The Wager
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder
By: David Grann
[Winner for the ‘Best History & Biography’ category of the 2023 Goodreads Choice Awards Reading Challenge ]
[Fulfilled ‘Book that won a categroy on the Goodreads Choice Awards’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge]
“Byron could not yet know for certain the true nature lurking inside his fellow seamen or even himself: a long, dangerous voyage inexorably exposed one’s hidden soul.”
This was quite the nautical tale!
It is Pirates of the Caribbean meets Gilligan’s Island but in the spirit of Lord of the Flies. Instead of Jack Sparrow’s humor, we are imbibed with anarchy and the desperation of starvation and fear of death that leads to dehumanization. But yes, there is treasure.
I was surprised with how this book kept my attention. It was really interesting to learn more about voyages at sea and to learn all the colloquialisms derived from nautical terms.
From the beginning Grann sets up the mystery: two different parties return to England with different stories about what happened. As a reader you already know there is mutiny, shipwreck, and murder, but you don’t know what ‘really happened’ out there. That is slowly unraveled.
This is one of those books that when you read it, you praise the Lord that you don’t live during that time. I am thankful for the age of planes, trains, and automobiles. Sailing on the ship is basically like going to Australia— everything can kill you. (Except Australia has a much higher survival rate than a ship… and much better food.)
I already got a taste of this when I read the book Amazing Grace which tells the tale of John Newton and his voyages on slave ships. That book had a whole other level of dehumanization that The Wager only briefly touches on.
But both mention the press gangs and both quote the poet William Cowper. Both detail the horrors of illness, injury, and the merciless storms at sea.
I do find it interesting that Grann says of the accounts from The Wager:
“We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done— or haven’t done.”
The stories that came back from the Wager’s shipwreck and their horrific weeks stranded on an island and their attempts to return home are conflicting. The details are obscured.
And that was one of the disappointments with the book. We are left with a bit of mystery on who is telling the truth. Both parties had a lot to lose. And the court hearing that happened was unsatisfactory in revealing the truth. Most likely because of political reasons.
Some readers might be okay with an open-ended book. Others might find that frustrating.
But I can’t help but see that contrast with the Amazing Grace book. John Newton of all people had a lot of willful sin he would want to hide, justify, or lie about. But he was honest about his treachery. He owned his sin. We see his story of redemption and the way he found forgiveness from a loving God. He definitely wasn’t the hero of his own story— Christ was.
The Wager has no such redemption. Even though Bulkley claimed to be a believer, his stories don’t have the transparency and humility of Newton’s.
Both accounts happen during the same time, but we have very different outcomes.
The Wager was hard to read, but Amazing Grace is harder. If you can handle it, I would recommend you give that a read too.
One very clear truth we can gather from The Wager is the sinful nature of man. Given the right circumstances, the perfect storm, every human is capable of unspeakable things. The Wager’s shipwreck is not an isolated example. We see it time and time again.
When there is no leadership or leadership is questioned and everyone is left to do what is right in their own eyes (hello book of Judges), nothing good happens. We would like to think we would all do the ‘right’ thing. But everyone’s idea of ‘right’ is different. If we need a leader, we usually don’t agree on who gets to be the leader or what behaviors are acceptable or not. And if we think we’re right and the majority is wrong, we will fight for our own way, even if we have to be sneaky.
I’ve watched enough Survivor to know that even on a reality show in a controlled environment, there are major conflicts with how much rice each person should get and when. Who gets to be the leader and make decisions for the tribe? Who decides who is the weakest member that should be eliminated first? Who is causing the problems? It ruins relationships and people are voted off the island. And that’s not even a life or death situation.
It’s a total microcosm of what happened with the Wager.
Add to that the very real biological and mental problems that come with starvation. Self-preservation is king. By any means necessary.
It humbles me and reminds me of my need for a Savior. It reminds me that I’m plagued by sin and if left to my own devices, I won’t always choose love and sacrifice— if ever. It reminds me how thankful I am to have the power of the Holy Spirit at work in my life to protect me from myself. He enables me to choose what is right and to value the lives of others, even above my own.
It reminds me how thankful I am that Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay the penalty of my sin so that I have hope. I don’t have to be enslaved to my selfish desires and there is a future for me. I don’t have to burnish or erase my memories because I don’t have to be my own hero. I have forgiveness and a perfect Hero who gives me something to live for.
Another disappointment with the book was something I’ve seen other reviewers comment on as well. There were some editorial comments— mostly at the end— that took away from the book overall.
Grann took it upon himself to point out the Imperial system of Britain and charge the sailors for not doing something about it.
“The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions… and ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving— and even sacrificing themselves for— a system many of them rarely question.”
I’m not trying to defend Imperial Britain or other unjust systems, especially the slave trade and chattel slavery, by any means. But it’s become quite popular to get on a high horse and lay out all the people to blame for these systems and to place people on the complicity spectrum. To some degree everyone participates in any system that has ever existed or continues to exist, no matter how many protests we attend or ‘equality’ posts we share. We don’t need to take every possible opportunity to assign blame amounts and show how progressive we are because we would NEVER have allowed the Imperial system to exist if we were alive in the 1700s.
Sure, if this book were largely about the Imperial system, we can talk about it. But this book was about a military ship’s journey around South America and their subsequent shipwreck and their attempts to survive. They were acting out orders of the government during a war, but to throw on these politically charged opinions just didn’t fit the book to me. It’s not lost on me that there is an underlying dig in that statement that has nothing to do with Britain and it felt like poor writing to include.
No, it was not pervasive throughout the entire book, and it does not render the book un-recommendable, but it felt worth noting.
Colloquialisms:
Here are some phrases that were all originally nautical terms that have become part of our everyday speech. I had no idea!
around the horn
toe the line
pipe down
scuttlebutt
three sheets to the wind
turn a blind eye
under the weather
dead reckoning
I also was surprised to know that the Byron who sailed on The Wager was the grandfather to the poet Lord Byron. I feel like there could be some interesting fiction written around that family with this kind of history…
Recommendation
I would recommend this book. It’s an engaging non-fiction book about a controversial part of Britain’s War of Jenkin’s Ear and the subsequent disasters that occurred— a story relatively hidden until now.
Some parts are hard to read and may seem a little gruesome or hard to stomach, but it’s not written in an excessive way.
This is the same author who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon which was just released as a movie last year. I may go back and read some of his other books because he does a good job of making history read like a fiction novel.
[Content Advisory: minimal swearing, if any; no sexual content; violence, hints of cannibalism; brief gore]
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