The Wager

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CAT'S PICK : ★ 7.3

“The Wager”, written by David Grann released on the date of 18th April,2023 is a fast-paced, fascinating history that will appeal to readers of the author's suspenseful historical thrillers. 

The British ship Wager, which was put into service during England's war with Spain in 1741, was chasing a silver-laden Spanish galleon when it got caught in a storm off the coast of Patagonia. The Wager was the only ship in the fleet at the time of the shipwreck, and many of its 250 crew members had already perished from injury, illness, starvation, or drowning. The greater part endures the destruction just to end up abandoned on a forlorn island. A chilling and vibrant account of a grim maritime tragedy and its dramatic aftermath is constructed by Grann using a wealth of firsthand accounts, including logbooks, correspondence, diaries, court-martial testimony, and Admiralty and government records. David Cheap, who, by chance, became captain of the Wager, is central to his large crew of seamen, Commodore George Anson, who had made Modest his protégé, powerful firearms man John Bulkeley and midshipman John Byron, the poet's grandfather. Grann clearly demonstrates how dangerous it was to live on a ship in the 18th century. Wild weather, enemy fire, typhus and scurvy, insurrection, and even mutiny were all threats. As factions formed and violence broke out on the island, Cheap struggled to maintain authority until a group of survivors left in crude makeshift boats without Cheap. 

Of that gathering, 29 castaways later appeared on the shoreline of Brazil, where they spent over two years in Spanish imprisonment, what's more, three castaways, including Modest, arrived on the shores of Chile, where they were held for quite a long time by the Spanish. In the end, all of the survivors made their way back to England, where they provided very different accounts of what had occurred, most shockingly, each blamed the other for uprising, a wrongdoing deserving of hanging. Relating the wild occasions in tense detail, Grann sets the Bet episode with regards to European colonialism as much as the rage of the ocean.