The white man's barbaric burden

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder 

Author:  David Grann

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 329

Price: Rs 799

Take your feet off the ground and step into the wooden world of a ship — a very old ship. Mind you, this is no cruise on an antique vessel. Once on board, you will find yourself taking a treacherous journey through tempestuous seas and icy winds. You will have to steer past jagged rocks lurking beneath ominous waters and escape enemy frigates shrouded by dense mist. In this rat- and cockroach-infested world of wood, you will also encounter putrid smells and diseases such as typhus, the Saffron Scourge, the Bloody Flux, the Breakbone Fever and the Blue Death.

Why then, you may ask, should you set foot on this ship? Suffice to say the navigator is a great storyteller.

David Grann doesn’t just tell a story; he makes you experience it. His latest book, The Wager, is a chapter out of a time some 280 years ago when European powers were jostling with one another in their lust to become bigger, mightier.

The book is set in the 1740s when Spain is the dominant power. Britain, which is on the ascendant, is determined to wrest that claim from it, whatever the cost. So it decides to launch the world’s largest amphibious assault on the Caribbean city of Cartagena, the hub of Spain’s colonial wealth. In a smaller operation, it also dispatches a squadron of five warships to loot a silver-laden Spanish galleon —basically, sponsoring piracy. The  Wager is part of this fleet and considered a lesser ship than the others. It is, after all, a merchant ship that has been modified into a man-of-war. (Since it traded in the India region for the East India Company, it was also called East Indiaman.)

The perilous journey had started claiming its victims even before the warships set sail. The Wager would be lost during a hurricane near Cape Horn, off the southernmost tip of South America — a wild stretch that sailors dreaded. This is the only place on earth where the waters flow uninterrupted around the globe, gathering enormous power. The ship would smash into a desolate island, which remains uninhabited to this day and is now called Wager Island. The crew would be given up for dead. But some nine months later, 30 skeletal men, barely alive, would arrive on a Brazilian coast. These survivors from the Wager  would be hailed as heroes.

Six months on, another stitched-up boat, a much smaller one, would wash ashore in Chile carrying another three survivors, their condition even worse. Their account would be wildly different from what the earlier batch of survivors narrated, and it would trigger a sensational trial with many of the men facing court-martial, even death. These three men would accuse the earlier batch of being mutineers and murderers.

The story of the Wager is as tangled as the seaweeds. Mr Grann tries to unravel it with the help of the sailors’ washed-out logbooks, naval historians, archivists and the many conflicting accounts the survivors wrote. He also went an extra mile for this book, many extra miles in fact. He sailed to the Wager Island on a small boat from Chile, located part of the Wager’s  wreckage to understand what the castaways had experienced nearly three centuries ago and recreated that: Their desperation that turned them to cannibalism, the murder, the mutiny, the deceit, the struggle to escape this wretched piece of land engulfed by a watery wall…

Given the shaded evidence, Mr Grann leaves it to the reader to decide which version is true, though he does say which account finally won. But that’s not the reason why this book demands to be read. After all, Wikipedia can tell you in whose favour the trial went.

Through the vivid picture it presents, Mr Grann’s book is also an indictment of the Empire and other colonial powers. Britain, which is purportedly out to civilise the realms of the earth, acts practically barbarically even towards its own people when it is trying to scrounge up seamen and marines for this War of Jenkins’ Ear (read the book for why it’s called that). Gangs are set out to kidnap anyone who could be a seaman: Invalids, criminals, old and infirm soldiers, sailors returning from years-long voyages, anyone and everyone is snatched and sent off to war while their families wail by the shore. There are children as young as nine on the ships.

Then there are stories of how these powers perpetrated slavery and eliminated indigenous communities that had rescued them on more than one occasion — the native Patagonians, the Chono, the nomads of the sea, the Kawésqar. Nothing righteous or civilised there.

The story of the Wager would influence philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire, biologists like Charles Darwin, novelists of the sea such as Herman Melville, and also a poet — Lord Byron, whose grandfather was a midshipman on it as a 16-year-old.

The Wager is a fantastical historical account of the white man who sees himself as a hero when the beast lies within.