Review of The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann Rating *****
In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Spain with five ships and 270 men for the first attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Only one ship returned three years later with 18 men, and Magellan was not among them. Some 200 years later, six ships with nearly 2,000 men left England for another planned circumnavigation. The book The Wager tells the story of this doomed voyage and how one of those ships, the HMS Wager, became shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Patagonia.
The story of the Wager and its crew is one of murder, survival, and mutiny. Author David Grann describes the initial goals of the Armada and how the ships became separated once they reached the stormy waters around Cape Horn. Once the Wager became shipwrecked on the island that now bears its name, the initial fight for survival soon turned to rebellion against the overbearing captain, especially after he shoots a sailor for a minor transgression.
One of the many sad outcomes of this ordeal is the number of sailors who died of scurvy, an illness easily remedied with vitamin C from citrus fruits. It would take nearly another 200 years before researchers solved the connection between scurvy and vitamin C deficiency.
As the fights among the survivors escalate, they separate into different factions. One group sails away on a rebuilt boat and two smaller vessels. A smaller group that includes Captain Cheap remains on the island, hoping for rescue from one of the other ships in the Armada.
Of the 300 men who set sail on the Wager, only ten would return to England. The last part of the book describes what happened to these few survivors and the subsequent court-martial trial that took place.
As for the men on the other five ships, only seven hundred returned.