The Wager
David Grann's The Wager, published in 2023, is a propulsive nonfiction account of one of the great forgotten maritime catastrophes of the eighteenth century and a meditation on how a single shipwreck became three competing books, three competing courtroom narratives, and an early case study in how history gets written. In 1740, His Majesty's Ship Wager set sail with a British squadron under Commodore George Anson, charged with intercepting a Spanish treasure galleon in the Pacific. The Wager never reached its target. Battered by storms, decimated by scurvy and typhus, and finally driven onto a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia, the survivors split into factions. One contingent, led by the gunner John Bulkeley, eventually built a makeshift boat and sailed three thousand miles to Brazil before returning to England as heroes. Another, led by Captain David Cheap, accused them of mutiny. Each side published its own book and demanded the Admiralty take its side. Grann, drawing on logbooks, court transcripts, and his own travel to Wager Island, recreates the disaster in unforgettable detail and lets the reader judge for themselves what happened. Like The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager is reporting at its most thrilling.
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What you might want to know about The Wager
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On a 1740 mission to attack Spanish trade in the Pacific, the British man-of-war HMS Wager wrecks on a desolate island off Patagonia in May 1741.
Yes. The Wager is David Grann's 2023 nonfiction account of the 1741 wreck of HMS Wager and the conflicting court martial accounts of survivors. Grann reconstructed the events from naval archives.
Yes. Martin Scorsese is directing a film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio. As of 2025, the project is in development.
The Wager was written by David Grann, published in 2023 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
The Wager is 432 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Wager takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Wager is a standalone novel by David Grann, not part of a series.
The Wager is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
