The Wager

Metadata

The book in 3 sentences

• This is an astonishingly thorough and painstakingly researched work of historical nonfiction. It tells the story of the shipwrecked Wager: a tale of death, destruction, betrayal, and survival. Many of the people and events involved were widely known in the eighteenth century but have since faded from history.
• The world of the Wager was almost unrecognizable by today’s standards. Press gangs seized men from the streets and forced them into naval service; upper-class boys as young as fourteen joined the Navy in hopes of becoming officers; and life aboard ship was defined by stench, vermin, scurvy, infection, and hunger. And yet, even under these brutal conditions, so many of the men tried to hold on to order, duty, and honor until the very end.
• What astonished me most was that mutiny still carried consequences, even in a place that must have felt like the edge of the world. Their society seemed barely held together, yet somehow its rules, hierarchies, and sense of accountability continued to exert their force.
• I loved maps. I think I should read more books with maps.

My top 3 quotes

• “Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
• “Persons who have not experienced the hardships we have met with,” Bulkeley wrote, “will wonder how people can be so inhuman to see their fellow creatures starving before their faces, and afford ’em no relief. But hunger is void of all compassion.”
• “Presence of mind, and courage in distress, Are more than armies to procure success.”