David Grann, The Wager
(No posts in March 2024: lots of reading, but too much non-blog writing for the energy to be left over for blogging. I'll catch up soon. In theory.)
The book club is reading David Grann's The Wager this month (breathlessly subtitled A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder), in the same cycle for some reason as Campbell & Chellel's Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy. Are we looking to shift our activities away from books to boats? Not likely to go well, based on these selections, even if we do have a ship's engineer in the group, but who knows.
(Let me be clear: I was bored and frustrated beyond words by Scorsese's drawn-out, bloated, seemingly unending, and yet to me unaccountably celebrated The Irishman, which preceded his Killers of the Flower Moon. In absolutely no way do I write as a fan of late Scorsese. Still, it's shameful that Killers of the Flower Moon was so often shut out at awards ceremonies: 0 wins for its 10 nominations at the Oscars, 0 for 12 at the Critic's Choice Awards, 1 for 10 at the Astra Awards, 0 for 9 at the BAFTA's, 1 for 7 at the Golden Globes, and so on. But that's a digression.)
Grann's more recent The Wager (2023) follows roughly the same approach as Killers of the Flower Moon, in that both books are the product of near-herculean efforts with archives, interviews, and obscured sources of information to make public a secret and/or forgotten story dripping with blood and ill intention. It's a remarkable story, and it took remarkable efforts to bring it to life in these pages, even if in the end I'm unexpectedly luke-warm about the results.
In brief: the British ship the Wager leaves Britain in 1740 among a convoy of military ships, part of the bizarrely named, ill-fated, and largely trumped-up War of Jenkins' Ear, in pursuit of a silver-laden Spanish galleon rumoured to be be crossing the Pacific in 1741. Most of the fleet founders or gives up during its attempt at surviving Drake's Passage south of Cape Horn, with a huge percentage of the sailors dying from the not-yet-understood scurvy, not to mention typhus and plain old starvation, and the Wager ends up wrecking off the coast of Chile. Hijinks ensue. Amazingly, a few men survive this wreck, along with other subsequent wrecks of various smaller provisional vessels they cobble together, not to mention their prolonged isolation and privation on Wager Island and throughout their journey. When they return to England, at three separate times in three separate groups due to the fracturing that resulted from the multiple wrecks and mutinies, it became a sensation through the late 1740s.
The book reads primarily as a ripping yarn, and it does this job seriously well. The depth of Grann's research is unassailable, too, though the book wears its scholarship very unobtrusively (35 pages of notes, but without numbered footnotes so you can pretend they're not there).
So it was odd for me that really, the point of Grann's The Wager gets dropped in lightly and very occasionally, and most clearly only in the final pre-epilogue chapter. The book reads almost entirely like a nonfiction novel, a limited-omniscient narration from the inside of this doomed ship's crew, but Grann's point is that the various post-journey stories about the Wager were used to bolster a toxically false myth of empire.
As Grann notes, the British empire, like all the others, based much of its authority on the concept that it was Doing Good For The Ruled: that the British were good people, doing good works, even if some of their methods and some of the outcomes looked otherwise.
The story of the Wager was used to stress the naval men's courage, their indomitable spirits in the face of crisis, and the power of systems (specifically the military system, as a function of governance and empire) to survive even the worst of disasters.
Instead, as Grann makes clear, the story of the Wager should have exposed that these men murdered each other, mutinied, abandoned each other to the elements and to capture by enemies, stole from each other, stole from their saviours, and worse--and then that the British Navy deliberately papered it over through a sham court-martial.
Although the story of the Wager eventually faded from conscious memory, it played a crucial role in the early years of the British empire's expansion, and traces of its alleged lessons remain visible even now in British nostalgia for the lost empire (and possibly its self-image more generally?). The myth of the Wager was false, was a lie, and in this specific sense the British empire was built on a series of specific lies that were cynically cultivated by the same jingoistic war profiteers who had trumped up the War of Jenkins' Ear, and deliberately sustained by the naval powers behind the court-martial of the Wager's surviving officers.
But all things considered, all this really gets only a few paragraphs in total, if you add up the occasional remarks to this effect throughout the book. Tell the story, and let any deeper meaning emerge from the details: to some extent that's the New Yorker way, where Grann's a staff writer. I've loved reading fellow New Yorker writer John McPhee for exactly this kind of structure, so I'm puzzling out for myself why I'm reluctant to embrace this book given that it's a fairly standard approach that I've generally appreciated.
So, yeah. The Wager been well received, and it has sold really well, too. Grann's interviews about the book are well worth reading, and he seems a really good guy, plus it looks like (as did Killers of the Flower Moon) it'll get a movie treatment from Martin Scorsese and Leonardo Dicaprio. But I didn't love it, even though it was a ripping yarn whose moral I can definitely get behind.
An odd reading experience for me, in other words. As always, I blame myself.
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