The Wager A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (PDF) ‎352 pages

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is the fifth nonfiction book by American journalist David Grann.In his new book, David Grann tells a classic sea yarn in a new way, overthrowing an old colonial story. Along the way, he charts a course for other tellers of modern adventure tales. Alexandra Petri’s US history review: if you’re going to lie, lie big – and funny Read more From a distance, The Wager looks like an old-fashioned thing. And in some hands the story might have heaved along like the ship itself: a relic of the 18th century, worn and worm-eaten, wearing only a new coat of paint. But Grann is one of America’s most meticulous narrative nonfiction writers, whether describing a septuagenerian bank robber for the New Yorker, or a French serial impostor, or a man trudging alone across Antarctica. In The Lost City of Z, he told the story of Capt Percy Fawcett, who in the 1920s disappeared into the Amazon searching for a hidden civilization. In Killers of the Flower Moon, he wrote of Oklahoma’s Osage tribe, whose members were murdered for their oil money. Across a span of work writers tend to reveal patterns, purposefully or not, and Grann seems drawn to people too obsessed for their own good, grinding themselves away, so focused on each step they never look up to see the horizon. That pattern holds true in The Wager.The book concentrates on the story of HMS Wager, a square-rigged sixth-rate Royal Navy ship, and the mutiny that took place after the ship’s wreckage in 1741