The Wager – David Grann

Click here to ediI take back what I said about O’Brian’s depiction of adversity and calamity in The Unknown Shore (though not his tiresome overdramatization of excess). The terror and the magnitude of the seas off Cape Horn and the atrocious hunger, exposure, sickness and despair that the castaway sailors of His Majesty’s Ship The Wager underwent were all too real.
 
Grann’s book is the historical account of the ill-fated expedition that left Portsmouth in 1740 and the personal stories of the very few men who, years later, made it back to England against all the odds. It’s one of those chronicles that is so meticulously and carefully researched that the author has all the events and elements totally clear in his mind and is able to lay them out in a lucid and immediately apprehensible story. “A tale of Shipwreck, Murder and Mutiny” reads the subtitle, and so it is! A true story, rather than a dry history, and far more compelling than O’Brian’s fiction, which overlooks much of the real drama.
 
Unless things have changed since I was a lad (I do hope so), when history is taught at school, the one thing that is never brought home to youngsters is the fact that these events actually happened and these people actually lived. If you had been there, you would have seen Napoleon, Cleopatra or Siddhartha Gautama. That’s what fascinates me about written history these days: and Grann does make the events and people feel real. It undoubtedly helped that he went by boat himself down the Patagonian coast to what is still called Wager Island and saw the environment of that forbidding place, where the sailors were marooned. The permanent absence of food, save for a little wild celery and seaweed. The sleet and lashing rains. The raging seas and the vast distances to human habitation on the remote shores of Chiloe Island or Brazil. Seeing rotten planks washed up from the 280-year-old wreck would certainly have focused his mind on the veracity of the tale.
 
The Wager is well-paced, nicely structured and exciting. If you have the slightest penchant for naval history or seafaring yarns, don’t miss out on this one.