How a shipwreck from 282 years ago became the best-selling book in the US

By Jorge de Souza

On January 28, 1742, a group of squalid men on the verge of death came to the remote village of Rio Grande, on the coast of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, aboard a precarious wooden boat, with an extraordinary story to tell:

How they had overcome more than 5,000 kilometers of sea, with an improvised boat, to escape from a desert island on which they had spent months confined in a desperate attempt to return to their homeland, England.

They were castaways from the HMS (“His Majesty’s Ship”) Wager, one of eight vessels that the English court had sent to South America with a secret mission:

To capture a certain Spanish galleon filled with gold which England, then at war with Spain, wanted to seize to weaken the enemy – and, of course, get even richer.

But while trying to round the fearsome Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, during a storm, HMS Wager broke away from the rest of the fleet, sailed into the channels of Patagonia, hit a submerged rock, and sank near a deserted island, which, not by chance, was eventually named Wager Island.

There, the crew disembarked for a long and suffering season of hunger, cold, hardship, discord, and intense conflict, which led part of the group to rebel against the tyrannical expedition captain, David Cheap, leaving the captain and his allies behind in a kind of mutiny.

ONLY 29 SURVIVED

Of the 81 men who began that desperate journey, crammed into a boat just over 15 meters long, built from pieces of wood taken from the wreck, only 30 made it to the Rio Grande do Sul beach alive – and one of them died of weakness and exhaustion when he touched the sand.

The others, so weak after three and a half months at sea, eating only what they could catch, could barely walk.

Received with compassion by the few inhabitants of the village of Rio Grande, that group of survivors of the sinking of the HMS Wager, led by the ship’s former gunner, John Bulkeley, who had rebelled against the captain of the vessel for his rigid and punitive conduct on the island (especially after he had killed one of the sailors for disobedience), were given shelter in the houses of the locals.

They soon recovered and were transferred to England, where they were received as heroes since they were already presumed dead.

But when this happened six months later, another group of castaways from the HMS Wager, including Captain Cheap, arrived on Chile’s coast after being rescued from the island by indigenous people.

And the story they told was different: those 30 sailors who had landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers, and, according to the rules of the time, they would have to be condemned.

This was the beginning of a legal and moral dispute, the basis of the new book by award-winning American author David Grann, The Wager, number one on the US bestseller list since it was released last month.

DEATH PENALTY

In the work, without a release date in Brazil, Grann dedicates part of the narrative to the difficulties of navigation in the 18th century and to the period that the survivors of the HMS Wager spent on the island in full convulsion.

The other part tells what happened in the English courts after that, with the battle between Captain Cheap and the leader of the mutineers, John Bulkeley, for the possession of the truth – a real story that mixes adventure, drama, conflict, overcoming, and moral issues.

While on the island, the survivors of the HMS Wager fought (often in reprehensible ways, even committing cannibalism) against hunger, cold, and the authoritarian ways of the expedition’s commander, in the English court-martial, the struggle was also one of life and death, since in both cases (mutiny promoted by the gunner Bulkeley, or murder perpetrated by Captain Cheap), the penalty would also be the gallows.

A DUEL OF WORDS

In court, Bulkeley and Cheap began to duel with words since the lives of both would depend on the story they each told – and their ability to convince the jury of its veracity.

However, a surprising outcome (which should not be given away, lest it spoils the pleasure of reading – although Grann’s book tells a well-known historical fact) brought the case to an end in the most embarrassing way possible.

And gave shape to the mutiny that never existed.

ABOUT TO BE MADE INTO A FILM

To write The Wager, Grann – who in the past had already written the book “The Lost City of Z” about the mysterious disappearance of English explorer Percy Fawcett in 1925, when he was searching for a lost civilization in the Brazilian Amazon – traveled to remote Wager Island in Chilean Patagonia (where he even found the wooden remains of the old English ship), and spent two years researching, dwelling on historical logbooks written by survivors of the two groups of shipwrecked men.

“What hooked me most in this story was not only what happened on the island, with the two groups fighting for power and survival, but what happened when they got back to England and told their different versions at the Court Martial,” said Grann, when launching the book.

Like his previous work, Killers Of The Flower Moon, recently made into a movie, scheduled to be released in Brazil in October, The Wager will also go to the screen with the same successful duo: Martin Scorsese as director and Leonardo Di Caprio in the lead role.

“After waging war against the elements of nature, the leaders of the two groups of castaways had to fight a battle against the truth, like a kind of 18th-century clash of fake news,” summarizes the book’s author.

ROBINSON CRUSOE ISLAND

When he was shipwrecked on that Chilean island, after months of ordeals at sea (which included outbreaks of typhus and scurvy, decimating his sailors – among them, even 6-year-old boys, such as the future grandfather of the famous English poet Lord Byron, John Byron, who, however, survived the sinking and the controversial rescue), the HMS Wager was heading for the Juan Fernandes archipelago off the coast of Chile, from where the fleet would depart in search of the galleon filled with gold.

But HMS Wager never reached this Chilean island, where, ironically, 38 years earlier, a certain English sailor, Alexander Selkirk, had spent four years alone, waiting for rescue, a fact that later inspired writer Daniel Defoe to write his masterpiece about the fictional shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe.

With the intricate and thought-provoking story of the sinking of the HMS Wager, Grann, one of today’s most lauded authors, remains light years away from the level of excellence of the legendary English writer.

But, perhaps, he has also produced his best book.

With information from UOL

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