a sailor in the 1700s.

Setting the tone of this review right away, I love anything David Grann writes. I find all of his books hard to put down because the stories he tells, the anger he can ignite and the curiosity he can elicit. He can be so compelling. This book again, gives you a history lesson that reads like a Hollywood script. The story takes you into the throes of a horrifying shipwreck. The characters come to life through logbooks, diaries and court room testimonials. You start to side with certain members of the crew and become bothered by certain decisions. The unbelievable survival results in years of anger, lies and accusations. Real people lived through this terrifying situation and the book takes you through their peril and leaves you saying once again "Why didn't' I know about this!"

England and Spain have never been best friends, to put it nicely. Occasionally they've broken out into actual war. This book centers around a time of such conflict, when in the 1740s England decided to commission a fleet led by a Commander Anson to go after Spanish galleons and loot them for their gold.

It was a disaster. By the time they actually set sail, they were headed for the worst weather of the year around the Cape Horn. There were already problems before they got there, including scurvy, but by the time they got to the bottom of South America, the fleet had broken up and one of the ships, The Wager, ran aground. Mayhem and mutiny ensued, along with starvation and murder.

I don't know why I love these nautical disaster books so much. I'm a total landlubber. I can't even swim. I didn't even see the ocean until I was an adult. But for whatever reason, I love reading these books. This one definitely did not disappoint. It was full of drama and emotion, and the best part was that it was all true and taken from the accounts written by the actual survivors. If you like tales of shipwreck or disaster, add this one to your list. I raced through it and I'm so glad I did.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free copy of this book. This did not affect my review.

I never thought that I would find a story about dudes in the 1700's on a ship to be entertaining and JUICY, but The Wager absolutely delivered.

Even though we knew the ending going into this book, the narrative nonfiction style made it feel like we were solving a mystery on par with something we'd experience from Agatha Christie. It's so hard to believe that this story is REAL and that the things that happened were real because it gets REAL dark and unbelievable at times. Cannibalism??? Damn! 😱

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes narrative nonfiction and stories that unfold like a puzzle box.

David Grann is one of my favorite authors, and his Killers of the Flower Moon is one of my all-time favorite non-fiction books. Since I have an interest in maritime history, I knew I had to read The Wager, which describes one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded.

Grann set the stage so well that readers feel as though they're on board ship with the officers and crew. This was the time of press gangs when the British Navy had so much trouble finding enough sailors to man their ships that they'd send groups of men to roam the streets outside pubs at night to kidnap men and force them aboard ships for duty that could last years. This meant that not all the men on the Wager wanted to be there. As the voyage progressed, scurvy set in, and as men began to die, the Wager found itself with a new captain named Cheap, a man who would be called "Jobsworth" by the British (as in it was more than Cheap's job was worth to go against his orders). Cheap's bungling and indecision were instrumental in the Wager's unsuccessful attempt to round Cape Horn, ending with the ship being wrecked and the survivors being castaways on a desolate island in Patagonia. This isn't the first book I've read about the land, the seas, and the weather of the Tierra del Fuego, but Grann wrote of it so well that I felt seasick, wet, and frozen solid as I turned the pages. The months the castaways spent on that island, trying to survive and trying to escape, were brutal.

Grann immersed me in these men's lives-- one of whom would be the grandfather of the poet, Lord Byron. (Yes, Byron's experiences were important in light of one of his descendants, but the crew member who had the most impact on me was the free Black man on the Wager, John Duck.) Grann also reminded me of the integral part sailors played in the history of our clothing and our language. However, the one thing that I enjoyed the most was how he exposed what was really going on and how the Wager's original assignment and the proceedings of the court martial at the end actually fit into the much larger world stage.

Any reader with an interest in ships, the sea, human nature, and government machinations should read The Wager.

In the tradition of fascinating nonfiction which ends around 60%-80% on the Kindle because the rest is bibliography (I love the level of research on these books, it’s like I’m back at school!), David Grann's "The Wager" weaves cultural details and political context around the gripping narrative of the shipwreck and mutiny of "The Wager" during the War of Jenkin's Ear between Spain and England. And now I have a hankering for maps, rum, and a viewing of "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World."

A gorgeous book about a beautiful subject. I never get tired of seafaring adventures, and this rollicking story of mutineers and mystery was one of my favorite reads of spring.

Although I hadn't read his previous works I was familiar with David Grann by name thanks to Hollywood's adaptations of his books, The Lost City of Z and Martin Scorsese's forthcoming Killers of the Flower Moon. I've yet to read (or watch) either, but have copies of both those books on my Kindle or in print, if not both. It was thanks to Hollywood, too, that I first learned of The Wager, via one of the Tinseltown trades that announced, nearly a year prior to the book's publication, that Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio had secured film rights and would be re-teaming for another big-screen adaptation of Grann's work following their Killers of the Flower Moon film. Seeing the book's subtitle of A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder immediately perked me up and put The Wager on my radar as a must-read.

