“A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder.”
The subtitle of David Grann’s The Wager tells you everything you need to know about the book. But we’re sure the members of the Iron Book Discussion Group will have plenty to talk about when it’s the subject of the group’s next meeting in August 2025.
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BOOK DESCRIPTION
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
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Copies of The Wager can be picked up from the Book Discussion Shelf on our first floor, and it’s also available digitally as an ebook (through Overdrive/Libby) or an audiobook (through Overdrive/Libby).
An in-person discussion of The Wager will be held at the library on Thursday, August 12, at 7:00 PM. No registration is required, so please join us if you’d like to be part of the discussion.
Published on July 16, 2025.
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