From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City
of Z a mesmerizing story of shipwreck survival and savagery culminating in a court martial
that reveals a shocking truth On January 28 1742 a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood
and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men barely alive and
they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager a
British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with
Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as the prize of
all the oceans it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men after
being marooned for months and facing starvation built the flimsy craft and sailed for more
than a hundred days traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
But then ... six months later another even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile.
This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The
thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group
responded with countercharges of their own of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his
henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy
with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of
treachery and murder flew the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling
the truth. The stakes were life-and-death-for whomever the court found guilty could hang. The
Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction
writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick
O'Brian his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of
survival writing such as The Endurance and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a
Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work the incredible twists of the narrative hold
the reader spellbound. Most powerfully he unearths the deeper meaning of the events showing
that it was not only the Wager's captain and crew who were on trial - it was the very idea of
empire--
