The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. When worlds were conquered through brute force and wooden ships, it is crazy to imagine how pivotal vitamin C was.

I really liked "The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder". It's very well researched and pieced together from conflicting accounts. After I was finished I decided to look up the author and found out he wrote "Killers of the Flower Moon" and "The Lost City of Z", both of which I really enjoyed! If you like books like Endurance, Unbroken, or A Land So Strange, you'll dig this one.

Yes. I could not put this book down. If you liked this one as an against the odds shipwreck survival story, David Grann’s The Wager is also very good.

The Wager, by David Grann; giving me greater context for understanding sea travel (in wooden ships, especially), and I learned that there were indigenous people living along the coast of southern Patagonia where the Wager wrecked. They must be very hardy and resourceful people indeed, given the cold and windy conditions of that region. The European sailors seemed primitive (using the term pejoratively here) in contrast; they all had scurvy and atrophy to various degrees, and had lost so many other sailors to illness and the elements, so reliant on the stores they brought, ignorant of how to survive off the sea and land (they found and were given by the locals enough to eat for there to be survivors who made it back to England, but it was an ordeal). I wondered at the past traumas and other events that lead to Euro-colonialism (this includes my ancestors) and the sense of entitlement that brings about actions like Spain and Portugal dividing the world in ~1600 (watching Shōgun on Hulu, which I also recommend). China also developed a sense of entitlement, but rather than go conquer Africa it sounds like they took their massive navy (dwarfing anything else at the time) on a…