I have a serious soft-spot for these kinds of historical tales. I'll occasionally lament that I was born in the wrong century, thinking I would have preferred a life of daring at sea a few hundred years past. At least until I'm reminded of just how fucking awful and grueling an experience that kind of life was, upon which I'm immediately and rightfully grateful for modern living again. The Wager is set at a time where plague is rampant, and sailors routinely lost teeth and hair and had old injuries split open under the onslaught of scurvy, living aboard a ship full of rats, eating bug-infested flour and stale meat, and where amputation, sans anesthesia, is the proscribed medical remedy for damn near any injury suffered at sea.

And all that's if you're fortunate enough to not have cannonballs shot at your face or find yourself shipwrecked, like the crew of the British Navy ship Wager did in May 1741. The voyage of the Wager carried a portent of doom, thanks to a wicked typhus outbreak, even before leaving port as part of a squadron of warships tasked with seizing a wealth-loaded Spanish galleon off the coast of South America. It was the turbulent, stormy Antarctic waters off the coast of Cape Horn that ultimately sealed the ship's fate, stranding what remained of its crew after an outbreak of scurvy, upon the desolate island that came to be known as Wager Island. Cold and starving, the crew would fracture and mutiny against their captain, David Cheap, and against one another in their pursuit for survival.

Grann does excellent work defining, clearly and vividly, the time and location of these events, largely by letting the sailors speak for themselves through their own written first-hand accounts. The ship's gunner, Bulkeley, was a meticulous journal keeper and recorded every facet of his life aboard the Wager and Wager Island, publishing his account upon his return to London several years later. Through their voices we are given a tremendous look at how unbelievably fraught and harrowing life was at sea circa the 1700s, and how even more devastating their experiences were on Wager Island.

While Grann shies away from the awfully explicit details, it's difficult to read his accounts of the toll illnesses like scurvy takes on the human body or the trauma of amputation at sea during battle without feeling instantly sympathetic for these pour suffering souls, or for their actions in the face of such grueling hardships. We know, for instance, that some of the crew engaged in cannibalism thanks to these men's own admissions. Granted, the crew themselves are shy to admit to the act of cannibalism, couching this taboo in inferences due to their own shame at such a deprivation. We do get a bit more of a graphic example, though, of what happens when a band of starving crewmen come for one sailor's dog, the only source of fresh protein on an otherwise lifeless island, but even here it's what isn't specifically stated that really tugs one's heartstrings. Grann's rendering of the desperation of the Wager's seamen is heartbreaking and, at times, infuriating as rival would-be powers compete and conspire against one another to survive and, eventually, escape the island. Even then, the survivors seem incapable of escaping their treachery upon one another.

While much of the fate of the Wager and its crew has been forgotten by history, its influence has been felt across the works of novelists Herman Melville, most directly in his 1850 novel White-Jacket, and Patrick O'Brien. Grann crafts a terrific bit of action in the book's few scenes of naval warfare and evasion that inspired O'Brien. If you ever saw the adaptation of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, you'll immediately be able to picture these sequences with ease. There's an intriguing bit of round-robin of influences at play here, as history and fiction and cinema all intermingle and inspire one another in crafting these adventure sequences. Grann's own writing is, at times, supremely cinematic, whether he's detailing the storm-tossed ships struggle to survive the onslaught of Cape Horn's seas or dueling man-of-wars devastating one another's crews with canon fire. It's easy to see what drew Scorsese and DiCaprio to this story but, now that I've finished The Wager as a book, it's going to be a long, hard wait for their film.

I am not a huge fan of non-fiction, but something about this book was enticing. So enticing that I sat down and read the whole thing in two days! Grann does a wonderful job of structuring the book to feel as though you are reading a novel. Once lulled into a the false reality of fiction, Grann reminds you that this tale of human strength and suffering is very real indeed.

This story takes a truly astounding number of twists and turns. I had to read it in short bursts because it's so difficult to read about starvation, desolation, disease, abandonment, etc. But what a yarn. A true essential for anyone who enjoys maritime disasters fictional or real, like Moby-Dick and In the Heart of the Sea. The book was thoroughly researched, and makes an excellent point about how details of the atrocities in the name of Empire can be conspicuously absent from the record. I also appreciated getting the background of the Indigenous people living near the shipwreck site. I suspect this will be a movie someday.

