A survival story at its finest: a Review of David Grann’s The Wager

It would’ve been next to impossible for David Grann’s most recent book to go unnoticed. The author of the infamous Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann has made a name for himself as one of the finest non-fiction writers of our age. His works not only inspire, they take us in the most bizarre of destinations, inform us of conveniently forgotten history, and capture the sheer intricacy of living as a human being in a strange, violent world.

The Wager captures a moment in history that, though perhaps not fully forgotten, has been reinterpreted in ways that make the story worth investigating more fully. Grann does just that. We’re plunged into early eighteenth century England, where war wages between Great Britain and Spain. In an effort to stick it to the Spanish crown, a small fleet of British ships, of which the Wager was a member, cross the Atlantic to round Cape Horn and pass into the Pacific Ocean where they’d search for a Spanish treasure-filled galleon and take it for the crown.

The mission was a dangerous, and almost ludicrous one. It comes as no surprise that not all goes according to plan. Disease afflicts the crew. Storms wage. Food sources become scarce. And ships wreck along the coast. The Wager sinks off the coast of Patagonia after having just passed Cape Horn, far away from the rest of the…