The Wager

The Wager is David Grann's 2023 narrative non-fiction book, his third major work after The Lost City of Z (2009) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2017). The story is the 1741 shipwreck of HMS Wager, a Royal Navy man-of-war detached from George Anson's Pacific squadron during the War of Jenkins' Ear, on the storm-driven coast of Patagonian Chile. Approximately 250 men were aboard when the ship struck. Roughly thirty survivors made it back to England across the next four years, in two separate groups, by two completely incompatible accounts of what happened on the island they sheltered on. The English public, the Admiralty, and eventually a court-martial had to choose which version of events to believe.

Grann's structural method is the patient assembly of the documentary evidence (the surviving logbooks, the published narratives, the court-martial record) into a sustained narrative non-fiction account that reads with the propulsive arc of a maritime novel. The Wager Island chapters in the middle third are some of the strongest survival-and-mutiny prose in contemporary American non-fiction; the procedural detail (the muskogee bivalves the men learned to forage, the bow-and-arrow trade with the Kawesqar, the carpenter's longboat conversion that eventually delivered one party home) is rendered with the kind of care that Grann's New Yorker readership has come to expect. The court-martial frame that opens and closes the book is the structural device that elevates the maritime-disaster narrative into a meditation on truth, narrative, and survival.

Recommended as required contemporary narrative non-fiction reading, as the right Grann entry point alongside Killers of the Flower Moon, and for fans of Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, Hampton Sides's In the Kingdom of Ice, and the broader contemporary maritime-history tradition. The Martin Scorsese film adaptation with Leonardo DiCaprio is in production. The Dion Graham audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.