5/12/2023 0 Comments The wager a tale of shipwreckLife onboard an 18th-century ship was perilous, as Grann amply shows. Central to his populous cast of seamen are David Cheap, who, through a twist of fate, became captain of the Wager Commodore George Anson, who had made Cheap his protégé formidable gunner John Bulkeley and midshipman John Byron, grandfather of the poet. Drawing on a trove of firsthand accounts-logbooks, correspondence, diaries, court-martial testimony, and Admiralty and government records-Grann mounts a chilling, vibrant narrative of a grim maritime tragedy and its dramatic aftermath. More than half survived the wreckage only to find themselves stranded on a desolate island. Though initially part of a fleet, by the time of the shipwreck, the Wager stood alone, and many of its 250 crew members already had succumbed to injury, illness, starvation, or drowning. In 1741, the British vessel the Wager, pressed into service during England’s war with Spain, was shipwrecked in a storm off the coast of Patagonia while chasing a silver-laden Spanish galleon. The author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z returns with a rousing story of a maritime scandal.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |