A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder

Fascinating books about true events you’ve never heard of—that’s how I’d describe the two David Grann books that made it to our Siblings’ Book Club reading list this year. Before this, I’d never heard of the author—you can tell by my posts that I don’t loiter near the NTY Best Seller’s List!—yet I’ve got a feeling he’ll be an easy selection for us in the coming years. Truth be told, Grann’s only the second author with multiple titles on our list in a given year, the first being C.S. Lewis’ full Space Trilogy back in 2019.

Of course, I loved both of Grann’s books, but if I had to choose a favorite between this title and Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), I think I preferred The Wager. Reasons include both Grann’s writing and the Wager events.

Grann’s Writing

Grann’s writing in The Wager took us readers straight to the salty sea in the mid-18th Century. It’s been a full year since I was last on a sailing-ship kick, with books like Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) and Expedition Wydah (1999), so I appreciated Grann’s bringing sea-spray to my face and queasiness to my bowels once more in the way he wrote! Particularly, the whole description of the mainmast and the need for sailors to scale those incredible heights in storms and all—some dying terrible deaths by falling 100 feet—was all just plain incredible.

Although I read The Wager before Killers and thus couldn’t compare Grann to himself at the time, I’ve read so many other titles from the genre that I had plenty of material upon which to base my initial judgments. Most recently was Blood and Treasure by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin (2021), a book about Daniel Boone that had such great potential to be violently un-put-downable, but that ultimately fell flat as basic historical narrative. Instead, I’d compare the feel and appeal of The Wager to Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City (2003), a dark yet rich invitation to the “murder and madness” of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

Part of Grann’s expert strategy in this book was to include writings of other authors from the same era—particularly fiction authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne—authors who themselves knew how to paint word pictures and did so from first-hand experience. It’s a stellar addition to the narrative that (if they do it at all) other authors don’t do half as well.

The Wager Events

Grann’s Prologue gave the entire story away, but in a great way. As noted above, this is a story most readers had never heard of before, so for Grann to go into it blindly or to develop the background too slowly might have stretched their patience too thin. Within a few short paragraphs, however, he gives us the gist: there’s a shipwreck at the edge of the world, and a group of sailors survives and returns as heroes with stories to tell. But then several months later there arrives another batch of survivors with a whole different set of stories to tell, theirs including terrifying details of mutiny and murder. It’s an epic account filled with possibilities and a fantastic introduction that drew me in immediately.

The backbone research for the book came from several ships’ logs, though the most important to Grann’s book was that a young man named Byron—as it turns out, the grandfather of Lord Byron! Byron’s writings about his time as a sailor aboard The Wager and then as a survivor on Wager Island were crucial to the narrative, because Byron wasn’t a captain or mate and his writings were non-essential to the functioning of the ship. Instead, they were personal journal entries never intended for the Public eye. Thankfully, they survived for such a time as this, and Grann made full use of the details found within.

The scenes of shipwreck and survival on the coasts of Chilean Patagonia are intense. I’m an avid survival-story fan, so this aspect helps rank it right up there with some of my other favorites like South and Alive. Thankfully folks on Wager Island had occasional visits from natives, so they never had to resort to eating each other…or did they?

The mutiny that’s the center of this entire ordeal is slow growing but vicious, and it’s this element that really made the book a page-turner. I was hoping for a lot more from the trial scenes in the end, so their short duration and questionable results were a bit of a letdown. Can’t blame Grann for that though—instead, we can thank him for not making the trial appear to be more than it was. Short, sweet, and to the point, just like it actually was.

Conclusion

The only complaint I have is the dearth of information about the two groups’ escapes from the Island. Granted, the log books likely weren’t kept too well at that point, but here we read about tiny boats filled with starving, dying men navigating the Straights of Magellan and up the coast to Brazil, and yet we get 3 months of this epic misery in just a few short paragraphs. And even when one boat sails for 2 weeks in what they think is the wrong direction, they turn around, realize their mistake, and then make up that same distance a third time, we get that whole 4-week ordeal in a single paragraph! It was a little disappointing, but that’s the survival-lover in me speaking. Again, Grann couldn’t make up details he didn’t have, but I’d have been happy with some informed speculation on this point. Oh well.

Overall, this was a fantastic and well-written account of survival and betrayal that I’m super happy we read. Nothing can top the epic voyage and return of Sir Earnest Shackleton and the Endurance, but that’s on a level all its own. This book is wonderful, and I look forward to reading more from David Grann.

©2024 E.T.

Read More from David Grann:

• The Lost City of Z (2005)
• Killers of the Flower Moon (2017)
• The Wager (2023)