Publication Date: April 2023
Synopsis:
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.
What To Expect:
Readers can expect a nonfiction about The Wager, a ship thought to be lost at sea along with it’s crew, as the men return to civilization with tales of murder and mutiny.
Content Warnings:
Language: Mild
Sexual Content: None
Violence: Mild to Moderate – Death, illness, injury, animal death, cannibalism, lashings and murder (not graphic)
Substance Use: Mild – Drinking alcohol and tobacco use
Prejudices: Hatred and prejudice against Indigenous peoples
Religious Themes: Some characters are Christian and talk about prayer and scripture, not the overall them to the book
Other Topics: Mutiny, theft
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