Reviews with content warning for Death - The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

I found this worthwhile and informative, if bleak in its reminders of the way naval stories like this are shaped by the huge and destructive forces of imperialism and ruthless extraction of resources. All the human folly that went into conscripting hundreds of deathly ill men to run ships that take thousands of century-old trees to build just to attempt needlessly difficult cape passages, only to shipwreck in an extremely challenging climate and

waste the lives of hundreds of people from disease and starvation!

I really liked that David Grann gave great context into the Indigenous tribes the men from this ship interacted with and the impact that naval expeditions had on them and all others in South and North America in the eighteenth century especially. It felt like he was resetting the image of journeys like these, moving away from glory and adventure into the grinding hardship, weaknesses of leadership, imperial greed, racist assumptions of superiority/inferiority, and endless jockeying between major European empires like Spain and England. Grann developed the historical characters well, and clearly established how naval honor codes, class, and rank influenced the events at sea and land. Shocked to learn that

the value of the seized Spanish galleon, then the greatest single event war bounty seized, was dwarfed by the full millions-of-pounds cost of the entire expedition to seize it.

And yet, we can't forget that history can be so easily spun into self-congratulatory stories that flatter rather than invite critical examination.

Content Warnings