Wager

David Grann published The Wager in 2023. It is a work of narrative history, and its author had previously written Killers of the Flower Moon.

The ship was a British vessel that sailed from England in 1740, bound on a secret mission in a war with Spain, and it went down on a barren island off Patagonia while chasing a Spanish treasure ship. The men who survived were marooned there for months; when starvation forced them to act, they built a craft out of patched wood and cloth and sailed in it for over a hundred days across nearly three thousand miles of ocean.

Thirty emaciated survivors came ashore in Brazil on 28 January 1742 and were received as heroes. Six months later a second, even more broken-down boat reached the coast of Chile carrying three castaways, and their account of the same events was very different from the first. The disagreement between the two stories ended in a court martial, and the book uses the case to ask what the imperial venture of the period was really like for the people sent to carry it out.