Joan Mackenzie reviews The Wager by David Grann

Hello I'm Joan and this book is called The Wager by David Grann. Sometimes you come across a piece of non fiction which is so compellingly readable that you wonder how on earth the author managed to find out all of this information from so many years ago and write it into something which is so extraordinary. It begins in 1740 when a British Man O’ War ship was dispatched from Britain in the middle of a fleet of other ships to go after a Spanish Galleon which was believed to be full of Spanish Treasure and they were going after it to get hold of it. But after they went around Cape Horn which of course is famous for its currents and the appalling winds, they found themselves shipwrecked off the coast of Patagonia. And the original crew of 250 men was whittled down to about 145. Reading about the rigours of being shipwrecked and then of things like scurvy and typhus that came along you wonder how on earth any of them survived any of it but they did. But at that point they started to factionalise and one group of men left abandoning the other on that God-forsaken island. And so it goes until eventually through means that I simply couldn’t understand, they all found themselves at various times back in England where they accused each other of mutiny and it all went before the courts. It’s an absolutely fascinating piece of history and I learned lot about things like how to operate a Man O’ War which was just amazing, and about the way that life was for those extraordinary people. And you know that some of them survived because one of the crew was a 16 year old at the start of the journey whose name was John Byron. And he went on to become the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. So there you go.