Free Audio Book : The Wager, by David Grann

On January 28, 1742, a group of thirty emaciated men washed up on the coast of Brazil in a ramshackle vessel made of patched-together wood and cloth. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had set sail in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” the Wager wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia, and the crew was marooned there for months, facing starvation. They built a flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas, and were greeted as heroes upon their arrival in Brazil.

However, six months later, another even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile, carrying only three castaways who told a very different story. According to them, the thirty sailors who had landed in Brazil were not heroes but mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, accusing a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for control over the barren wilderness of the island. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth, with the stakes being life-and-death.

The Wager is a thrilling tale of human behavior at its extremes, recounted by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann masterfully recreates the hidden world on a British warship and brings to life the castaways’ desperate straits, standing up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance. His account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller, with incredible twists and turns that keep the listener spellbound. Grann’s storytelling prowess is on full display in this fascinating tale of mutiny, survival, and justice.