Grann begins weaving into the story references to older forms of sea poetry and narrative, for reasons that don’t become fully clear until later. “The cartilage that glued together their bodies seemed to be loosening.” Their teeth fell out, as did their hair.” Their breath stank. “As the scourge invaded the sailors’ faces, some of them began to resemble the monsters of their imaginations. He relates the physical and psychological toll of the voyage. At this early point in the story Grann begins to deviate from the romance of old sea-faring literature. That was also where scurvy set in, and typhus. The sailors endured hardships as they rounded Cape Horn, where the strongest currents in the world pounded the ship so hard even veterans reeled. Its covert mission was to intercept a Spanish treasure ship off the Chilean coast. In 1740, His Majesty’s Ship The Wager set sail across the Atlantic. Really it was a clash of empires, as the British and Spanish grabbed as much of the New World as they could, then snatched it from each other. We meet the cast of sailors and their officers in the mid-18th century, during the absurd-sounding War of Jenkins’ Ear, so named because it arose from the allegation a Spanish sailor cut off a British sailor’s ear. Here’s what Grann gives away, right at the beginning of his tale. Across a span of work writers tend to reveal patterns, purposefully or not, and Grann seems drawn to people too obsessed for their own good, grinding themselves away, so focused on each step they never look up to see the horizon. In Killers of the Flower Moon, he wrote of Oklahoma’s Osage tribe, whose members were murdered for their oil money. In The Lost City of Z, he told the story of Capt Percy Fawcett, who in the 1920s disappeared into the Amazon searching for a hidden civilization. But Grann is one of America’s most meticulous narrative nonfiction writers, whether describing a septuagenerian bank robber for the New Yorker, or a French serial impostor, or a man trudging alone across Antarctica. And in some hands the story might have heaved along like the ship itself: a relic of the 18th century, worn and worm-eaten, wearing only a new coat of paint.
From a distance, The Wager looks like an old-fashioned thing.
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