by David Grann ★★★★☆
2023 is going to be a very good year for David Grann. His previous work of non-fiction, Killers of the Flower Moon, recently came out in theaters, with an all-star cast and directed by Martin Scorsese. It is certain to do well, and I suspect Grann's deal for the rights allows him to share in some of that success. If nothing else, it puts his name back into the public consciousness six years after that book came out, which also makes it a perfect time to release another book about a completely different subject. Enter The Wager.
Lest you be led astray, The Wager is not about a bet of any kind, except, perhaps, the one each seaman makes with his life when he set out on a sea journey in the 1740s. Instead, it's the name of a British ship, christened for Admiral Sir Charles Wager, First Lord of the Admiralty. The ship set sail from Portsmouth, England in 1740, specifically as part of a cohort of ships on a mission to intercept a Spanish galleon, rumored to be around Cape Horn on the western coast of South America, and steal its copious treasure. Rather than jumping into the voyage, Grann walks us through some of the preparations of the ship, simultaneously introducing the cast of characters and establishing some personalities early in the novel. It's also obvious just from the book's subtitle that the Wager is doomed, so there is an impending dread that accompanies the first third of the book, as we know that the crew (who Grann continues to make familiar to us) face extreme trials ahead.
When the inevitable finally happens, the true mystery begins to unfold. How will anyone survive their predicament? Who will make it out alive, and who will perish? What could possibly allow them to be saved? How did any of the account of what happened to the crew survive to allow Grann to write his book? It's compelling, and while it's a non-fiction event from almost 300 years ago, there are moments that read like an adventure novel. At the same time, it's a close look into the absurd risks and peril involved in sea travel at that time. The men who chose this mission, spurred on by the prospect of riches, faced steep odds at success and even steeper odds that they would survive the journey. Even if their ship remained intact, the opportunities for tragedy could be found everywhere one looked. Rough seas could throw a man overboard, scurvy could spread and take a man's life, supplies could become compromised and the ship could run out of food, or they could come across a Spanish warship and face a sea battle that would leave many severely wounded or killed. Odds of survival were probably less than 50%, yet hundreds of men filled the Wager and took their chances on success.
There were hundreds of men on the ship, and Grann does a nice job of honing in on a couple of dozen key players. Throughout the book, he regularly reintroduces the reader to them, focusing on a few key facts, such as their job on the ship (e.g. - "the carpenter") or a distinguishing characteristic (e.g. - "the one who brought his young son along on the voyage") to help the reader remember who's who. While there is too broad a cast for us to become deeply attached in the 250-or-so pages, Grann connects us enough that we start to understand personalities and find favorites and villains. We're attached enough to care, which is important to the novel's success.
While it's not unnecessarily graphic, The Wager is not a pleasant read. The conditions throughout the voyage and the events following the shipwreck are rough. It's a miracle that anyone survived the ordeal, but the mettle the sailors possessed was something different and worthy of admiration. One challenge of history and non-fiction is that the events don't always play out with the same crescendo and grand climax that we would typically find in a scripted story. That's the case here as well. Grann does a fine job of introducing the impending peril (namely, the threat of death by hanging) that accompanies some of the men, who, as alluded to in the subtitle, may face charges of mutiny even if they should somehow survive. It is interesting that there is a third act following the survival, but that third act is the weakest of the three, and so the book limps a little to its eventual conclusion.
If there is one thing I'd change about the book, it's the prologue. Grann spells out in broad strokes almost everything that he's about to cover in detail. It was long enough from the time I read the prologue until I got to those events that I had forgotten some of the specifics, but if I could offer any word of advice to new readers of The Wager, it would be to simply skip that prologue. It provides a slew of spoilers, none of which are necessary to draw you into the book or to understand the story. Instead of building tension with the prologue, Grann effectively removes the majority of it.
This is a fine work of non-fiction, and I have to imagine that Grann pored over reams of logbooks, newspaper accounts, and published works in order to compile the information and shape his telling of the tale. I appreciate his effort in consolidating all of that material into a tidy 250 pages that allowed me to learn about an event in history I otherwise never would have come across. While there's plenty to hold one's interest, this is not a rivet-you-to-your-seat work. It's an interesting story worth a read (don't forget: skip that prologue!) but not one that rises to the level of a 5-star book for me.