This novel is mostly about the ship the Wager (a British ship), along with a few smaller ships that go on a mission in 1740 to steal a large prize of Spanish galleons during a war between the two countries. The smaller side ships disappear, and the other large warship does not make it either. The captain of the Wager assumes they gave up in turbulent seas, or they just did not survive. The Wager is shipwrecked on an isolated island with no chance of survival.
Mutiny, starvation, craziness, and sickness ensure. The book is said to have cannibalism, but it does not really dive deep and just contains a sentence or two. Two years later a shoddy vessel reaches South American and the surviving castaways return to England as heroes. Unfortunately, a few years later another shoddy vessel reaches England and it contains more of the castaways from the Wager with a tale that the other survivors are not indeed heroes. Now the original "heroes" will await trial for mutiny and possible be hanged.
The first half was overly descriptive to the point of boredom. (Reminded me of Moby Dick here with the endless descriptions. I really did not care about how fast their cannonball could go or how long their masts were). The second part was quicker, but I felt it left out a lot of the details about the shipmates and their being stranded. Grann said some of them kept detailed records and log-books, so I was hoping for more. I also thought the inclusion of the second large lost ship, the Admiralty, and the captain Anson (along with what he did after) did not really need to be added in. Maybe a sentence or two, but not full chapters. It disturbed the flow.
This book was a mix of Patrick O'Brian's work, Robinson Crusoe, Lord of the Flies, and Moby Dick (which he quotes along with Byron a lot). I honestly do not think this was Grann's best novel, but I'll still read more of him. I thought the book had a good amount of research and you could definitely picture the shipwreck. Also the inclusion of some of the indigenous groups in the area was interesting to let readers be aware of their past presence.

Avast, all readers who enjoy books about the age of sail, the quest for English dominance of the seas and maritime law! What awaits is a tale of a voyage rife with large egos, dreams of Spanish treasures, and hopes of glory for self and country.

But the voyage is fraught from the beginning. The outfitting of a proper ship and the other vessels that will support its mission is delayed by supplies, qualified workmen, and the inability to procure a full complement of ready sea men. This was not only true of the Wager, but other ships of that period. On the hunt for a storied Spanish galleon the ships encounter the foulest weather as they attempt to navigate around South America. What follows is shipwreck and being marooned and near starvation in a hostile land. The crew degenerates into a real-life Lord of the Flies tableaux with mutiny, warring factions, and murder.

The horror of their condition is matched by their tenacity and resourcefulness given their adversity. When a small contingent of survivors emerge, they tell their tale of terror. England is riveted to their story which soon becomes suspect as a smaller contingent of survivors arrive with a different tale. The stakes are high and a court martial is convened to sort it all out.

This is a terrific book that will be enjoyed by readers of Patrick O’Brien, sea survival literature, and courtroom proceedings. Grann also gives the reader insight into the daily struggles of an 18th century sailor and the political machinations that birthed England’s sea power. An afterward updates people and the research. Worthy voyage for any reader. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this title.

I enjoyed this book immensely. I was eager to read it as I had read the author’s earlier work and found it to be very engaging. This work was no exception. I will be buying this for my library.

As has been true with other Grann non-fiction tales, this is thoroughly researched, expertly told, well-written and riveting. Through no fault of the storyteller, I found the ending a little anti-climactic.

The Wager
Set in 1740, this is the story of the treacherous journey of six English warships, the Wager among them, with the secret mission of capturing Spanish silver and gold near the tip of South America. While rounding Cape Horn, and battling an outbreak of scurvy, the weather conditions turned atrocious, and the Wager became separated from the rest of the squadron. Shipwrecked on a desolated island, the surviving crew struggles against the elements, splitting into two groups: one that mutinied against their Captain, David Cheap, and a smaller group that remained loyal to him. Five months after the shipwreck, self-elected Captain Bulkeley and his mutinous group of 80 members set off in a schooner, losing and abandoning more than half of its crew on their on their way to Brazil, eventually arriving back in England at the beginning of 1943.

Here their troubles continued, as the survivors made it back with conflicting stories, knowing that they were guilty of some crime or another that would earn them the death sentence. To justify his actions, John Bulkeley even published his story based on his personal log as a way of justifying their actions. Five and a half years after setting out from England, Captain Cheap arrived back in England along with two of his loyal men, ready to defend his honor. In an attempt to determine the truth, the English admirals start a trial to investigate these contradicting versions of the truth, and a way to contain the catastrophic results and costs of this expedition.

Based on personal and detailed diaries of the captains and seamen, this book has elements of true crime and history. It gives you a true sense of daily life on a ship, the crowded conditions, the dangerous work, deaths due to typhoid fever and scurvy, the starvation when supplies run low, and what struggling to survive in an inhospitable land does to your psyche, all described in chilling detail.