War of the Wager

Where does duty end and survival begin, asks David Grann in his rip-roaring account of an 18th-century mission gone wrong.

- NIK DIRGA

THE WAGER: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann (Simon & Schuster, $39.99)

Imagine setting off to sea on a doomed mission of imperial conquest, ending up shipwrecked on an impossibly remote island, losing hundreds of your fellow sailors to illness, disaster and starvation, and then, finally, returning home after your ordeals... and you're put on trial for mutiny.

Where does duty end and survival begin? This is one of the questions bestselling author David Grann asks in his harrowing account.

The British Royal Navy ship HMS Wager left Britain in 1740 as part of a fleet on a secret assignment during the conflict with Spain known as the "War of Jenkins' Ear". The ships set out to disrupt the Pacific possessions of the Spanish empire, but it all fell apart horribly.

During the journey, the ambitious Lieutenant David Cheap was promoted to acting captain of the Wager, but the promotion became a poisoned pill when the ship was separated from the fleet and wrecked among remote islands off the coast of Chile.

The shipwreck was horrific - much of the crew got drunk, determined to die in "an orgy of revelry" - but what followed was even worse. Cheap's command of his surviving crew collapsed in a Lord of the Flies-style breakdown of all polite society's rules and ended in a mutiny that's still debated centuries on.