The Wager

In 1740 HMS Wager sailed with Commodore George Anson’s squadron on a British expedition against Spain during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Disease, violent weather and failures of navigation separated the ship from the fleet, and in May 1741 it was wrecked on an island off the coast of Patagonia. Captain David Cheap tried to preserve naval discipline among starving castaways, but authority fractured as gunner John Bulkeley and other survivors challenged his decisions and organised a plan to escape through the Strait of Magellan.

Thirty men eventually reached Brazil in a makeshift vessel and presented themselves as heroic survivors, only for Cheap, midshipman John Byron and two companions to arrive later in Chile with accusations of mutiny and murder. Grann follows the competing journals, testimonies and official records into the Admiralty court-martial, showing how each faction reshaped the story to protect itself. The book uses the disaster to examine endurance, class, naval law, imperial ambition and the power of written narratives to determine what becomes accepted as history.