DOUGLAS GAERTE
Updated 11:50 a.m. EDT, 24 October 2025
The Wager by David Grann (2023) – warning spoilers.
I have always had a fascination with the ocean, which is probably weird for someone who grew up in the middle of cornfields in Indiana. In the summer, when there is a bit more space for leisure reading, I love to relax with books about whaling voyages and arctic exploration trips gone awry. This past summer, I enjoyed one of the best in the genre – The Wager by David Grann.
Published in 2023, The Wager relates the gripping story of an ill-fated naval expedition that departed from Portsmouth, England in September 1740. Charged with the task of capturing a treasure-laden Spanish galleon and then attacking and disrupting Spanish settlements across the Pacific, the 2000 men on five men-of-war and one smaller scouting sloop were to cross the Atlantic, sail through some of the world’s most treacherous waters around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, and finally emerge into the Pacific to begin their campaign against the Spanish. In early March 1741, the Wager and the other ships in the squadron started the dangerous trip around the Cape. Battered for nearly two months by strong winds and huge waves, the scurvy-ravaged sailors of the Wager managed to push around the Cape. During the voyage through the Drake Passage, the Wager lost contact with the rest of the squadron. With the ship badly damaged and some forty percent of the crew dead from disease and exposure, the Wager finally ran aground on a small island off the western coast of South America.
Although the survivors of the shipwreck were safely ashore, their ordeal wasn’t over. The uninhabited barren island had little food, and the castaways faced danger from exposure and starvation. The survivors soon fragmented into two main groups – a smaller group of men loyal to Captain Cheap, and a larger group who had lost faith in the competence of their captain. Violence took several lives as the two groups fought over scarce resources. In October 1741, after five months on the island, eighty-one of the “mutinous” sailors departed from the island using one of the Wager’s salvaged longboats and another small boat they had constructed from scavanged lumber. More than a hundred days and 3000 miles of open seas later, thirty half-starved survivors washed up off the coast of Brazil.
Just a week short of a year after the Wager’s shipwreck, the small group of sailors loyal to Captain Cheap finally escaped from their desolate island with the help of local native Patagonians. In March 1746, five and a half years after setting sail from Portsmouth, Captain Cheap, long presumed dead, set foot back in his native England.
The subsequent admiralty trial over the Wager voyage was rife with claims and counterclaims of murder, mutiny, and incompetence, but the admiralty court quickly absolved everyone involved. It seemed British officials were eager to squash any public questioning about the value of an ill-fated expedition that had cost the lives of more than 1300 of the original 2000 men who had set sail.
The Wager is an exciting tale of survival and human endurance. For that reason alone, it’s worth a read. At a deeper level, however, it has a lot to say about the moral implications of empire and national ambition. It’s also a study of leadership and what effective leadership looks like. Is the good leader one who heroically rescues his people from grave danger, or is the good leader one who avoids putting her people at risk in the first place? And to what extent does loyalty demand that we follow a leader whose stubbornness and poor decision-making have put his or her followers in danger?
The Wager is also a case study that illustrates how groups of people under tremendous stress and in the face of grave danger will often turn on one another in an effort to survive. If you start the book some cold winter Houghton night, be sure to have a cozy blanket and a warm mug of hot chocolate to help you get through the scenes of icy desolation with the poor souls stranded on Wager Island. ★
